206 A Nurse collecting is a direct form of animal abuse given that its consequence is termination of a nonhuman animal life The Nature of Animal Collecting The focus of this chapter is deliberate, intentional collecting as a form of animal abuse Thus this chapter distinguishes between hoarders, who may well collect animals through ‘good’ intentions but will inadvertently commit animal abuse, and those whose intent is collection of an animal with disregard for animal life or an active intent to cause animal abuse via killing Hoarding and neglect are dealt with elsewhere in this volume and so are only briefly referred to in this chapter Previous research (Nathanson 2009, p 307; Nurse 2013a, p 93) identifies hoarding as an extreme form of passive animal harm which may initially be the result of good intentions gone awry, albeit indicating the serious consequences of collecting and neglect By contrast, active animal harm consists of deliberate and intentional harm caused to animals (Daugherty 2005) In the case of collecting activity, such active cruelty indicates elements of malicious intent towards nonhuman animals on the part of the offender This activity may be an indicator of psychological factors such as a predisposition towards cruelty (Ascione 1993; Boat 1995) and may also indicate that an abuser commits other forms of abuse within the home such as spousal or child abuse (Schleuter 1999; Turner 2000) Active animal collection, of the kind typified by the compulsive egg collector or acquirer of taxidermy specimens and sport trophies, represents a different kind of behaviour from hoarding or passive neglect Here, the end result and arguably the intent of collecting activity is the death of a nonhuman animal to serve the collecting need Thus egg collectors, quite literally flush away an animal life in order to acquire their ‘trophy’ (discussed further below), while taxidermy and sport hunting trophy collectors employ speciesism (Beirne 2007; Sollund 2008) objectifying animals in order to suit their collecting needs and neutralise the cruelty inherent in their actions Animal life is thus simply a barrier to their obtaining the object of their desire and abusing animals becomes a tool to facilitate their trophy acquisition Collecting activity thus requires negating the animal abuse and harm involved as offenders take an anthropocentric view of nonhuman animals as existing only to serve human needs or desires