ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to make sense of the phenomenon of excessive pet keeping that breaks with modern norms and policies in an urban context. It starts with an in-depth study of behavioral scientific accounts of animal hoarding by looking at the classification and construction of pathology. The chapter focuses on detailed and anonymized animal welfare complaints, protocols and decisions from twenty cases, derived from two of the county administrative boards. It discusses the urban and suburban home of people and their animals. More importantly, perhaps, it is a home where officials enter uninvited in order to "perform animal welfare" in the name of the law. The chapter attends to the sense-making of cross-species disconcern: explanations of excessive pet keeping and their "sensuous impressions" in social interaction and the mediated production of knowledge. It ends with the broader framework of humanimal crowding in zoocities, and argues that hoarding can be viewed as verminizing phenomenon: too many, too unruly, too dirty.
