One of the most disturbing trends in animal hoarding cases is that of a person hoarding under the guise of being a legitimate animal shelter, sanctuary, adoption agency, or rescue group. These cases are particulary difficult to resolve becasue it involves overocming an entrenched systematic effort to acquire animals, usually with a long history of enabling by a public ill-informed about animal hoarding and easily swayed by claims of good intentions.

Sometimes these truly remain relativlely solo efforts, with a half-hearted attempt to maintain the facade of a legitimate agency. Other times, the barriers can be more formidable, as occurs when the hoarding is done under the guise of a registered non-profit organization calling itself a sanctuary, retirement home, or no-kill shelter. Of course, all of these can be and often are legitimate activities providing needed services to unwanted animals; each of these activities does and should elicit great sympathy. Experience has proved that courts, the public and the media have great difficulty distinguishing between legitimate operations where the needs of the animals come first, and those which are smokescreens for institutional hoarding. Part of this is the baseline level of confusion about different types of animal groups and what they do. The abscence of established stardards for companion animal care also contributes. Finally, the Internet appears to be becoming a vehicle for national, and even international, solicitation for animals. HARC has personal testimony from people seeking to place a special-needs animal lured by an appealing website, only to find a hoarding situation when they happened to visit. There are some general characteristics that should at least raise the suspicion of hoarding:

• Unwilling to let visitors see the facilities where animals are kept
• Unwilling to say how many animals are actually present
• Little effort made to adopt, and much effort focused on acquistion
• Continued acquisition in the face of declining care for existing animals
• Claims of being able to provide excellent lifetime care for animals with special needs (paralyzed, feline leukemia positive, extreme aggression) without verifiable resources
• Number and staff and / or volunteers inconsistent with the number of animals
• Desire to receive animals at a remote location rather than on-site