Publication (142 pages).

keep everything. Animal hoarders generally collect
exclusively one type of animal, without feeling
the need to hoard anything else.
HORDING EVOLVES
SLOWLY
The “recidivism” rate for hoarders is around
70%. This is why hoarders get fined again and
again for filling their houses and yards with
junk, and animal hoarders get sent to jail and
come out only to collect more animals. The
process starts in childhood, with a tendency
to collect things. It ramps up with the ability
of the hoarder to keep collecting. When people
reach adulthood they get their own space
to fill with junk, and they get money to buy
the junk. What usually stops them from going
overboard is the other people in their life
— family and friends notice things piling up.,
neighbors dropping in, co-workers take note
the state of a person’s clothes, even if they never
notice the state of their house. Sooner or later,
with hoarders who truly can’t help themselves,
the people in their lives fall away. Some die.
Some move away. Some just distance themselves.
Eventually there is no check on anyone’s
ability to hoard, except the state penal and psychiatric
system.
Hoarding Is An Amplification of What We All Feel
Hoarding has been made the subject of many
articles,and some riveting television, because
it’s one of the most understandable compulsive
behaviors. Nobody reading this lacks their
version of a hoarder’s cache, whether it’s a stack
of old books that we’re not going to read, a
long Netflix queue we’re not going to watch,
or a drawer full of cords, adapters, chargers,
and remotes that we’re never going to sort out,
we all cling to something. There are analyses
of hoarding from a social standpoint. As consumerism
grows, we invest our possessions
with more and more value. We even become
convinced our possessions have attitudes and
feelings, which is a delusion common among
hoarders. (Toy Story, which turned inanimate
objects into feeling things that dreaded
being thrown away and could retain feelings
even when broken, is probably responsible
for a few young hoarders.) Most importantly,
brain scans of hoarders have shown that when
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