The “cat lady” may be more than just a stereotype. After investigating roughly 30 people who collected nearly 1,400 animals total in southern Brazil, researchers now suggest that such men and women are afflicted with what they called animal hoarding disorder—not to be lumped in with object hoarding.
The first scientific reports of people living with an excessive number of animals first appeared in 1981. Animal hoarding is currently thought of a variant of hoarding disorder, in which people have both the compulsive urge to acquire unusually large amounts of possessions and difficulty in disposing of them, regardless of their value.
