animal abuse

1. I "watch too much TV," except for being in a family full of cops going back several generations, and except for being married to a cop. And except for me doing research reports on issues related to criminality, criminal psychology, and law enforcement. So...yeah, I get all my info from TV. Sure.

Since you're substituting your own ignorance on the matter for actual research, I'm including an extended quote below this response from a NY Times Mag article back in 2010.

If you're not familiar with the work of Wright and Hensley, Tallichet and Hensley, McClellan, and others, maybe you should stop posting whatever you come up with off the top of your head until you can manage to read something outside your own head and your own speculation.

2. Nobody said animal abuse was the ONLY thing an investigator looked for. Of course you look for specific evidence related to the specific crime, and of course that's a primary level rather than a secondary level, where most or all indicators that are profiling indicators are properly understood to be. Stop trying to lecture people about evidentiary necessity-plus-sufficiency as if that kind of straw-man argument were conclusive.

3. Likewise, nobody said anybody could be "convicted in court" for a violent crime against humans with evidence of animal abuse being the sole basis for the conviction. Talk about setting up a straw man. Do you actually consider yourself a rational person?

The link between animal abuse and criminality is covariant, not causal. It's co-indicative of a third factor, in other words. It is also neither necessary nor sufficient for a criminal conviction. It is not 100% predictive or 90% predictive; it indicates elevated probability. It can be a significant investigative factor, and it can be one of several factors that would add weight to a criminal case against a violent offender.

You do understand the difference between investigation and trial, right?

4. Also, nobody said dogs are "dumb." In some dramatic situations, when filming, depending on the director, the degree of attention given to the matter, the attentiveness of trainers and any regulatory personnel on set, etc., an animal may be in a scene where acted-out abuse can be disturbing to the animal. That's not true in all situations on all sets, but it's true in some. Is it possible you really don't know that? If you need that proven to you, you're working at a level that disqualifies you from commenting. And the further point is, you're not actually going to know what the mental state of that animal is. You might surmise that -- because of the factors you've mentioned here -- it's somewhat unlikely that a dog experienced any kind of mental trauma because of a scene depicting mistreatment, violence, etc. Clearly it's true that some situations and some trainers are better than others. But you cannot say that you're certain the animal hasn't suffered some kind of trauma, primarily because animals don't have the same reporting-and-feedback capabilities that humans do. And if you're not certain, then some version of the OP's original question is still valid: If some animals on some sets are traumatized when they're involved in depictions of mistreatment and violence, shouldn't that matter?

So the OP's question still stands as valid, on that basis: Why involve animals in scenes that might cause trauma? There is an answer to that. I've already posted one answer: Because it's part of the characterization of a violent offender. In a sideways manner, you've posted another: Because it can be done without necessarily traumatizing the animal, which is true. If the question is really based on a notion that there's no story value in involving the animals, and we can guarantee the animals will be traumatized, then of course that'd be bad. But if on most well-regulated sets, with people concerned with animal welfare, the risk of trauma can be reduced to at least the "unlikely" level, and there is a purpose in involving the animals, then that is a legitimate answer to a legitimate question.


In sum: There is good evidence to show that especially in cases where an offender exhibits a pattern of violent behavior (as opposed to a one-off incident or outburst), that offender is more likely than the general nonoffending population to have abused animals at an earlier age. The kinds of nonsensical, nonscientific, illogical objections you're bringing up have absolutely no impact on that evidence. Of course it's true that animal abuse isn't 100% predictive, nor would it need to be to show statistical significance and therefore some weight of relevance in an investigation. It's one of several potential factors, but it is a significant and identifiable factor.

Maybe you should stick to the usual comment-list practice of popping off against somebody who has no clue on the subject.

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From NY Times Magazine, 11 June 2010, "The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome," by Charles Siebert. Posted for purposes of education and discussion, not for profit.

In addition to a growing sensitivity to the rights of animals, another significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern, including illegal firearms possession, drug trafficking, gambling, spousal and child abuse, rape and homicide. In the world of law enforcement — and in the larger world that our laws were designed to shape — animal-cruelty issues were long considered a peripheral concern and the province of local A.S.P.C.A. and Humane Society organizations; offenses as removed and distinct from the work of enforcing the human penal code as we humans have deemed ourselves to be from animals. But that illusory distinction is rapidly fading.

“With traditional law enforcement,” Sgt. David Hunt, a dog-fighting expert with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in Columbus, Ohio, told me, “the attitude has been that we have enough stuff on our plate, let the others worry about Fluffy and Muffy. But I’m starting to see a shift in that mentality now.” Hunt has traveled to 24 states around the country in order to teach law-enforcement personnel about the dog-fighting underworld, often stressing the link between activities like dog fighting and domestic violence. “You have to sell it to them in such a way that it’s not a Fluffy-Muffy issue,” he said of teaching police officers about animal-abuse issues. “It’s part of a larger nexus of crimes and the psyche behind them.”

The connection between animal abuse and other criminal behaviors was recognized, of course, long before the evolution of the social sciences and institutions with which we now address such behaviors. In his famous series of 1751 engravings, “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” William Hogarth traced the life path of the fictional Tom Nero: Stage 1 depicts Tom as a boy, torturing a dog; Stage 4 shows Tom’s body, fresh from the gallows where he was hanged for murder, being dissected in an anatomical theater. And animal cruelty has long been recognized as a signature pathology of the most serious violent offenders. As a boy, Jeffrey Dahmer impaled the heads of cats and dogs on sticks; Theodore Bundy, implicated in the murders of some three dozen people, told of watching his grandfather torture animals; David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” poisoned his mother’s parakeet.

But the intuitions that informed the narrative arc of Tom Nero are now being borne out by empirical research. A paper published in a psychiatry journal in 2004, “A Study of Firesetting and Animal Cruelty in Children: Family Influences and Adolescent Outcomes,” found that over a 10-year period, 6-to-12-year-old children who were described as being cruel to animals were more than twice as likely as other children in the study to be reported to juvenile authorities for a violent offense. In an October 2005 paper published in Journal of Community Health, a team of researchers conducting a study over seven years in 11 metropolitan areas determined that pet abuse was one of five factors that predicted who would begin other abusive behaviors. In a 1995 study, nearly a third of pet-owning victims of domestic abuse, meanwhile, reported that one or more of their children had killed or harmed a pet.

The link between animal abuse and interpersonal violence is becoming so well established that many U.S. communities now cross-train social-service and animal-control agencies in how to recognize signs of animal abuse as possible indicators of other abusive behaviors. In Illinois and several other states, new laws mandate that veterinarians notify the police if their suspicions are aroused by the condition of the animals they treat. The state of California recently added Humane Society and animal-control officers to the list of professionals bound by law to report suspected child abuse and is now considering a bill in the State Legislature that would list animal abusers on the same type of online registry as sex offenders and arsonists.


[I can list other sources for anybody who's interested, but the names above -- in the main body of the text, under point 1 -- should be a good starting place. Also, if you want to know why skepticism re the MacDonald Triad doesn't negate the research establishing a link, ping me and I'll answer. Briefly, it has to do with the necessity of reaching a very high degree of validity in both clinical practice and the lab, to be able to establish what amounts to a "syndrome," with a constellation of factors typically present, where the presence of one or two factors can be presumed to indicate the presence of the others. You actually don't need that kind of "syndrome" construct to establish a simple elevated probability of animal abuse among offenders with a pattern of violent offenses.]