An animal rescuer will try their best to rescue animals that are distressed, abandoned and in need of help. As an animal rescuer, it is important that a person needs to know the difference between rescuing an animal and animal hoardings.

You will always feel good when you rescued an animal. However, after the animal is rescued, you will need to house the animal within your home for a while. Lets give an example that you have rescued a domestic cat.

While the cat is at your home, you will need mend its injuries or illnesses and thereafter, find a suitable home after it recovers.

In this view, there is no way you are going keep every cat or dog you rescued in your home. Should you have day job and a family to take care off, you will need to manage your time with the cat and your daily errands.

If you could not find a suitable home for the cat, you can also sent it to an animal shelter. However, usually a few of these animals are released or in a worst case scenario, some of them especially the weak ones are put down due to the space constraint.

As an animal lover and rescuer, you may do the rescue on your own. However, there is a catch to this. When words of mouth spreads, people might just start to dump unwanted kittens or puppies on your door step.

Important point to note is that you do not let too many people know that you are rescuing on your own. By doing so, it will be not be time consuming and stressful for you and your family. For example, if you are fostering an injured feral cat, once the cat recovers and good to go, you can just let it go to where you rescued it. When u do this, you are creating a new space for another animal in need.

One more thing to add is that not all the cats are able to adapt as a house pet. So keep in mind that you are not suppose to be too emotionally attached to the cat when you are mending its injuries. When emotionally attached, you may keep the cat after it recovers.

Lets discuss about animal hoardings. We have heard of such people as Crazy Cat Lady or Man. Such people tends to collect cats or dogs to their home and therefore this will lead to animals hoarding. This is serious pathological behaviour as it may cause terrible suffering to both the care-taker and the animals.

We will call such people "hoarders". When hoarders starts to collect cats or dogs back to their home, there will be a time when there are too many of them running around their home. As such, the hoarders could not manage and fail to provide enough space, food supplies and medical care for them.

In some cases, we find that some of the animals are severely sick and normally beyond the vet reach of a proper treatment. However, to the hoarders, they will think that they are providing the animals proper care and most of them refused to let any of the animals go when the authority steps in. These poor animals that are being confined in the hoarder's home are usually contracted with disease, starvation and even death.

From my experience, I had ever attended a case whereby a family which hoards a total of 16 cats. A complaint was made by their neighbours because of the unbearable stench from the house. After receiving the complaint, the resident manager invited me to the house. Upon reaching, true enough we could not even step in as the smell was unbearable. The cats were immediately confiscated by the resident manager and authority was called in.

From my experience, some of the poor cats that were ill and malnutrition, will be put down at the animal shelter. However, as an avid animal rescuer and lover, I have requested to the resident manager to hand-over the cats to me to be nursed and sterilized by neuter/spay.

As most of the cats are matured, finding a home for them was not easy. After being sterilized, I then released them to safe environment in a nearby neighborhood where there are nice people to provide them with food daily. Hopefully, they can adapt and survive.

As for the family, they are only allowed to keep a few cats that are very attached to them. For my job, I have to ensure the cats they kept are being neuter/spay and the family are being monitored by the management from bringing any more cats to their home.

Hoarders may not be a person that collect animals, but there are hoarders that collects old, unwanted and reusable items. These items collected will piled up and end up as a fire hazard. The items will also block the way of escape.

Hoarders need our help to bring them to the social world and meet friends. If you have friends or know someone that starts to show the hoarders symptom, do offer a hand to advise and help them.