Man arrested in feces-filled home Mon Apr 16, 6:54 PM ET

OCALA, Fla. - A man living in a home with a layer of animal feces between 2 and 3 inches deep and as many as 300 cats, both alive and dead, was arrested Friday, authorities said.

Jonathan Terpstra, 61, was charged with 55 counts of animal cruelty, two counts of tampering with evidence and one count of resisting without violence, the Ocala Star-Banner reported.

Authorities had to break some windows to ventilate the home. Oxygen levels inside the home were low and ammonia levels extremely high, said Lt. Ron Baroni, with Marion County Fire Rescue.

Animal feces also was backed up in corners and crevices, Baroni said.

One deputy told the paper that when he arrived at the home, there were vultures feeding on a cat carcass and more vultures on the rooftop.

Animal control officials removed at least 80 cats from the home by Friday evening, said Dennis Underwood, an animal control field supervisor with the county's Code Enforcement Department. The animals were being examined, Underwood said.

Terpstra was being held at the Marion County jail on $1,000 bond.

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How ppl let themselves get to that point is sad ..... hope he gets the help he needs and the cats find better homes.

thats bad,

How can some one live in that? I wonder if he doesn't have some mental problems, cause come on....

I'd say it's pretty obvious he did have mental problems. It's impossible to even retain your sanity i'd say while living your entire life in three inches of cat crap and piled corpses. I'm suprised he even amanged to survive living in there. The smell of my ONE cat's poop gets me out of the house.
This is a very sick man, and I think the whole situation is just showing what happens when you leave something festering like this. No pun.

a layer of animal feces between 2 and 3 inches deep and as many as 300 cats, both alive and dead

whooooooooa. wow. ummm. yeah, idk just wow. i never cease to be amazed...

My old neighbors have about 84 cats inside their home yes I said 84 cats. I have tried to talk to them over and over again that did not do a bit of good. Two of the other neighbors worked at the court house and tried to get some thing done about it because the house reaked when people would walk by their home it smelled BAD. I called the S.PC.A. they only gave them warnings because were I use to live ( right across the street from them) they had no law saying they could not have that many animals. Long story short we moved and so did all the other neighbors no lie. We still call to see how every one is doing they are all ok. but another friend who still lives in that neighborhood says that they are being warned all the time by the township about the oder I could tell more but it just makes me sick.

I know.

That is just sick! Poorly sick!

I've been watching "Animal Cops" on The Animal Planet. And they have cases like this. Half the time, they can't find the owner. But they had a case with at least over 100 cats. The house itself was abandonded. They had to wear gas masks because inside the house smelled so bad! They had to take breaks though they got all the living cats out of the house. They had to put down some of the cats since a lot of them where agressive.

Not very hygenic was he

At one time my Mother, in her 60's, had 37 dogs...16 of which were house dogs. She wondered why nobody would come to visit her. Fortunately, most of the dogs were old so when she got to the point she had to have home health care there were only two left. While she was in the nursing home for three months getting rehabilitaion after a stroke I spent the entire three months, 14 hours a day, cleaning, ripping out carpets, scrubbing walls, generally washing everything from top to bottom and repainting the entire inside. If her case worker from the hospital had seen the way she had let her house go she would have had to stay in the nursing home and they would have condemned her house. not because the house was in bad shape, but how nasty it was. Part of her home health care includes general house keeping so I no longer have to worry that it will ever get like that again, thank God.

My worst fear was that she was going to end up like that because she wouldn't let anyone do anything while she was home. But, I'm a sneaky little devil and did it while she was gone. I'll still never hear the end of it though.

Aw.

You saying about nobody visiting her because of the pets reminded me of something I had read many years ago in a problem page. There was a couple who had a neighbour with four cats, now this neighbour invited this couple to dinner one night to which they readily agreed, however, after dinner they were horrified when the hostess scrapped all the leftovers onto one of the plates and let all four cats eat and lick off the plate.

They were reluctant (well actually they were adamant they would never go to dinner there again lol) and the problem they were writing to the magazine with, was how did they refuse any future invitations from their neighbour without hurting her feelings.

The answer was to tell her point blank that cats eating off the plates that they may well be eating off themselves at a future date was enough to put anyone off lol.

I still wonder to this day if they did just that

My family was pretty blunt about that, and the smell, since she didn't let any of the inside dogs out to "go" because they fought when they were all together. She kept them seperated because they didn't get along. Groups of dogs were kept in different parts of the house (a rather large house) and they "went" everywhere. It was a friggin nightmare! You couldn't go from one room to another without shoving dogs away from the doors trying to get into the other rooms. If she hadn't taken care of them as well as she had I would have called the ASPCA on her.

i see... .. i lived with over 20 cats.. and yes, they poop everywhere and my house smell like..poop..
well.. i guess thats why i never get any girls ... aww..craps...

Brutal....This house actually NEEDS to be toilet papered.

wow
this guy i swear he isnt all with it
poor cats will they all be put down the surviving ones i mean
also did he start out with one or two cats or more and they just bred also where would you get the food for all these cats