METHUEN — A local person surrendered 14 kittens after someone tipped off the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that the person was hoarding the animals.
The house was dirty and unsanitary and had a total of 30 to 35 cats living in it, but officials at MSPCA were happy to see the cats were healthy.
"The animals are social and in good shape, so we're in the process of immediately spaying and neutering them and adopting them," said Mike Keiley, manager at the animal adoption center.
This is the third hoarding case the MSPCA at Nevins Farms has dealt with in about the last year and a half.
The 14 kittens are ready to be adopted today. The MSPCA will take in the other cats periodically.
"If we felt like they were in some sort of immediate distress, there's no way we would have left the cats behind," Keiley said.
Keiley did not release the name or the hometown of the cats' owner. He did say the owner had cooperated with the MSPCA and voluntarily surrendered the cats.
The hoarding situation is not as bad as other cases they have seen, but it's still "moderately bad," Keiley said.
"If the person's pretty reasonable, if they can kind of clean up their act and clean up their house, we may leave a small amount of cats in the household," he said.
Also, the MSPCA is short on space in its shelter, and there may be other people who own the cats that the person was hoarding, and those people could potentially go and get their cats back, Keiley said.
Somebody tipped off the MSPCA's law enforcement division about the hoarding. The tipster's information is kept confidential, Keiley said.
A woman surrendered 51 exotic cats in May, and the animal shelter still has many of those up for adoption. A Chelmsford man surrendered 30 cats in March 2007.
Hoarding is a mental disorder in which people don't understand that they need to limit the number of animals they have.
"They can't make good judgements, even to the animals' health or their own health," Keiley said.
People don't spay and neuter their pets, and the animals have babies and then their babies end up giving birth and the animals continue to multiply in the person's home, Keiley said.
Dozens of people surrender pets to the MSPCA on a daily basis. They facility has more than 250 cats up for adoption, Keiley said.
When they got the 14 kittens this week, the shelter workers didn't have anywhere to put them because the facility is already overflowing with cats. So they had to store some in a room that isn't normally used for containing animals, Keiley said.
The non-profit facility is funded by donations from the public, so having the abundance of cats to feed takes a bite out of their finances.
"We're so overcrowded, it's such a hard thing. We really need people to come down and adopt them," Keiley said.
