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What is it about?

We looked at the nature of the connection between animal abuse and violence against people. While it existed, the association was not as strong as some material suggests primarily because animal abuse is relatively common in "normal" or "control" populations.

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Why is it important?

Suggesting that animal abusers are inevitably dangerous to people can help lobby for creating and enforcing animal cruelty laws. However, it is equally important to focus on animals as victims of both illegal abuse and legal activities that cause suffering. Most animal cruelty occurs in a context that will not lead to violence towards humans.

Perspectives

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Some kinds of data associations are hard to represent accurately in simplified forms. For example, while perpetrators of violence to humans are more likely to have a history of animal abuse, this difference is relatively small (25 vs. 14%), and most people who have abused animals do not seem to target human victims later. The dangerousness of animal abusers to humans needs to be understood in a nuanced way alongside lobbying for the recognition of animals as sentient victims of abuse in their own right.

Dr. Emily Patterson-Kane
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Animal Abuse as a Sentinel for Human Violence: A Critique, Journal of Social Issues, July 2009, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2009.01615.x.
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