Animals, People and Violence
Dr. Randall Lockwood

     Randall Lockwood, PhD, is Vice President for Training Initiatives of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Psychology. His research has examined many different aspects of the interactions between people and animals including the connection between cruelty to animals and other forms of violence. He co-authored with Frank Ascione Cruelty to Animals and Interpersonal Violence.

     This article was originally published in The Humane Educator, a newsletter published by the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies (CFHS).

     Increasingly I think society is recognizing that the way we treat our animals is mirrored in the way we treat one another. That's hardly a new concept in philosophy. It's been around in all the great ethical or philosophical writings for years and lies as the foundation for the formation of animal protection agencies around the world.

     I think most of you are aware that most SPCAs and humane societies were founded with the joint purpose of protecting children and animals and often were involved in other charitable acts. In the mid 1800s in England, the abolitionist movement, the women's suffrage movement, the movement for improving the treatment of mental patients, the child protection movement and the animal welfare movement all grew up side by side in an outpouring of compassion and empathy.

     We are a culture steeped in, obsessed with and consumed by violence. Dealing with problems of violence against people, against animals and against the earth itself has to be a major focus of all compassionate people. That is the environmental movement of the next hundred years, if not the next thousand years.

     It's easy to feel overpowered by all the violence portrayed in the media, but most human interactions, like most human-dog interactions, are very peaceful, very friendly, very positive. The reality is that a small number of people are responsible for most societal violence. The question has been for decades, how can we spot them early and what can we do with them?

     That's one of the reasons I'm so interested in animal cruelty. We now recognize within the psychiatric community that animal cruelty is an indicator of conduct disorder and it is one of the symptoms with the earliest onset. If you have a child who is intentionally and repeatedly displaying aggression towards animals at age five, six, seven, that is a very serious red flag of problems and a warning sign perhaps at a stage when some intervention may be possible.

     Why do people hurt animals? There is no single reason why someone burns a cat, poisons a dog, stabs a horse, but most of the time the underlying motivation is power and control. In violent relationships that put women and children at risk, it is all about power and control. These are people who for the most part are losers. They don't have great skills and they have a small peer group. They usually have been involved in other rather timid anti-social crimes such as arson. People who are cruel to animals for a sense of power and control often flaunt that cruelty as a way of shocking others and bringing them under control.

     A lot of animal cruelty in teenagers is coming from imitation of what they see in the home. Sometimes these are kids who actually like animals but have had that love used against them. They have learned that love hurts, so rather than be out of control, they kill the animal themselves. Violence against animals is also a red flag for suicide, the ultimate control over self. In some cases, animal cruelty is coming out of sado-masochistic miswiring. Virtually every serial killer has an early history of abusing animals.

     It's interesting to talk about serial killers, but we're dealing with the much more mundane violence we see perpetrated against women and children every day in North America and we're only just now beginning to recognize this interconnection.

     Ten years ago, I did a study on how pets were treated in child-abusing families. We found that in two-thirds of those families, there were incidences of animal cruelty. In three-fourths of those cases, the abuser was the abuser of the child. About one-fourth of the abusers were the children themselves who were modelling the violence they saw.

     Animal cruelty is a powerful indicator of violence in the home and a predictor of future violence. Three separate surveys interviewing women coming into battered women's shelters showed that of the women coming in, roughly half had a battered pet at home. We hear many stories of women who delay leaving an abusive relationship because they have no place to put that pet at risk. I keep hearing horror stories of women going home prematurely to look after animals. In Rhode Island, I heard of a woman who left the shelter and went home to take care of the dog. Her abuser was waiting for her there and beat her almost to death, knowing that she would have to come back for the dog.

     We have case history after case history where the father kills, threatens to kill, or beats the animal in front of the family as a warning, "This could happen to you next." The metro police in Nashville have recognized that violence against animals is a potent indicator that the violence in a domestic relationship has reached lethal or potentially lethal levels. If a partner kills an animal, threatens to kill an animal, or threatens an animal in front of the children, they now treat it in the same way as if he had said, "If you leave me, I'll kill you," or as if he had brandished a weapon.

     The most dangerous time for a woman in a violent domestic relationship is when she is on the way out. Many agencies put together checklists for women at risk. Most of those checklists don't say what to do with their animals. We need to work more closely with the people drawing up those resources to address that issue.

     What about the treatment or cure? Maybe there are some in whom this disease of violence is too virulent and they can't be reached. But one of the things that we see from looking at the criminological literature is that there are some interventions that work if applied early enough. Some of the most promising programs are those that teach job skills and reward pro-social attitudes, family interventions that teach parents to monitor what their kids are up to and hold them responsible for knowing where their kids are and what they're doing, that teach parenting skills, and that teach non-violent conflict resolution skills early on in adolescence and before.

     Which brings us back to where we as humane societies fit in. The act of caring for unwanted dogs and cats and everything else is hard enough, but it's not enough. Our goal as a humane society, as a humane federation, is to find ways to create a humane society.     We don't need to change our basic mandate or action nor do we have to apologize for having a special interest in animals. That's the special niche that we've carved out. That's where our special sensitivities and skills lie. When George Angell was asked why he spent his time working for animals, he said he was working at the roots. And that's exactly what we do.

     If we are working to help people appreciate the needs of others, to teach empathy at the earliest possible age, to teach people to enlarge their circle of compassion to include individuals of other cultures, other races, other species, I think that is one of the biggest steps we take against violence.

     Let's try to think creatively about how we can all work together.