Great Falls lawmaker targets 'animal hoarding"

By SHANDA BRADSHAW
Community News Service
UM School of Journalism

The first clue was the sound of barking dogs.

Their curiosity piqued, U.S. Customs officials at Montana's Sweetgrass border crossing decided to check the contents of an unventilated semi-trailer being towed by an Alaskan couple bound for Arizona.

What officials found on that October day more than six years ago shocked Montanans: Two hundred dogs, most of them collies, had suffered a week in the trailer. Many were sick or injured, their fur matted with feces.

The scene still disturbs Great Falls Sen. Mitch Tropila, who is carrying a bill this session to include "companion animal hoarding" as a special offense under the state's animal cruelty laws. The bill is scheduled for debate in the Senate Wednesday.

Tropila, who eventually adopted one of the abused dogs , admitted that the bill hits close to home. "Yes I do have a dog in this fight," he said.

Senate Bill 221 would consider a "companion" animal as any domesticated cat, dog, bird, ferret, rabbit, or other animal normally maintained in the residence of an owner. Companion animal hoarding is defined as possessing 10 or more household pets and failing to provide the necessary care for those animals or confining those animals in a severely crowded environment.

Tropila said that in most cases, people who hoard animals often are unaware of their wrongdoing because they suffer from mental illness, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or bipolar disorder.

"They think they're helping, and they think they're giving these animals care," Tropila said. "But they have a problem."

If passed, the bill would require a person convicted of companion animal hoarding to undergo a psychological examination and treatment, at the person's expense, in addition to other animal cruelty penalties.

The bill would give authorities the ability to prosecute animal hoarding cases more seriously than they have been in the past, Tropila said.

"We're not trying to send these people to Warm Springs (state mental hospital) for ten years but we are trying to get them the help that they need," he said.

With the recidivism rate for untreated animal hoarders at nearly 100 percent, he said, proponents of the bill emphasize the need to provide them with sufficient treatment and monitoring to ensure that they don't mistreat animals again.

Some senators worried that the required psychological evaluation would cause hardship on the state system if offenders couldn't afford the evaluation on their own, Tropila said.

"We revised the fiscal note and decided that even if these people couldn't pay for their own evaluations, cost to the state would be minimal," Tropila said.

At a recent hearing , supporters ranged from law enforcement to the state director of the Human Society and animal shelter volunteers. There were no opponents.