Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Spotting a future criminal


Pat Murphy

Americans who are anxious—make that outraged—about cruelty to animals, especially household pets, should be thrilled with a little noticed piece of legislation dropped into the U.S. House hopper in Washington last week.

The Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act (HR 137) would provide prison time for anyone involved in interstate activities that subject dogs to fighting matches as well as people involved with cockfighting.

It's painful enough to see and hear about pet owners who neglect animals by indifference to their care or who ditch pets on the side of a road when they become inconvenient burdens. However, it's unspeakable when pet owners subject pets to cruel fighting that leads to bloody, disabling injuries, even death.

This savagery rarely begins in adulthood.

Study after study by criminologists, psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers have found that abuse of animals more often than not begins in childhood or adolescence.

The Internet contains a veritable encyclopedia of data on animal cruelty. One study, the Achenbach-Connors-Quary Behavior Checklist, found that among a sampling of 2,600 boys and girls between 4 and 16 years of age referred for mental health therapy, 35 percent of the 4- to 5-year-old boys had been cruel to animals and nearly 20 percent of the girls of the same age.

This is important: Cruelty to animals in childhood and adolescence is an indicator a future criminal is being born.

Since the 1970s, the FBI has officially acknowledged that most serial killers, for example, killed or tortured animals as children. A 1997 study by Northeastern University found that 70 percent of animal abusers had committed at least one criminal offense. Some 40 percent had committed violent crimes against people.

And so the data goes—48 percent of convicted rapists and 30 percent of child molesters abused animals; 74 percent of pet-owning women in crisis shelters reported their pets had been threatened, injured or killed by abusers; 20 percent of women in a Utah safe house delayed leaving an abusive relationship for fear a pet would be harmed.

Although further proof seems unneeded, data shows that teenagers involved in notorious shootings of school classmates in the 1990s had histories of animal cruelty.

Except for abusing children, few acts of violence are as brutal as animal cruelty. Pets especially are trusting, defenseless and physically too fragile to survive the muscular attacks of an enraged, perhaps psychopathic child or adult.

Legislation to punish participants in callous dog-fighting matches is a bold step toward dealing with inhumane treatment of animals, as well as possibly preventing sociopathic personalities from brutalizing people.




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