One of the dirty little secrets in the so-called "Animal Rescue Movement" is that they take advantage of people who are emotionally wounded, and unable to say "no" to animals in need of help. There are networks of people who take animals in, and some of them are simply extreme cases of what might be called a "bleeding heart" personality. I know of a particular case in which a woman was told (by manipulative activist types involved in the "no kill" movement) that unless she took in a particular cat, it would have to be killed. The reason was what I learned is all too usual in these cases: a completely unverifiable story of how it "bit" another animal worker who was new to the game, and didn't handle the animal properly. But "rules are rules" and (at least so the story goes) even "no kill" shelters don't have to care for "biting" animals. I got suckered into helping out one of these cats myself, and I'll never do it again, because it only helped free up space for the particular activist to take on even more cats. However I'll never forget the reaction of the professional animal breeder who ended up taking the cat. "Nonsense! This is a perfectly normal cat, and he's no more likely to bite you than any other cat!" The breeder said the "no kill" people were just lying to pressure my friend into adopting ("rescuing") the cat.

I don't know what the fine line is between animal rescue and animal hoarding, and I don't want to invade anyone's privacy here by saying anything more about the people I know. Suffice it to say that it is my opinion that a lot of well-meaning people with psychological issues are being taken serious advantage of by activists who ought to know better. You could call this a pet peeve of mine, but it's not one I spend a lot of time on, largely because I know that it's both an emotional and a political issue, and sounding off on emotional political issues invites trouble. (From "activists," of course. And again, I don't enjoy debating activists, as it's a no-win.)

A story buried in today's Inquirer made me think of my own indirect brush with "no kill" animal rescue dishonesty:

A feces-filled rowhouse packed with 62 cats and dogs - possibly a refuge house for animal rescuers who oppose the shelter system - was discovered by authorities yesterday in the Castor Gardens section of Northeast Philadelphia.

A mental-health worker had gone to visit a tenant at the house in the 6600 block of Horrocks Street, and when she got no response and noticed a foul odor, she called police, said Lisa Rodgers, director of outreach for the Pennsylvania SPCA.

Inside the two-story property, police and PSPCA agents discovered 46 cats and 16 dogs "in various states of breakdown. Some couldn't even stand," Rodgers said.

Authorities suspect there may be three other similar homes in the neighborhood, possibly part of a "hoarding" network for animal rescuers who fear the animals would be euthanized in the shelter system, Rodgers said.

The homeowner, Jerri Sueck, 51, was charged with failure to provide proper veterinary care and sanitary conditions, Rodgers said.

The 63-year-old tenant was involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation, Rodgers said.

A message left at Sueck's house was not returned yesterday.

Neighbors, possibly from the other hoarding homes, came to yell at the PSPCA agents yesterday, Rodgers said.

The Philadelphia Daily News has more. It turns out that this woman is a fairly well known author, as well as a distinguished schoolteacher:

PERHAPS HER OWN early life as an unwanted orphan prompted Jerri Diane Sueck to take hordes of cats and dogs into her Northeast rowhouse, where animal-welfare agents seized them yesterday.

But officials of the Pennsylvania SPCA said Sueck, 51 - a schoolteacher known to be into animal rescue "big time," according to someone who knows her - carried it too far.

They said she was housing 46 cats and 16 dogs in conditions so bad that welfare workers gagged at the stench.

The smell was so bad a mental-health worker and one of the neighbors feared there might be a dead body inside the house.

There wasn't - but searchers did find a mentally ill tenant, covered with feces, in the basement.

Sueck was charged with keeping animals in unsanitary conditions and failure to provide veterinary care, and the house was condemned by the Department of Licenses and Inspections, said SPCA spokeswoman Lisa Rogers.

She said the dogs and cats were in "varying conditions," suffering dehydration, skin problems and other ailments.

Sueck, a teacher at the Franklin Learning Center, is the author of a book about her early life called, "Letters My Mother Never Read: An Abandoned Child's Journey."

In it, she tells how her mother died in a trailer fire when she was 8 and that her stepfather's parents kept her and her brothers in a coal cellar before depositing them at an orphanage.

Police issued Sueck a summons yesterday. Efforts to reach her for comment were unsuccessful.

Sueck owned the 46 cats, some of them strays, and two of the dogs, Rogers said. The tenant, identified by Rogers as Beatrice Lloyd, 63, owned the 14 other dogs, Rogers said.

"It was suspected that these people are hoarders," Rogers said. "They worry that if they turn an animal in to a shelter that it's going to be euthanized.

When her mother died in a fire, eight-year-old Jerri thought life couldn't get worse. She was wrong. Sent to live with people who didn't want her, Jerri was powerless to stop her once-happy childhood from becoming a nightmare of cruelty and neglect. Only a stubborn belief in her own worth and a fierce will to live allowed her to reach adulthood physically and emotionally intact. This is a book that will inspire not only those who have been orphans or foster children, but anyone who has known the pain of being unwanted.

Ages: 12 Up

I don't mean to invade this woman's privacy, but the Inquirer story made me think there was more than meets the eye, which of course there was.

I am not sitting in judgment on anyone here, but my heart goes out to the many well-meaning people who get so sucked into animal rescue that they cross the line from "rescue" to "hoarding."

As to exactly where that line is, I don't know, but I think the psychological predisposition to cross it stems from misplaced altruistic anthropomorphism which, when coupled with a "savior" ("rescue"*) personality, can take on its own life until it metastasizes controllably. The logical error is one I've touched on before, and it involves seeing unwanted animals as analogous to innocent human victims placed on death row. That these animals will be euthanized is seen as unbearable, but something very simple is being forgotten ---

The animals do not know they are going to die!

Thus, their plight is very different from an innocent man facing the death penalty. Believe me, having put my own animals down, I can certainly empathize. But I also try to be logical. So I hypothesized that my own dog, Puff, was on death row:

Using my dog Puff as an example familiar to me, even if I engage in the most extreme anthropomorphic projection imaginable, there is no way that I could make the claim that Puff, intelligent and sensitive dog though he was, could possibly have been aware what it meant to euthanize him. I was sitting right there, and the dog had been experiencing regular pain and discomfort, and I'll never forget how happy he was when that shot tranquilized him. He wagged his tail and just went to sleep. There was no awareness of death at all. I was the one experiencing that -- and it was all on his behalf. I was stressed (and extremely so), whereas Puff's stress had come to an end.

From where derives the burgeoning idea that a death like that constitutes animal cruelty? It might be people cruelty for those who are present, but even if I search within the depths of my soul, there is no way I can imagine it to be animal cruelty.

But let me back up, to when Puff was a young and healthy dog in the prime of his life, say, when he was four years old. Of course I would never have euthanized him, but let's assume that he'd taken off chasing a bitch in heat or something (this never happened, as I didn't allow him to roam, but I suppose it's theoretically possible), and let's assume that he managed to get totally lost and was picked up by a stranger or something, and later found himself in an outlying jurisdiction many miles away only to be turned in by some kind-hearted person to a local animal control shelter. Naturally, I'd have spent all my time looking in local shelters, and it might occur to me to put posters up. (I had a dog stolen years ago, and I got him back that way.) Assume the holding period in the shelter wherever Puff was passed, and that they had a policy against adopting out "pit bulls." Or suppose he had eaten an indigestible object which lodged in his gut, causing a massive blockage only curable by expensive abdominal surgery. (Such things happen all the time.)

So anyway, there's poor Puff, aged four, facing a lethal injection, without his master there to save him. (Again, horrible as it sounds, these things happen all the time.) Puff would have had no more awareness at that age than he did a decade later. Again, the pain and stress would have all been mine, and possibly, that of the animal control workers. To the extent Puff would have been stressed, it would have been during the holding period before his death. As I raised him from a puppy, and he grew up with his father and grandmother, his real stress would most likely have been wanting to find his way back home to familiar surroundings, so even if he'd been adopted out to a new owner, he might have wanted to escape. So it's arguable that depending on the circumstances, euthanasia might have been less stressful for Puff even than an adoption.

Why has that thought not occurred to so many well-meaning people?

*I worry that the word "rescue" is becoming a synonym for "adoption."

AFTERTHOUGHT: I don't think it should be necessary to point out that animal hoarding is crueler to animals than euthanasia.

But then again, maybe it is necessary.

(Emotion can play strange tricks on people's brains.)