The Granada Policía Local were called out to a flat in Zaidín where a woman was living with 34 dogs, much to her neighbours' annoyance.

This sort of behaviour actually has a psychiatric term; the Noah Syndrome or Animal Hoarding.

Noah syndrome is a variant of Diogenes syndrome that presents as animal hoarding in squalid conditions, with well-known predisposing factors such as loneliness, psycho-social stress, and diverse psychopathology, due to neurologic and/or psychiatric conditions.

What made it worse is that she never took the dogs out, which quite apart from the noise generated by so many dogs crammed into a flat, caused a stench as well.

The Policía Local sent their Canine Unit to collect the dogs. They checked them for chips, only one of the dogs out of the 34 had one that confirmed the woman as its owner. After that they took all of the dogs to the Animal Protection Service in La Malahá. The officers were accompanied by people from the Municipal Environmental Department.

Editorial comment: when the Policía Local moved in to confiscate 12 dogs belonging to a French man (Gabi) who had a cortijo in Maro, they took half of them and when they came back for the rest they found that the man had hanged himself. The situation had been badly handled, undoubtedly. Hopefully, the Town Hall also sent qualified social workers with psychiatric training to attend to the woman in this case — something lacking in the case of Nerja.

(News: Zaidin, City & Metropolitan Area, Granada, Andalucia)