The Toronto Humane Society, in association with the University of Guelph and JVT Strategies, has published the first known study on the behavior of hoarded cats.
And there’s good news.
According to the report, published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, most hoarded cats were socialized and able to be adopted into conventional homes.
“We were quite surprised at how many of these cats were really quite social towards people and were able to live a very happy life in what sounded like a normal adoptive home,” said the Toronto Humane Society’s Dr. Linda Jacobson, one of the study’s authors.
“So there was really good news. If you had asked me to predict how many (hoarded cats would get successfully adopted), I would have said less. There’s overcrowding (from where they came from). There’s generally poor sanitation. They’re are often sick and also they can’t get away from other animals so they just don’t have their own space. They don’t have normal social structures and they don’t interactions with people.”
Despite coming from those conditions, the report, titled Behavior and Adoptability of Hoarded Cats Admitted To An Animal Shelter, found that adopters were overwhelmingly positive about their adopted cats, and very few hoarded cats had any issues with litter box use.
Jacobson said this study was linked to another study, titled Medical Conditions in Hoarding Animals, done on 371 cats from 14 different homes in and around Toronto between 2011-2014.
The hoarding in a single home ranged from 10 to 77 cats.
“We had 195 cats that were the subset in the behavior study and all told, 174 were adopted,” she said.
“There was (little) difference in the (rate of) hoarded cats that were returned (10%) and non-hoarded cats (7.1%) that were returned during the study period, which we took all the way up to the end of 2019.”
She said only two cats were returned for litter box issues.
Jacobson said animal hoarding is “quite common” although there are no actual statistics on how frequent it is.
“There really aren’t many good numbers,” she said. “The cases that we see probably don’t represent that number of the cases that are out there.”
The report also recommends shelters and adopters wait between 5-10 days before making any decisions based on a cats’ behaviour to give the animal time to decompress before moving it again.
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