Animal Abuse Just The Start, USU Professor Says

Hurting pets likely link to later hostility and violence

By Bryce Petersen Jr, Standard-Examiner Cache Bureau
Originally published in the Standard-Examiner, November 8, 2001

LOGAN — As Frank Ascione progressed in his studies of the socialization of children, he noticed a hole.

"You look through almost any psychology magazine and there are absolutely no references to pets," Ascione said. So he set out to fill the gap.

Now, after several years of adding to that body of knowledge, Ascione has been rewarded with the 2001 Distinguished Scholar Award, given once every three years by the International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations and the International Society for Anthrozoology.

Specifically, the award was given to Ascione for his research documenting the connection between child abuse and animal maltreatment.

Ascione theorizes that when children abuse animals, they are often "imitating what they are seeing in the home or community." It may come from watching parents, siblings or neighbors abuse pets. It may stem from seeing spousal abuse in the home. Or it may be a result of child abuse.

One way they act out their disturbance is to act out on anything that is smaller, Ascione said. "Anything smaller" can include cats, dogs, turtles. Or other children.

Although young children can be expected to make mistakes with animals, Ascione said quick intervention and education should follow. He compared violence against animals to fire starting. At first, a child may find some matches and experiment, causing damage, a little or a lot. When parents find out, they should tell the child about the danger of fire, take better care of matches and monitor the child a little more.

With younger children, usually better supervision and less access to dangerous material tends to solve the problem, he said.

"In older children, it is more often a symptom of other problems and education usually doesn"t help. In those cases, evaluation by a psychologist or a psychiatrist is often needed."

But repeated behavior in a younger child may also be grounds for professional help, Ascione said. A few months ago, a 4-inch news brief elicited a storm of letters to the Standard-Examiner. The brief told of how a 6-year-old Ogden boy tortured four kittens, killing one and hurting the others so badly that officials opted to euthanize.

For Ascione, the most troublesome part about the incident is what the father told police: The boy doesn"t have pets because he kills them.

If the behavior is repeated, or committed by an older child, "it may be a symptom of some other issues," and require professional help.

"It's really dangerous for a child … to not learn that animals feel pain," Ascione said. Though hampered by limited study most studies look backward at children who became criminals as adults instead of forward at adults who abused animals as children—there is evidence that cruelty to animals can lead to violence against people.

One example of studies that look backward is one of Ascione's, showing that five of 11 U.S. school shooters from 1996 to 1999 had allegations of animal abuse in their past.

The most well-documented example was the case of Luke Woodham who, in the April before his October 1997 murder of his mother and two schoolmates, tortured and killed his own dog, Ascione writes in an article, to be published Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Left unchecked, violence against animals can give a child a sense of excitement and power that may lead to other types of abuse in later life, Ascione said.

Ascione is the author of three books on the subject, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence and Animal Abuse: Linking the Circles of Compassion for Prevention and Intervention, Cruelty to Animals and Interpersonal Violence and Safe Havens for Pets: Guidelines for Programs Sheltering Pets for Women Who Are Battered. His article can be seen at http://www.ncjrs.org/html/ojjdp/jjbul2001_9_2/contents.html.

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