Suzanne R. Goodney Lea

Criminal Justice
Recent Scholarship
Edited by
Marilyn McShane and Frank P. Williams III
A Series from LFB Scholarly

This page intentionally left blank
Delinquency and Animal Cruelty
Myths and Realities about Social Pathology
Suzanne R. Goodney Lea
LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC

New York 2007
Copyright © 2007 by LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lea, Suzanne R. Goodney.

Delinquency and animal cruelty : myths and realities about social
pathology / Suzanne R. Goodney Lea.
p. cm. -- (Criminal justice : recent scholarship)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59332-197-0 (alk. paper)
1. Juvenile delinquency--United States--Psychological aspects. 2.
Violence in children--United States. 3. Animal welfare--United States.
I. Title.
HV9104.L343 2007
364.360973--dc22
2007009789
ISBN 9781593321970
Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

For my Dad, who was my first sociology teacher,
and for Marty Weinberg and David Heise,

who together made me a sociologist
Table of Contents
THE PRESUMED “LINK” BETWEEN ANIMAL
CRUELTY AND VIOLENCE TO HUMANS 1
CONSTRUCTING THE “LINK” 21
METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES 41
DOES ANIMAL CRUELTY DURING CHILDHOOD

CORRELATE WITH BEING VIOLENT TOWARD
HUMANS LATER IN LIFE? 59
HOW DO WOMEN’S AND MEN’S REPORTED RATES

OF ANIMAL CRUELTY DIFFER? 81
TELLING TALES TO ACCOUNT FOR INCIDENTS OF

ANIMAL CRUELTY 91
THE FINDINGS AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY

113
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: HOW

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
OF ANIMAL CRUELTY HELPS CLARIFY OTHER
ACTS OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY 131
REFERENCES 153
INDEX 153
vii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sharon Barnartt and John

Christiansen for offering encouragement and mentorship
with regard to pursuing scholarly endeavors at a teaching-
oriented institution and balancing the two in a responsible,
sane way. Margaret Vitullo and my Dean, Karen Kimmel,
have done all they can to ensure that I have had the
institutional support to get this and other research done in a
heavily teaching-oriented environment. I am immensely
grateful to both of them. Teresa Burke has been wonderful
at offering moral support and practical guidance with this
and other research endeavors. Barbara Stock offered
specific feedback on this manuscript and has become a
terrific colleague and co-author.
I would like to thank Marty Weinberg for teaching me
to be a rigorous, careful scholar and for keeping the faith.
For all that I ever accomplish, I will be grateful to him.
Eliza Pavalko taught me how to apply complicated
statistical procedures carefully and confidently. Phil
Parnell modeled a reasoned, humane, historically-informed
understanding of criminology. Rob Robinson, Tim Owens,
Tom Gieryn, and Jack Levin offered me support and
ix
x Acknowledgements
encouragement over many years. David Heise taught me to

think critically and creatively. Eric Wright and Jason
Jimerson taught me how to be the teacher-scholar I knew I
wanted to be and helped guide me towards a job I love.
Many years back, at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, Raymond Grew, Michael Kennedy, and
Howard Kimeldorf taught this working-class kid that I
could live a life of the mind, as a scholar. They guided me
through my first research efforts and in my pursuit of
graduate school. The Lee Iacocca Scholar’s Program gave
me the financial support to pursue an undergraduate
education at the University of Michigan; without that
support, I would never have pursued a doctoral degree.
Finally, I would like to thank LFB Scholarly Publishing
and, specifically, Leo Balk, for their confidence in,
direction with, and support of this project.
Thus, while all mistakes are my own, this work—like
any scholarly endeavor—has benefited from much support,
guidance, and feedback.
Suzanne Goodney Lea, Ph.D.

Gallaudet University
CHAPTER 1
The Presumed “Link” Between

Animal Cruelty and Violence to
Humans
“…unnatural cruelty is planted in us; and what humanity

abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us, by laying
it in the way of honor.”
-John Locke, 1705
This study examines human cruelty toward animals, a

phenomenon that is cited by both lay people and behavioral
scientists alike to be a harbinger of human-directed
violence. Many people assume that someone who could
beat a puppy or kick a kitten must be remiss of empathy
and thus capable of all sorts of violence. The inherent
assumption is that a transgression against, in particular,
those animals with which many humans of Western
cultures strongly identify and even anthropomorphize,
indicates an especially cold and unfeeling personality that
is potentially capable of any sort of cruelty. If a man
shoots his dog, social philosopher Immanuel Kant, for
example, reasons, he’s not doing anything wrong to the
1
2 Delinquency and Animal Cruelty
dog, but he is doing something wrong to his own moral

character and to all of those humans whom this character
may affect, “for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard
also in his dealings with men” (Rachels 2003:190-91).
Kant referenced the ban of doctors and butchers from
serving as jurors due to the carnal nature of their work as
partial support for his reasoning (for a more elaborate
recounting of this reasoning and the sway it has held over
Western culture, see Franklin [1999]). The inverse is rarely
considered, however: the Nazis, who were arguably
uniquely cruel toward other humans, exhibited
vegetarianism and adoration of their animal companions
(Franklin 1999). How could people so capable of kindness
to animals evidence such cruelty toward their fellow
humans. I contend in this study that acts of cruelty toward
animals empirically show no special association with acts
of human-directed violence.
Other researchers have begun clarifying how common
the practice of animal abuse, particularly by young boys,
actually is within American society. Surveys of college
students consistently reveal that many collegiate men report
having engaged in animal cruelty during the course of their
lives (Felthous and Kellert 1987; Flynn 1999; Arluke et al.
1999). Can a behavior so seemingly commonplace
adequately serve as a means of identifying budding
sociopaths?
To date, individually-perpetrated1 animal cruelty has
seldom been considered outside the rubric of, mainly, two
discourses: (a) biographical accounts of identified extreme
killers, which retrospectively assert that early episodes of
1
I mean to exclude here the consideration of behaviors effected within
institutional settings, for instance research using animals, animal
trainers/handlers, farmers/butchers, etc.
The Presumed “Link” 3
animal cruelty clearly signaled these individuals' eventual

violence toward people (Flynn 1988; Ressler et al. 1986)
and (b) specific incidents of animal cruelty that are
regarded as so sadistic as to elicit media attention. A
propensity to engage in animal cruelty has been cited as
evidence both of an individual’s (a) familial
pathology/disorganization (Ascione 1993; Ascione et al.
1997; Ascione and Arkow 1999; Flynn 1999) and/or (b)
social alienation and resultant tendency toward violent
expression (Arluke and Lockwood 1997; Arluke et al.
1999; Ascione 1993; Felthous and Kellert 1987; Hare 1993;
Norris 1988). Usually, the focus of research has been upon
what violence against animals might tell us about its
perpetrators. Arguably though, the same tendencies
identified post hoc in the biography of a violent individual
can often be found within the biographies of his or her
peers. How might one distinguish “boys being boys” from
budding sociopathy?
Framing the issue as one of individual children abusing
animals engages a particular level of analysis, one that is
monadic and situational. Any identification of the patterns
that might underlie this behavior therefore remains elusive.
We might thus profit by refocusing our social analyses
from any one cruel or "at risk" child to a broader
examination of socialization forces. Rather than attempting
to seek out particular young people who might be
dangerous, we could instead work toward identifying
socialization trajectories that accommodate and encourage
anti-social impulses.
Challenging the pervasive assumption that animal
cruelty is both rare and a harbinger of sociopathy, I aspire
to document here the prevalence of animal cruelty within
many individuals’ life course trajectories. If this behavior
is more common than presumed, an assessment of the
social, psychological, and developmental functions that this

behavior might serve is warranted. Perhaps this behavior is
not even experienced as violent by its perpetrators. In fact,
it may be an expression of boredom, an effort at sensation-
seeking for “kicks” or “thrills,” reflecting a vein similar to
that tapped by Katz’s (1988) research findings. By
examining this behavior as more a social phenomenon than
a matter of individual deviance, the cultural bailiwick that
allows individuals to enact such cruelty within a context of
banality reveals itself, as Scully and Morolla (1984) found
in their examination of rapists’ accounts of their
experiences and motivations. Once rapists’ own
explanations of their behaviors were examined, a picture of
a society that over-sexualizes women, and arguably even
supports their being raped, emerges. One wonders what
forces within American society have ostensibly earmarked
animal cruelty as a horrible act while simultaneously
defining groups that aide and shelter animals as “humane”
societies. What is the presumed gestalt within such a
context?
How Did Animal Abuse Come to Be Viewed as a

Warning Sign of Sociopathy?
In 1963, John M. MacDonald posited that aggression

towards animals could be considered one part of a
"triangle" of pre-sociopathic symptoms, along with
enuresis and fire-setting. Though most researchers have set
themselves to investigating etiological precedents to Anti-
Social Personality Disorder within a much wider scope than
MacDonald envisioned (Gluek and Gluek 1950; Hare 1993;
Newman 1987; Robins 1966), some researchers still assert
the reliability of the triangle, or at least the part thereof
pertaining to aggression toward animals. Despite critiques
and conflicting data, discussed below, the notion that

animal abuse is a pre-sociopathic symptom has grabbed
hold of the public imagination, gradually achieving near-
mythical stature.
Three factors have contributed to this popularity. First,
sensational stories have borne out the proposed connection.
Historically, we have the case of Pierre Rivière, whose
1835 acts of parricide were uniquely well documented and
later compiled by Foucault (1975). Contemporaries of
Rivière pepper their character testimonies and legal
summations with allusions to Rivière’s regular torture of
birds and frogs and other such animals as, seemingly,
obvious evidence of his cruel and heartless nature. More
recently, reports of teenage school shooters’ prior cruelties
toward animals inevitably emerge after such incidents
make headlines. Friends of the shooters recount that the
shooter used to do things to animals. For instance, Kipland
(“Kip”) Kinkel, who killed his parents one night and then
opened fire on his classmates the next morning, killing two
of those classmates, is reported by a peer to have run over
snakes with his skateboard. What the peer does not report
is that the he knows of this behavior only because he was
doing it with Kip (Sullivan 1998). Similar examples of
reported cruelty to animals can be found in the post-
incident background narratives of Luke Woodham (Pearl,
Mississippi) and Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson
(Jonesboro, Arkansas). It is important to note that the
construction of biographical narratives about a person who
has perpetrated unspeakable violence will inevitably be
impacted by selective observation. Observers desperately
seek some explanation for what caused the person to enact
such horror.
This leads us to the second factor: MacDonald’s (1963)
triangle provides concrete warning signs for unthinkable
behavior. It reassures people to believe that there must be

some prior symptom evidenced by a teenager who kills his
parents and then shoots dozens of classmates, or by a serial
killer who tortures and murders his victims. We do not
want to think that just anyone is capable of such acts.
Animal abuse seems a good candidate for a behavior so
“evil” that it must discriminate between good and bad
individuals, giving us a simplified means of identifying at-
risk youth.
A third factor that has contributed to the popularity of
the MacDonald triangle is that the line between research
and advocacy has become blurred, which may have inflated
the perceived strength of the evidentiary support for the
link between animal and human cruelty. Individuals and
organizations with strong animal welfare agendas are
disseminating, and even compiling, research on this link.
For example, consider an excerpt from an ad in the
September 2005 issue of Good Housekeeping, placed by
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA):
Often, boys will be boys. Pulling pigtails and
shooting spitballs may be harmless pranks, but
when kids hurt animals, they often grow up to be
violent criminals. FBI experts know that serial
killers and rapists often have a history of animal
abuse. Teach your child that it’s wrong to hurt
animals. If you know a child who has abused
animals, tell the parents or the police before the
child’s violence escalates.
Here PETA cites data without noting its significant
limitations. FBI experts base their expertise on the
offenders they encounter. They are not doing scientific
research; they are solving crimes. Access to their records
and processes is closed and thus cannot be peer-reviewed.
Developing a heuristic opinion based upon one’s

experience does not render one an expert on the etiology of
violent offenders. Furthermore, even granting that “serial
killers and rapists often have a history of animal abuse,”
this does not imply that “when kids hurt animals they often
grow up to be violent criminals.” It is errant reasoning to
suppose that the fact that a large percentage of violent
offenders abused animals entails that a large percentage of
animal abusers will become violent offenders. Of course,
PETA’s mission is not to clarify the nuances of statistical
data; it is to help animals. Appealing to the tendency of
animal abusers to harm humans is more likely to further
this agenda with the readership of Good Housekeeping than
would some of PETA’s more radically pro-animal rhetoric.
Notably, some of the key players in performing and
compiling research on this subject are also public figures in
organizations that advocate for animal welfare. Randall
Lockwood, who served as Vice-President for Research and
Educational Outreach with the Humane Society of the
United States (HSUS) until 2005 (he joined the HSUS staff
in 1984) and now serves as Senior Vice-President for Anti-
Cruelty Initiatives and Training with the American Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), and
colleague, Frank Ascione, who has also served in an
advisory capacity for HSUS, edited the compilation,
Cruelty to Animals and Interpersonal Violence (Lockwood
and Ascione 1998). In the animal advocacy role, it is
expedient to present the link between animal-directed
violence and human-directed violence as well-established.
Thus, from a CBS news story (Hughes 1998):
Gaining a sense of power and control through the
suffering of another living thing is a very dangerous
lesson that children learn often with animals as their
first victim,” said the Humane Society’s Randall

Lockwood, publisher of a study on the link between
human and animal abuse.
Similarly, the HSUS sponsors efforts, such as the ongoing
First Strike campaign, which use promotional materials,
workshops, and even celebrity endorsements to assert the
“clear” link between animal and human violence. From a
1998 letter addressed by Paul G. Irwin, president of the
HSUS until 2004, to members of the American public:
“First Strike is attempting to educate the public to
understand that a crime against an animal is a crime against
society, and a child who abuses a pet may have deep,
serious problems that sooner or later could lead to human
violence.” He continues: “And when you return the survey
[about animal cruelty], perhaps you can send a gift of $10
to the HSUS today to help us publicize the connection
between animal cruelty and human violence.”
It is one thing to advocate on the basis of there being a
clear “link” between animal cruelty and future human-
directed violence, but, as a social scientist, one must retain
skepticism; this is the basis of all good science. Perhaps
the researchers involved do indeed keep these roles
separate, maintaining objectivity in research alongside their
public roles as animal advocates. Still, the convergence of
these roles in the same persons may make the empirical
support for the putative “link” seem unambiguous. When
those with academic credentials, such as Kenneth Shapiro,
executive director of Psychologists for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals, over-generalize, “Virtually every
one of these kids who ends up shooting up the school yard
has a history of animal abuse” (Martin 1999), it is not
surprising that the popular press take this at face value: in
an article discussing the shootings by two Arkansan boys of
their schoolmates and teacher, Newsweek asserts that,

“Psychologists say that one of the surest sign of an
incipient sociopath is a child who likes to tease or torture
animals” (Gegax et al. 1998).
Additionally, there is now evidence that violent
offenders proceed in no direct path from “practicing” on
animals and then moving to humans (Arluke et al. 1999).
What is often not reported by the mainstream press and
what has not been examined very closely by researchers is
that, for every child who abuses an animal and then shoots
up his school yard, there are probably thousands of children
who have abused an animal but have not gone on to shoot
up their schools. In the Rolling Stone article examining the
public construction of the life of Kip Kinkel, who killed his
parents and then shot up his school mates in May, 1998,
author Randall Sullivan (1998, p. 81) makes the following
observation:
. . . in the Portland Oregonian, a classmate named
Jesse Cannon was quoted as saying that Kip was a
‘Jekyll and Hyde’ who talked constantly about
killing and plotted a shooting spree while riding the
school bus. What none of the papers told its readers
was that until last fall, Jesse Cannon had been not
only Kip’s closest friend but also his principal
partner in building bombs and shoplifting at local
stores. Aaron Keeney was a source as well,
recalling assorted scary stories that Kip told. No
articles, though, mentioned Aaron’s own tales, like
the one he is said to have told about putting his pet
hamster out in the middle of the road and trying to
run it over with Rollerbaldes, or how, when that
failed, he shot the hamster in the head with his BB
gun.
It reassures people to think that there must be warning signs

evidenced by a child capable of killing his parents and then
shooting dozens of classmates the next day, and animal
abuse apparently seems a good candidate for a behavior so
“evil” that it must discriminate between good and bad
individuals. Though not remarked upon at all in previous
versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM), animal cruelty is now listed as one of the
warning signs of Conduct Disorder in the DSM-IV (1994).
Pressure to pathologize cruelty toward animals by children
compelled its listing as one of seven behaviors indexed to
diagnose Conduct Disorder within DSM-IV.
In 1974, Goldstein proclaimed that the “fact” that early
cruelty to animals is indicative of psychopathology is
"already agreed upon." As a result of such rhetoric, animal
abuse has come to be widely identified with sociopathy.
Still, social scientific research, thus far, has yielded little
convincing evidence to justify populist cries of outrage that
posit animal cruelty within an animal-cruelty-to-human-
violence progression paradigm, commonly termed the
“graduation hypothesis” (Felthous and Kellert 1987). To
date, there exists no no convincing empirical evidence that
cruelty towards animals begets human-directed anti-social
behavioral outcomes, despite such campaigns as the
Humane Society of the United States' "First Strike" effort.
In fact, some experts will acknowledge that there exists no
such “link” but persist in promoting this idea because it
helps with fundraising for animal protectionist
organizations (author’s personal phone conversation).
Much of the work that provides the basis for this claim
is anecdotal and not especially rigorous. Liebman (1989),
for instance, argues that animal cruelty is characteristic to
the life histories of serial killers based upon just four case
histories. Tapia’s (1971) study of children who are cruel to

animals proposes a list of characteristics that are common
to such children. The problem with this study is that it
examines eighteen case histories of children who were
referred for psychiatric care because they were cruel to
animals and, typically, otherwise violent. This group of
youngsters might represent a uniquely anti-social set of
aggressive persons. Rigdon and Tapia (1977), in a follow-
up to Tapia’s (1971) study find, indeed, that many in this
initial group of children are still consistently aggressive
several years later. This narrow sampling of study
participants, however, does not tell us how common such
abuses toward animals might be in the broader population.
Maybe the animal abuse done by these young people
sounds especially bad because it is in framed within a
contextualized pattern of abusive, aggressive behavior.
Still, the specific acts of animal cruelty themselves might
not be especially unusual.
The few statistical studies that have been attempted
suffer from (a) small N’s and big conclusions (Flynn 1988;
Kellert and Felthous 1985; Norris 1988; Ressler et al. 1986)
and (b) non-representative study groups (Flynn 1988;
Liebman 1989; Ressler et al. 1986). Too often, researchers
have gone only to violent offenders in search of personal
histories of animal abuse. Flynn (1988), Norris (1988), and
Ressler et al. (1986), for instance, like Liebman (1989),
only examine a study population of serial and mass
murderers, finding that many of these individuals’
backgrounds include accounts of animal cruelty. Though
Flynn (1988) and Ressler et al. (1986) may include larger
numbers of serial killers in their studies than did Liebman
(1989), neither includes a control group. Beyond the
possibility that these types of offenders might over-report
such abuses so as to look meaner or tougher, as Arluke and
Lockwood (1997) suggest, the fact that a serial murderer,

might have abused animals during his or her formative
years is not necessarily significant. The idea that he or she
might have intentionally abused a helpless animal indeed
sounds horrible, but if other children who did not grow up
to be serial murderers also abused animals, then the import
of animal abuse in the psychosocial development of a serial
murderer becomes less clear. In effect, one could envision
the possible relationships between animal abuse and anti-
social behavioral tendencies via Table 1.1.
Most research has not attempted to explore the animal
abuse histories of “normal” individuals (Arluke and
Lockwood 1997), or the experiences of those anti-social or
violent individuals who have not ever acted out violently
upon animals. Notably, there are several such individuals.
Some notorious killers have, in fact, expressed feeling more
a sense of affinity with animals than with humans. Dennis
Nilsen represents one such case. When he was finally
arrested for a series of murders in London, his central
concern was the fate of his dog, which was, in fact,
euthanized by the authorities (Masters 1985). Adolf Hitler
and many of his fellow Nazi comrades were avid animal
lovers, even vegetarians (Franklin 1999). Jeffrey Dahmer,
who is oft-cited as “having abused animals as a child,” in
fact appears to have done no such thing. He instead
showed a strong affinity for animals, only once causing
suffering to an animal. In that instance, he was in primary
school and became frustrated when an adored teacher to
whom he had presented a goldfish gave the gift to
another boy in his class. When Dahmer discovered this
“betrayal,” he poured turpentine into the bowl, killing the
fish (Dahmer 1994). Though some might dismiss this
behavior because it was directed toward a “minor” animal,
such use of an animal as a proxy for one’s frustrations may

represent a worrisome motivational context. Other than
this incident, Dahmer’s
Table 1.1: Conceptual Model Illustrating How Animal

Cruelty Relates to Sociopathy.
Kind to Animals Cruel to Animals

Presumption that a
“good” person could
“Normals” UNEXPLORED
not intentionally
hurt or torment an
innocent animal.
Small-N studies of
incarcerated serial
killers suggest that
these individuals
commonly abuse
animals during
Sociopaths UNEXPLORED
childhood, or
adolescence. Some
experts infer that
such abuse is
“practice” for
eventual killing of
humans.
“torture” of animals involved no such thing. He did have a

strange passion for dissection, but he would explicitly
select animals that had been killed on the country road
outside his home for such explorations so as not to cause
any suffering. In fact, as a teen, when he witnessed another
boy run over a puppy, as so many boys in that age range
seem prone to do, Dahmer was outraged and immediately

severed the friendship with the boy, after ensuring the
puppy was not hurt (Masters 1993). Harris (1977),
referring to his contemporary criminologists’ lack of
attention to the gender dimension of crime, terms such
oversights “conceptual blind spots.” In effect, researchers
themselves can become so entrenched in their particular
worldviews, or perspectives, that they simply cannot
imagine asking certain kinds of questions. Arguably, this is
what has happened in the exploration of animal cruelty.
The studies of animal cruelty, which have been larger
and more representative, have veered from attempting to
answer the original question: “Does animal abuse predict
sociopathy (or future human-directed violence)?” to instead
exploring how animal abuse might be associated
specifically with such phenomena as patterns of domestic
violence (Ascione et al. 1997; Flynn 1999; Raupp et al.
1997). The original, broader question as to whether or not
animal cruelty predicts human-directed violence, then, has
still not been adequately answered in an empirical fashion.
Though most work on the topic of animal abuse has
focused upon the histories of persons in correctional
institutions, there do exist studies that have attempted to
provide, either directly or indirectly, a broader assessment
of the extent of animal cruelty within the general
population. The most read and cited of these is Kellert and
Felthous’ work, summarized in their 1985 publication.
More recently, see Arluke et al. (1999).
Kellert and Felthous’ (1985) study uses close-ended
interviews of both aggressive and non-aggressive
incarcerated offenders as well as never-incarcerated
individuals to clarify how experiences with animal abuse
differ among these three groups. Commenting on this
study, Ascione (1993) remarks: “Although this and related

research have been acknowledged to contain some
inconsistencies and to share some methodological
shortcomings (Felthous and Kellert, 1987), a case for the
prognostic value of childhood animal cruelty has been
made.” This conclusion hardly seems merited, however,
since about 30% of both the aggressive offenders and the
non-offenders in Kellert and Felthous’ study (1985)
reported never having engaged in an act of animal cruelty.
Of those who did report such activity, the 25% of
aggressive men who propagated “substantial cruelty”
actually represented only twelve men, each of whom
reported five or more incidents of abuse. Why five
incidents were significantly different from, say, three or
four incidents (the categorization denoted prior to the “five
or more” designation) was never clarified but seems an
important point, as 16% of the non-offenders reported 3-4
incidents of abuse.
Felthous and Kellert (in Lockwood and Ascione 1998)
are clear in their goals/biases:
(Meanwhile), clinicians, jurists, school teachers,
parents, and others who work and play with
children should be alert to the potentially ominous
significance of this behavior in childhood and the
advisability of concerned, helpful intervention.
Also, on a preventative note, if aggression to
animals can become generalized to involve humans,
perhaps an ethic of compassion and respect for
animals can also carry over to humans.
These would seem to be noble, well-intentioned goals, but
social policy guidelines arguably extend only from valid
and reliable research findings. The presumption, then, that
“aggression to animals can be generalized to involve
humans” has not yet been reliably established (Arluke and

Lockwood 1997; Arluke et al. 1999). In fact, Arluke et al.
(1999), in a substantive, empirical study correlating reports
of animal cruelty to authorities with criminal records (or
lack thereof) find that there is no clear, progressive “link”
between animal cruelty and future human-directed
violence. Among those who were cruel to animals, some
individuals had criminal records that included human-
directed violence, and some did not. In cases where there
were reports of human-directed violence, acts of animal
cruelty that might have been reported did not consistently
predate the reports of human-directed violence. In effect,
some individuals seemed simply to be very aggressive,
alternating between animal targets and human targets but
following no particular pattern in their abuses. Of course,
this study is limited by the fact that only reported incidents
of animal cruelty or human-directed violence more
generally could be collected.
More recent studies of the animal cruelty “link” mimic
the famous Kellert and Felthous (1985) study. Hensley and
Tallichet (2005a, 2005b), Tallichet and Henseley (2005),
and Singer and Hensley (2004) have written a series of
articles discussion the relationship between animal cruelty
and human-directed violence using, like Kellert and
Felthous (1985), an incarcerated population of 261 adult
males. They find a relationship between abusing animals
and conviction of more violent felonies, however, there are
many drawbacks to using an incarcerated population only.
They compare violent offenders with more moderate
offenders but do not include a measure of non-felons. They
explore how these felons learn to be cruel (Hensley and
Tallichet 2005b), motivations for animal cruelty (Hensley
and Tallichet 2005a), rural and urban differences in the
commission of animal cruelty (Tallichet and Hensley

2005), and even whether whether or not firesetting and
animal cruelty can lead to serial murder (Singer and
Hensley 2004). In that article, they contend that
information on the childhood and adolescent backgrounds
of serial murderers is “scant.” In fact, there is such a
fascination with these cases, that more is arguably known
of these individuals’ backgrounds than that of any other
offenders. Whether or not this background information is
valid is another matter entirely, but it is certainly available
from, usually, a variety of sources (interviews with friends
and families, police records, interviews with the felons
themselves).
Arluke and Luke’s (1997) review of the literature
examining the presumed “link” between animal cruelty and
human-directed aggression cautions that the evidence is not
conclusive. Ascione’s (1993) review of the literature
regarding this “link” recounts a number of case studies but
few empirical studies. Many of the empirical studies
reviewed are inconclusive. For instance, with regard to the
firesetting-enuresis-cruelty to animals “triad,” Justice et al.
(1974) find support for the theory while Hellman and
Blackman (1966) and Wax and Haddox (1974) do not.
Price and Dodge (1989) find that attributional bias tends to
inform socially rejected boys’ levels of aggression. In
effect, such boys tend to misread interactional cues,
attributing hostile intentions to other individuals even when
such intentions are not present. Such an attributional bias
could work in a very similar way with regard to imputing
intentions of animal interaction partners. Kolko and
Kazdin (1989), however, in exploring qualitative accounts
of firesetting behavior among children, add that a simple
presence-absence model is insufficient in its explanatory
power. In effect, the intensity, duration, and breadth of
particular antisocial behavior may matter more than their

frequency (Kazdin 1990). More recent explorations using
carefully matched and/or longitudinal studies find that
home environments seem to strongly impact teenage and
adult behavioral outcomes. According to Becker et al.
(2004), which examines sets of mothers and kids over a ten
year period starting in 1990, children who are exposed to
marital violence, parental pet abuse, and parental drinking
are more likely to engage in firesetting behavior as teens.
Firesetting, correlates in their study with a threefold
increased risk of juvenile court referrals and a 3.3 times
greater risk of juveniles arrest for violent crime. Marital
violence and paternal or maternal harshness in parenting
correlates with teens’ reports of animal cruelty which then
predicts higher self-reports of violent crime (if not official
court detection). Currie (2006) finds that exposure to
domestic violence correlates with more reports of animal
cruelty by children. This echoes Flynn’s (1999) work.
Making generalized statements that animal abuse
predicts human violence based upon faulty logic and
exaggerated research could be dangerous should well-
intentioned parents or doctors start labeling children
sociopathic or potentially dangerous based upon incidents
of animal abuse which may have relatively generic and
non-pathological in their motivations motivations. Many
men, for instance, report that, as boys, they would seek
animal targets upon which to fire their BB guns after tiring
of the proverbial cans, open up a mammal to see how it
worked, and aim for an animal on the side of the road as
they were driving along in their car with friends.2
According, however, to an article in a magazine for nursing
2
These are trends gleaned from anecdotal data reported within a
preliminary animal abuse survey I fielded in 1997.
practitioners (Muscari 2003), which asks “Should I assess

animal cruelty as part of all routine child health visits?,”
doctors and nurses should assume that, while some cruelty
in the very early years may merely be exploratory:
Pathological animal abusers are usually, but not
necessarily, older. These children may demonstrate
symptoms of psychological disturbances of varying
severity, and/or may have a history of physical
abuse, sexual abuse, or exposure to domestic
violence. Professional counseling is warranted.
Delinquent animal abusers tend to be adolescents
with other antisocial behaviors, sometimes drug-,
gang-, or cult-related. Both clinical and judicial
interventions may be required.
As Piper (2003) contends in her article questioning the
validity of the animal cruelty/human-directed violence
“link,” the hyper-explanatory power this mythical link has
gained garners it independent power and a moral panic
status. This can be dangerous when it is applied in clinical
settings as fact.
This study will use a clinical study population to
explore several questions raised by the research done thus
far to investigate the perceived connection between animal
cruelty and human-directed violence. I will first clarify the
frequency of animal cruelty within my study population, as
well as how reported involvement in animal cruelty and
other anti-social acts during childhood or adolescence
compares for men and women. I will then examine how
other childhood/adolescent anti-social behaviors correlate
with animal cruelty. Finally, I will assess how effectively
animal cruelty predicts future human-directed violence and
posit alternative models which might better explain the
rationale used by perpetrators to explain violence done to
animals. The use of a clinical study population,

particularly a population drawn using the sampling method
described below to over-sample anti-social individuals,
helps to ensure that the study population represents a
reasonably diverse set of individuals, in terms of their
background with regard to childhood/teenage and adult
anti-social behavioral patterns. Such diversity in the
sample will allow for better identification of variables that
might differentiate between animal abusers and non-
abusers. Several in-depth interviews with selected study
participants will also help to clarify the motivational
context which informs animal cruelty.
CHAPTER II
Constructing the “Link”
Any discussion of a pathological condition, or social

problem, almost immediately engages the boundary wars of
two or more disciplines (Abbott 1988). With regard to
defining, understanding, and treating sociopathy, sociology
has largely removed itself from considering this
phenomenon. In the last forty years it is the psychologists
and psychiatrists who have staked out the job of making
sense of this phenomenon. The framework employed by
both of those camps is medicalized, and thus individually-
focused. Sociology, by reintroducing context and social-
level forces to the study of sociopathy, might endeavor to
reclaim this domain of inquiry, thereby continuing the work
of Robins (1966) and others.
Psychology represents a normative-based field. Hence,
its clinicians measure phenomena via inventories of
questions that intend to distinguish individuals who meet a
given set of criteria from others who do not. Those who
possess a set of traits that are not broadly present within a
given population are potentially tagged as having the
disorder indicated by these criteria. My criticism of this
approach is that much is lost in the details. Each question
21
that comprises a psychological diagnosis incorporates a

large amount of information, but this subtlety is not
considered. The meaning inferred when administering
these questions is assumed to be “clear” by both researcher
and subject, but many social researchers realize, based
upon vast amounts of survey and interview data, that such
shared meanings are rarely accomplished. Race, class,
gender, and many other dimensions of the human
categorization of experience compromise this process
because they funnel perceived meaning in unforeseen ways
for various individuals or groups of individuals. And, of
course, subtle changes to the phrasing of a given question
can also have a considerable impact.
For instance, this particular research project
incorporates questions from the Diagnostic Interview
Schedule (DIS), an index of various elements of anti-social
behavior constructed as an array of experience-based
questions (see questions excerpted, listed in Appendix A).
Consider the question that asks about animal abuse:
When you were a child or a teenager, were you ever
mean or cruel to animals or did you intentionally
hurt animals (mammals, not insects, etc.)?
A follow-up version of this question, administered in face-
to-face interviewing off another schedule of questions
administered during the same study posited a similar
question, although this time without a specific focus upon
mammals:
Have you ever mean or cruel to an animal or have
you intentionally hurt animals, outside of removing
vermin?
These are, in fact, very different questions. A few
respondents did answer yes to the first question but no to
Constructing the “Link” 23
the second. A careful reliability check of the battery of

questions that have been derived by psychologists to index
various disordered states (pathologies) would surely
unearth many other such discrepancies.
Such an item-focused, normative-based approach to
understanding a psycho-social phenomenon ignores
context. When we ask an individual about these sorts of
experiences, using tools like The Hare Psychopathy
Checklist (1991) or the DIS, we assume that a shared
cultural understanding will allow a subject to “get” what a
question is asking. The question may seem simple and
straightforward enough, but, as noted above, there can be
subtleties in the most seemingly straightforward of
questions. If a researcher presumes that a given set of
experiences consistently plays out in a particular way and
drafts close-ended questions based upon those
presumptions, we are placing much trust within his or her
conceptualization of that phenomenon.
Per the phenomenon of sociopathy, available question
sets meant to measure incidents of anti-social behavior
arguably incorporate biases of race/ethnicity, class, and
gender, at the very least. Do our checklists and inventories
capture adequately, for instance, the range of experiences in
which female sociopaths engage? We know from various
researchers (Chesney-Lind 1998, Messerschmidt 1997,
Steffensmeier and Allan in Zaplin 1998) that female
deviance plays out within different outlets and patterns
than, generally, does deviance expressed by men.
Similarly, it seems likely that lower- and working-class
men and women might act very differently than do their
middle- and upper-class counterparts (or, as illustrated in
Chambliss’ [1973] article on “saints” and “roughnecks,”
class often implies a different response by authority

figures).
In assessing, then, the social patterns that characterize
animal cruelty, one might consider several dimensions of
sociological theory. Mainly, my interest here in this study
is to consider some of the social functions animal cruelty
might serve in American society. The psychological
perspective, though it may address the functions a given
pathology might serve for a particular individual, does not
consider the social functions that a perceived pathology
might serve. Sociologically, however, one might reason
that animal cruelty, for instance, could serve several social
functions: (1) it might plausibly offer a release valve for
individuals’ frustrations, a function even psychologists
acknowledge, although not in such a way as to consider
how such releases might be socially informed; (2) it might
serve as an expression of behavior learned from adult and
peer role models; (3) it might evidence an attempt by some
to seek sensation or stave off boredom; or (4) it might
provide a realm within which young people might exercise
identity exploration efforts.
These next sections will explore the sociological
literature as it relates to each of the four potential functions
of animal cruelty, as listed above. I first discuss sensation
seeking, since this would seem the most common
motivation, perhaps because adolescence in American
society is characterized by an ambiguity of status. In
effect, while some young people of middle-school and high
school age are extensively scheduled into planned sporting
and leisure activities, other members of this age group are
faced with quite a lot of free time and little in the way of
real, demanding challenges, tasks, or roles, which can lead
to delinquent involvement (Felson 1998). Next, I discuss
frustration and aggression release, which is the most

commonly-perceived explanation for why someone might
intentionally harm an animal. Finally, I explore learning
theory and then identity formation, distinguishing between
personal and social identity and incorporating a discussion
of gender roles and their impact upon identity formation
and perception. These categorizations seem to offer the
most sociologically viable theoretical explanations for this
behavior.
Sensation-Seeking
Katz (1988) elucidates a motivation for much youthful

delinquency, suggesting that a great deal of this behavior
can be explained via a discourse of sensation seeking. This
would seem a plausible explanation for interpreting acts of
cruelty by children. Perhaps, such cruelty is less a
harbinger of sociopathy than a sort of release-valve for
boredom.
In his thesis, The Seduction of Evil, Katz (1988) argues
that young people pursue shoplifting, for instance, as a
means of obtaining “sneaky thrills.” Teens and preteens
who shoplift, he finds, do so not because they need the
items they steal. In fact, most of these young shoplifters
report that what they typically steal is nothing they need or
want. They shoplift simply for the thrill it provides. It is,
they suggest, as if the items “call out to them” (Katz 1988).
This framework echoes that of Fine’s (1986) concept of
“dirty play,” which suggests that young people use play to
explore some of the forbidden or taboo aspects of their
society. For example, young children might secretly “play
doctor,” which they sense carries some adult meaning that
they are not supposed to understand. Perceiving that such
play might be chastised if discovered by adults, children

tend to engage in such play amid an oath of secrecy, which
adds to the “fun” or thrill they experience. Arluke (2002)
connects the “dirty play” concept to the accounts of animal
cruelty histories he collected from twenty five of his
students. He observed that many of these accounts resonate
with the idea that young people are obtaining some sort of
thrill from their actions. Additionally, he notes that these
young people never discuss these acts after their
occurrence— even with their peers.
That animal cruelty may indeed function as a means of
sensation-seeking for young people is also suggested by
recent literature on lifestyles of teens in suburban settings
(Duany et al. 2001). While such environments may feature
much adult-organized activities, there exists little for teens
to do on their own beyond going to the shopping mall or
movie theatre and little transportation for younger teens
beyond the erratic bus. Young people—particularly
males—in such settings may reasonably be expected to
innovate “fun” activities, perhaps by exploding something
with a firecracker or shooting something with a gun.
Moving targets, such as animals, seem to be more exciting
targets than, for instance, stacked cans.
Frustration and Aggression
Another explanation for aggressive behavior is frustration,

or strain. Block’s work, characterized by the 1977 text
examining violent crime in terms of social environment and
interaction, extends the Chicago School’s perspective on
the stains of urban life for, especially, young African-
American men. Arguing that much urban violence is the
result of widely-available powerful guns and turf wars,
Block paints the picture of “hot” violent crime. Such crime
is not cold and calculating but instead perpetrated out of
frustration and rage. Henry and Short (1954) in their
exploration of the relationship between suicide and
homicide find that homicide, or outward-directed
aggression, is more likely to generate when there exists an
external force toward which to attribute one’s frustration.
Hence, “home” stressors like a spouse, kids, and pets, while
decreasing the odds of suicide also increase the odds of
frustration-driven homicide. Henry and Short (1954)
observe as well that, due to social convention, men are
much more able to express violence, but Schur (1984) notes
that women, when they do exhibit aggression, are quite
likely to act out in the home environment, against a spouse
or child.
Sometimes an animal will come to represent the
frustrations encountered through interaction with others
(Flynn 1999). For instance, if a young person were to have
a chance of gaining a “best” friend or a potential lover and
that would-be companion were commonly distracted by, or
attentive to, a pet, the young person might become filled
with animosity for that pet and possibly do harm to it
(author’s research/interviews; Felthous and Kellert 1987).
According to Price and Dodge (1989), boys who are
rejected by their peers and/or are socially maladjusted are

more likely to infer hostile intentions with regard to others’
ambiguous behavior, with “others” including peers or,
arguably, animals (Ascione 1993). Such personified abuse
is more likely to be of a repetitive rather than an incidental
nature. Such an individual may “stalk” or repeatedly
torment a particular animal, developing, perhaps, an
extensive fantasy around the animal. An individual may
report having engaged in several such incidents, but each
will be emotionally elaborate in and of itself. This sort of
abuse may also encompass a sexual dimension (which is
often vague or indirect) because the individual may develop
an emotionally intense relationship vis-à-vis the animal
(Flynn 1988; Hickey 1991; Ressler et al. 1986).
Research linking domestic abuse with animal abuse
suggests that animal cruelty can also sometimes be an
outlet for a particular sort of aggression. Children in
abusive homes are more likely to exhibit an early first
occurrence of cruelty, either toward an animal, sibling, or
peer (Zahn-Waxler et al. 1984). In a sense, the abused
child might transfer, to the animal, sibling, or peer, his or
her frustration with the abuse he or she has experienced or
witnessed in his or her home life. The child might do this
to release frustration, or because he or she is simply
imitating behavior he or she has associated as being
“proper punishment” from the adult abuser in the
household, which bring me to my next theoretical frame:
learning theory.
Learning Theory
Another theory that proves useful in understanding many

types of violence is the idea that people learn deviant or
social behavior in the same way they learn pro-social

behavior, via interaction with and observation of others
with whom they identify. These others might be adult role
models or admired peers (Sutherland and Cressey 1974).
Just as a person might learn to “do stick-up,” i.e., street
robbery, or become a thief (Sutherland 1937), one might
also learn to be violent towards animals, and other humans
as well.
Athens (1989), for instance, proposes a model to
explain the creation of “dangerous, violent criminals.”
Based upon extensive interviews with violent felons, his
model hinges upon the idea that young people are first
victimized by an adult in such a way as to feel weak and
disempowered. They may also see others they care about,
for example a parent, sibling, or pet, victimized in similar
ways. Such a child vows never to engage in such violence
but then one day “snaps” and exhibits violence in a public
setting, for instance on the playground during recess at
school where there are many other children to observe.
The child may be acknowledged for his or her successful
exhibition and then gradually come to embrace violence as
a reasonable tactic for solving problems. At first, the
conditions for its use will be minimal, but they will
gradually widen because the child has a readily available
rubric of justifications for using such violence under a
broader array of settings. In effect, then, the child will have
learned to use violence in much the same way in as their
abuser used it.
Flynn (1999) observes that, many times, animal abuse
and domestic abuse tend to go together. That is, homes in
which a spouse or child(-ren) is (are) abused might very
possibly house (an) abused pet(s). Here, too, children in
this setting may observe a parent beating the dog for
urinating in the house and come to view such treatment as

normal or appropriate.
The key with regard to learning theory is that the young
person will not only learn a behavior but also a context or
vocabulary by which to neutralize, rationalize, or justify
that behavior. Many people, of course, do “bad,” i.e.,
socially unacceptable things, but an actor will typically
develop some means of accounting for the act in such a
way as to deem the act acceptable, at least under a
particular circumstance. Generally, the framework of
excuses and explanations which compose the context is
learned from others.
Just as we are instilled with norms of behavior that
orient to our gender, many of us learn negative, abusive
behaviors via violence inflicted upon us within our home
environments. Sutherland’s Differential Association
Theory (Sutherland and Cressey 1974) contends that people
learn deviant or violent behavior just as they learn any
behavior—via interaction. Widom’s (1992) discussions of
cycles of violence, Athen’s (1992) theory of the origins of
dangerous, violent criminals, and Strauss’ (1994) efforts to
document the prevalence and impact of child mistreatment
clarify the details by which this process occurs. Children
are beaten and brutalized by a parent and they may watch
the abuser beat their siblings and/or the other parent. They
learn either to behave in a similar fashion once they can
achieve influence over others—or, in some cases, they
learn to be repulsed by such behavior and to empathize
with the victimized.
Animals, arguably, can serve as a mediator toward
either of these outcomes. Some literature (Ascione 1993;
Flynn 1999; Raupp, Barlow, and Oliver 1997) finds that
children who are beaten in their homes start inflicting
similar abuse on household pets. In effect, the children

may act out the punitive role of the adult other as they try
to discipline the pet, thus illustrating a central dictum of
social learning theory: observation and imitation.3 They
may also learn to take on such roles by watching older
siblings. Some times though, the child sees his or her
beloved pet being hurt by their household’s abuser in ways
similar to those the child endures. That child may come to
especially empathize with the animal, which he or she
comes to view as an innocent victim that cannot understand
or avoid the punishments (see Flynn’s [1999] work on
domestic violence and its link with animal cruelty).
These rationalizations largely echo those noted by
Felthous and Kellert (1985), in their study of abusers’
accounts of animal cruelty. In many cases, an appeal to the
ignorance of youth is made. In others, science comes to the
rescue: curiosity, experimentation, etc. In still others, the
animal is blamed for having misbehaved. Or, the animal
might effectively serve as a means for expressing the
abuser’s frustration with the animal’s owner. In a few
cases, the abuse continues into the adult years masked as
“mercy killing”. Many times, the professed motivation is
simply one of having been bored and in search of some
excitement.
Gender Roles, Identity Work, and Deviant Behavior
It seems clear that gender, as with most aspects of human

behavior, represents an important explanatory variable that
potentially underscores all of the factors discussed, above.
3
Here, too, then, the rationalization processes employed by children
who experience abuse at home and then discipline a household pet are
likely acquired via interaction with the disciplinarian parent.
Much of the sociological literature discussing deviance and

crime observes that men are more likely to engage in
deviant—and particularly, violent—behavior and that
women’s involvement is limited by their social opportunity
structure. Anderson’s (1999) work, and other work
examining other settings populated exclusively by young
males (Becker 1963; Katz 1988), provides a summary of
behavioral patterns that seem to characterize these
situations: an inclination toward “showing off” or boasting
and an effort to project a “don’t mess with me” toughness.
Since much animal cruelty seems to occur within all-male
situations, the social dynamic of all-male settings is
relevant, particularly as it relates to identity testing along
the social dimension of gender role prescription. However,
the idea that women do not engage in violent behavior is
increasingly suspect (Pearson 1998). In fact, women very
obviously engage in aggressive acts. Researchers,
however, may not be asking the right questions about the
relevant contexts and thus be failing to identify such
behavior.
Chesney-Lind’s (1997; 1998) work suggests that all of
our society’s ideas about crime have been patterned by our
gender roles and stratification patterns. In fact, most
incidents of animal abuse appear to take place within small,
exclusively male groupings. However, it may well be that
women engage in abuse as well, albeit under different
parameters. Chesney-Lind (1997; 1998), extending Widom
(1986) considerations of cycles of violence, suggests that
traditional examinations of delinquency benefit
significantly by the employment of a field-
observation/listening approach.
Much of the research conducted under the guise of
classic studies of delinquency focused nearly exclusively
upon men (eg., Chambliss 1973; Glueck and Glueck 1950).

Women were dismissed as not being particularly prone to
deviance due to a tendency to internalize the
norms/expectations of proper behavior. At best, it was
theorized that women would become more deviant as they
gained more liberation (termed the “liberation hypothesis”
by Schur [1973]). Chesney-Lind (1997) argues that a
woman’s obedience may be more a function of much
greater monitoring and surveillance than some abstract
propensity for girls to obey. In short, girls were kept closer
to home. Theoretically though, girls’ deviance could have
been adapted to the home environment. In the case of
animal cruelty, perhaps girls are more likely to abuse or
torment household pets.
Messerschmidt (1997) suggest that crime is, in effect,
an expression of masculinity, a means by which those
deprived of traditional means of social success might gain
social clout and respect. Steffensmeier and Allan (in
Zaplin 1998) go on to argue that, because crime is so
stigmatized vis-à-vis women, those women who do act out
criminally tend to actually be more deviant than their male
counterparts. The very terms we use for criminal identities
tend to have masculine connotations: thug, mugger, killer,
etc. (see Affect Control Theory [Heise 1979; MacKinnon
1994] for a discussion of such identity-linguistic
connotations). Thus, we may have difficulty
conceptualizing or categorizing a deviant or violent
woman, though they may be equally prone toward deviant
or violent behavior.
American cultural patterns generally deny women the
externalized expression of aggression (while condoning, if
not sanctioning, it for men), and thus aggressive behavior is
deemed masculine (Henry and Short 1954). Such
normative expectations muddy our very conceptualization

of aggression (Widom 1986). For instance: a woman living
within a Victorian setting might be more inclined than one
living in modern times to appropriate the role of a “black
widow.” A Victorian lady had little opportunity to earn a
living on her own; she was dependent upon her male
“caretakers.” However, if she were to murder a wealthy
husband or father, she would legally acquire his wealth and
maintain the security of a widowed woman’s social
position. This was one of the few means by which a
Victorian lady could gain independence. We, of course,
have little means of knowing how often such a tactic was
employed. But, perusal of the historical record of female
criminals (Newton 1993) makes it clear that there were
many more incidents of black widowhood and other lone-
woman-perpetrated murder (usually of other victims who
were the woman’s kin) recorded in the U.S. prior to 1950
than after 1960.
Borrowing from Sykes and Matza (1957) and, more
recently, Scully and Morolla (1984), I use the concept of
accounts to understand what acts of animal cruelty mean to
their abusers. Accounts provide a glimpse at the
motivations for acts that might be deemed cruel. Often, in
terms of aggressive outcomes, we are called to apply a
matrix of empathy. Some presume that empathy emerges
almost “naturally,” and early— perhaps by age five (Zahn-
Waxler et al. 1984). I suspect, though, that children are
often, by reflex, cruel to a wriggling, live creature that is
smaller than them, and that empathy is very much a learned
trait. And, like anything that is learned, it is acquired via
social interaction.
Part of my interest here is the extent to which non-
human “others” can elicit in humans the same kinds of
symbolic processes that underlie the “looking-glass self.”

It is arguably much easier to rationalize or neutralize the
“feelings” of a non-human other since the “other” in such a
case can offer no challenge to one’s rationalizations. In
fact, it seems likely that some individuals, perhaps the
“badass” characterized above, for instance, might not feel
at all compelled to rationalize harming an animal.
From the sociological vantage point, humans behave
according to their impressions of how they perceive
themselves to be seen by others. Using a process termed
the “looking-glass self,” humans gauge the impression
others seem to have of them by attempting to interpret
others’ reactions to them (Cooley 1902). Based upon such
reflections, individuals begin to think of themselves in
terms of various identities (Stryker 1968). One may come
to think of oneself as a good student, for instance, if one is
praised by teachers and achieves good marks. Such
identity-formation can also work in a negative direction, as
well. For instance, if an individual is repeatedly
characterized a “loser” by his or her peers, he or she will
likely begin to feel that he or she is a “loser.” Such an
individual may begin acting out in ways that confirm this
view of self, perhaps avoiding academic, athletic, or social
achievement. What sociologists term the symbolic
interactionist perspective suggests, then, that identity
formation unfolds in much the same way as a marble
bouncing about a pachinko game. As we collide with
others’ views and demands of us, we are funneled down
particular pathways.
In effect, then, young people— particularly men who
are much more able to explore a “tough” or “badass” social
identity due to this culture’s pervasive gender norms (Katz
1988) may attempt to appropriate this social identity so as
to fit in with peers or alienate “boring” adults. Such a

young person might, then, go along with peers on an
expedition to shoot at neighborhood cats or attempt to run
over animals in cars. However, once such violence is
enacted, some young people may find that they empathize
with the animal if it is injured or killed. In such a case, this
young person may feel much guilt over what she or he did
to the animal. This may discourage the young person from
incorporating this “tough” role as a personal identity (see
Owens and Goodney [2000] for a more elaborated
discussion of the dynamics of guilt and identity formation).
While a young person may have many social identities
from which to appropriate, not all of these may feel to be a
good match for his or her personal identity context
(Rubington and Weinberg 2005).
As a young adult, a teenager will begin testing potential
identities. Though some young people seem to commit to a
“badass” identity fairly quickly, many young people are
arguably just “test-driving” a social identity, in accord with
Katz’s (1988) argument that deviance, particularly that
perpetrated by young people, is largely driven by an
inclination toward sensation-seeking and looking “tough”
or “cool.” When young people do “bad” things, the
reactions of their peers will confirm or disconfirm their
sense of commitment to such a negative identity (Ulmer
2000). In most cases of reported animal abuse, the activity
is reported to have occurred in the company of others.
If an individual were, for instance, deemed a “badass”
by some of his or her peers, s/he would likely begin to act
tough and mean in an effort to confirm this label.4 For
4
See Lemert (1951) and Katz (1988), as well as Athen’s (1992)
discussion of how ‘dangerous violent criminals’ come to find positive
social support, or feedback, for a mean or cruel demeanor.
such individuals as these, animal abuse may be just one of

many acts of social deviance affected in an effort to project
a “badass” persona. Thus, the animal abuse may, in and of
itself, have no special significance to this individual. He or
she may readily acknowledge engaging in such behavior
and perhaps even boast to peers of his or her exploits, citing
them as demonstrations of his or her capacity for cruelty.
In fact, because this behavior may be perceived as
instrumental and non-significant, some individuals who
have perpetrated animal cruelty may completely forget
about past incidents of cruelty until giving an interview on
the topic.
I will return to the theoretical framework outlined
above during my concluding discussion, below, in which I
will attempt to model the motivational contexts that
underlie animal abusers’ accounts of abuse. First, however,
I would like to briefly review here some of the literature
exploring the intersection of animal cruelty and human-
directed violence, as well as some relevant sociological
theories of delinquent behavior, so as to orientate the
quantitative dimension of this study.
My key objective with regard to the quantitative portion
of this study is to better clarify the extent of animal cruelty
within a community-based sample. Hirschi (1969) and,
later, Schur (1973) suggest that most humans are inclined
to engage in deviant, and even criminal, behavior. The
fewer social controls there are upon one’s behavior, the
more likely one is to act in a deviant, or anti-social,
manner. Such controls can be obligations, or threats of
sanctions. Since not everyone can be socially controlled at
all times, most everyone is tempted to engage in deviant
behavior. For every deviant or criminal act that is detected
by some authority, there are likely several similar acts that
go undetected. I therefore suspect that animal cruelty is

likely to be more common than most Americans assume,
even if it may not be well-reported or detected. Depending
on who is doing the cruelty and under what conditions and
in what locale, an act of animal cruelty is more or less
likely to be reported. For instance, if one leaves one’s dog
panting in a hot car, this is likely to be reported. If one
throws one’s dog down the stairs for misbehaving, this is
not likely to be reported.
A Canadian study (Offord et al. 1991) found, using a
census-based sample, that about 2% of 12-to-16-year-olds
were said to be engaging in acts of animal cruelty, based
upon mothers’ reports. When children were asked directly
about their cruelty toward animals, the self-reported rate of
such acts was nearly 10%. Interpretations of “cruelty” as
well as the secretive nature of most such abuse likely
explains the difference in reported rates—and may even
suggest that the 10% rate is also underreported. Some
children, asked directly, may have misunderstood the
question, been ashamed to say they had been abusive, or
even have forgotten that they had engaged in such
behavior.
Specifically with regard to animal cruelty enacted
during childhood, Arluke’s (2002) study of college
students’ retrospective accounts of animal cruelty give
strong suggestion that children may experience animal
cruelty as a sort of “dirty play,” extending Fine’s (1986)
research on children’s use of play to explore taboo subjects
and power dynamics. Arluke (2002) suggests that children
may participate in such “play” but then simply outgrow
such behavior. The idea that engaging in animal cruelty
during childhood might lead to human-directed violence
later in life is rendered dubious by Arluke et al.’s (1999)
finding that there is no linear path progressing from animal

cruelty during childhood to human-directed violence in
adulthood. More likely, extending Lemert’s (1951)
labeling theory, the more one is labeled as a violent or
aggressive individual, the more likely one will be to engage
in violent or aggressive acts as one ages. In effect one
commits to a violent identity, an idea echoed in Athens’
(1992) work examining the “creation of dangerous, violent
criminals.” Importantly, per Schur’s (1973) theory of
radical non-intervention, the very process by which
authority figures exercise their authority upon children and
teens who are acting in anti-social ways out arguably
ensures that the labels used to identify the socially
inappropriate behavior will likely become cemented into
the formative identity process of the so-labeled young
person. Schur’s advice: “Leave kids alone wherever
possible (1973:155).” Typically, if left alone, children will
simply outgrow such behavior and, thereby, not commit to
an anti-social identity pattern.
Specific to men, one might reasonably suspect that such
patterns of labeling might apply more to them than women
based upon Harris’ (1977) work, which finds that men are
more likely to be officially labeled as deviant.
Additionally, drawing from Matza’s (1964a) subterranean
drift theory, masculine cultural norms are more likely to
glamorize violent behavior. Hence, among men who are
committed to a masculine identity, tendencies to boast
about acts of cruelty or mischief tend to emerge. Engaging
in such “bad” behavior, within this sort of a context,
becomes, then, a show of strength, toughness, or courage.
The research presented below attempts to puzzle out the
frequency, function, and meaning of acts of animal cruelty
in this society. How common is such behavior? Is such
behavior more common among men than among women?

What other behavior is associated with animal cruelty
during childhood/adolescence? Does animal cruelty
correlate with adult violence? This study aspires to use
sociology’s empirical tradition to examine these questions.
The next chapter outlines the methodological procedures
employed to accomplish this task.
CHAPTER III:
Methodological Procedures
This project examines several hypotheses that promise to

better illuminate the characteristics of the claimed link
between cruelty to animals and violence toward humans.
This chapter outlines the design of this study, the
characteristics of the sample used, the operationalization of
the study’s measures, and the protocol followed in
collecting the interview data used in this study.
Study Design
This study aspires to address the dearth of information

available that empirically examines the presumed
connection between animal cruelty enacted during
childhood or adolescence and violent behavior evidenced
later in life. As discussed above, there exist a few studies
that attempt to empirically address this question, but most
of these examine only incarcerated populations (Kellert and
Felthous 1985), convenience samples (Arluke 2002; Flynn
1999), or idiosyncratic accounts (Flynn 1988; Norris 1988).
The data used in this study generated from a
community sample collected by Dr. Peter Finn through the
41
Indiana University Clinical Psychology Department. Some

of the questions used in this study included sections of the
Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) protocol (see
Appendix A for the list of questions used). The DIS
inventory incorporates scores of questions that ask
respondents about anti-social behaviors in which they may
have engaged. Some of the questions refer to events that
may have occurred during childhood/adolescence. Other
questions ask about the same acts but refer to their
incidence during adulthood (after age 15).
For my interests, the availability of response data for
570 respondents relating to questions about animal cruelty
and many other anti-social behaviors was intriguing,
particularly since this data included questions relating to
both childhood/teenage and adult years. This allows for
some comparison of behavior patterns over time, as well as
a chance to examine the correlation between animal cruelty
and other anti-social behaviors during
childhood/adolescence. I used logistic regression
procedures to examine the extent to which animal cruelty
during childhood/adolescence predicts adult violence.
I supplement the quantitative data with open-ended
interview data collected from 21 of the initial 570
respondents. This qualitative data allowed a chance to
explore how study participants remember, explain, and
recount acts of animal cruelty that they may have witnessed
or enacted as a child or young adult.
The Sample
This study uses a set of quantitative data that examines the

behavioral patterns of 570 young people recruited from
Bloomington, Indiana. The study participants who took
Methodological Procedures 43
part in this research were over-sampled for anti-social

personality traits.
The Bloomington, Indiana, community, population
69,291, is characterized by a highly educated population.
Of the population of residents age 25 and older, 91.2%
have a high school degree and 54.8% have at least a four-
year university degree. This would explain the mean
educational level being 14.24 for this study population.
Only 12.7% of residents of Bloomington are under age 18,
while just 7.9% of the population is age 65 or older. Being
a college town, Bloomington is populated by a fairly young
population. This would explain the relatively young mean
age of this study group, which is just about 21 years of age.
The gender composite for the city indicates that 51.4% of
the population is composed of women, which corresponds
closely to the gender breakdown for this population.
Approximately 87% of the Bloomington population is
white. The largest minority groups are Asians (5.3%),
Blacks (African-Americans) (4.0), and Hispanics and
Latinos (2.5%). The race/ethnicity breakdown for this
study population is 83.7% white and 16.3% non-white,
which combines Asians, Blacks/African-Americans,
Hispanic/Latinos, and members of other racial/ethnic
groups. The specific breakdown of membership
percentages for groups compiled into the non-white
category closely approximates the representation of these
groups within the broader Bloomington population.
Recruitment of Participants
Recruitment for this study was designed to attract an over-

sampling of anti-social personality types of respondents.
The initial study for which this data was collected
investigates disinhibition and alcohol abuse. Widom’s

(1992) method of inducing responses from persons who
have traits composing disinhibition, a characteristic
associated with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASP) as
the trait of “impulsiveness” (DSM-IV 1994, employs
advertisements in newspapers inviting participation in a
research study. These ads are crafted to attract three types
of persons using the following phrasings: (1)
“adventurous, carefree individuals who have led exciting
and impulsive lives” or “daring, rebellious, defiant
individuals,” (2) “persons interested in psychological
research,” and (3) “quiet, reflective, introspective persons.”
The first of these phrasings, Widom finds, reliably attract
individuals with a strong propensity toward disinhibition.
These ads were placed in papers throughout Bloomington,
Indiana, so as to attract (1) highly disinhibited, (2)
somewhat disinhibited, and (3) highly inhibited persons,
respectively. Subjects who responded to these ads and who
were selected to participate in the study were paid $7/hour
for their time. This study, which concluded in Summer,
2000, was conducted by Finn et al. and entitled
“Disinhibition and Risk for Alcohol Abuse” (Protocol #97-
159 with the Indiana University-Bloomington’s Human
Subjects Committee).
I recruited interview subjects by selecting individuals
from the initial subject pool who either identified as an
animal abuser or as a non-abuser, in response to DIS
Question #9. I interviewed both admitted abusers and
declared non-abusers to assess whether there were any
relevant differences between these groups. I also included
male and female study participants, as well as some who
were categorized as ASP and some who were not.
Laboratory assistants phoned lists of qualified (pre-
selected, based on DIS Question #9 and other criteria)

study participants and invited them to take part in an
interview about “their interactions with animals, both
positive and negative.” Participants were offered $10 to
participate in a one-time interview lasting, usually 1-1.5
hours. A total of 21 interviews were collected.
The Data
My data includes 575 individuals (cases). Only five of

these cases had to be dropped due to incomplete case
information. Study participants were paid for their time
and given routinized question protocols in person by
trained interviewers, so the data collected is quite complete
and generally consistent. For instance, if one triangulates
response data for two similar questions, one generally finds
that the responses to both items will be consistent. As part
of the original study, the Diagnostic Interview Schedule
(DIS) behavioral checklist was administered (See Appendix
A). This survey incorporates questions which
operationalize many of the DSM symtomological criteria
for ASP and its precedent Conduct Disorder (CD).
Measures
This study incorporates two types of questions, as used

within the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS). The first
type of questions asks subjects about behaviors during the
child/teen years. These questions may use various
euphemisms, i.e. “when you were a kid” or “when you
were a child or teenager,” but the intent is to capture
behavior occurring before age fifteen, in accordance with
the guidelines of the DSM-IV (1994), which categorizes
“Conduct Disorder” as symptoms present before age
fifteen. The second type of question asks about behaviors

occurring since the age of 15. It is probable, of course, that
some subjects included behavior occurring during the later
teen years (15-19) as well when answering the questions
about behavior occurring “prior to age 15.” It is impossible
to assume that someone answering a question like this as an
adult would be able to specifically recall whether
remembered events occurred at age 14, 15, or 16, for
instance. For the purposes of this study, however, it is not
so significant if “childhood” behaviors include acts done at
age 14 or 17. Mainly, my interest is in examining acts
occurring during the childhood and teen years, termed here
as in terms of how the pattern of those involvements might
predict adult anti-social behavior.
For the purposes of psychological inventories, the
convention for identifying anti-social behavioral patterns is
to examine whether there exists an enduring trajectory, i.e.,
did the person’s behavior begin in childhood/adolescence
and continue into adulthood. The use of the age of 15 as a
cut-off for the corpus of “childhood/teenage behavior”
allows, ideally, for any anti-social tendencies appearing in
the late teenage years to carry less weight in the overall
picture of formative behavioral patterns. Many young
people will engage in some anti-social behavior during the
teenage years and then quickly outgrow these tendencies as
they reach young adulthood. Examining patterns split
across the childhood/adolescence and adult periods thus
allows one better to identify cases where there is a lifetime
of anti-social behavior.
Animal Cruelty
Operationalizing the definition of animal cruelty presents a

number of challenges:
• The type of animal could matter.
• The type of cruelty employed also seems an
important consideration: teasing, inducing
physical suffering, sexual touching, and killing
have all been indexed as abusive (Flynn 1999;
Felthous and Kellert 1987; Kellert and Felthous
1985).
• The setting matters: wanting to see the insides
of an animal is considered culturally appropriate
in biology class but rather sadistic if enacted
upon a pet dog.
Flynn (1999) discerned among (a) subjects who had killed
a stray or wild animal, usually with firearms, (b) those who
had hurt or tortured an animal (shooting, stabbing, burning,
blowing up, or poisoning the animal), and (c) those who
had killed a pet. Notably, and this will become more
relevant in later sections of this thesis, those respondents
who had killed an animal were least likely to repeat such an
act of cruelty. Contrarily, were the animal simply hurt,
recidivism rates were quite high (45%). If one reported
killing one’s own pet, one seemed also quite likely to
repeat such behaviors.
Ascione (1993), in his review article, offered a
definition behavior that aimed itself toward the
“intentional” causing of unnecessary pain, suffering,
distress, or death, or behavior that was deemed
“unacceptable.” Kellert and Felthous (1985; also see
Felthous and Kellert 1987) and Flynn (1999) incorporate

intentionality, or “knowingly” or “deliberately” inflicting
pain or torture upon an animal, into their definitions. A
failure to intervene or a delight in watching peers engage in
cruelty may also be deemed troubling, or cruel in itself.
These behaviors arguably fall within the definition of
socially unacceptable behavior, but it is difficult to specify
what defines such behavior within this context (or in most
other settings). A rural family would not likely regard
pulling the wings off fireflies in the summertime or
shooting stray cats in the head as especially cruel, whereas
an urban, upper-middle class individual quite likely would.
I operationalize animal cruelty using Question #9 of the
Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS; see Appendix B):
“When you were a child or a teenager, were you ever mean
or cruel to animals or did you intentionally hurt animals
(mammals, not insects, etc.)?” The responses are: “No”,
“Occasionally”, and “Frequently.” However, I convert this
into a dichotomous “yes” or “no” variable by collapsing the
“occasionally” and “frequently” response options into one
category. Note that six measures #7, #8, #9 , #10, #11, and
#19, were originally coded according to response options
“0,” “1,” and “2,” with 0 denoting that the respondent had
never engaged in the specified act, “1” indicating that the
respondent had occasionally engaged in the behavior, and
“2” marking that the study participant had often
participated in the specified behavior. Extremely few
respondents—typically only 3-5 individuals most any
particular DIS variable—chose “2” in response to any of
the DIS questions, and so the response option categories
were collapsed into a “0-1,” or “no-yes” format.
The following table illustrates the gender breakdown
for the animal cruelty measure.
Table 3.1. Distribution of Study Participants by Gender

and Admitted Abuse of Animals.
Occasionally/
No Frequently N
Men 220 63 283
Women 278 14 292
Since individuals in this study who self-identify as abusers

are responding to a broad, general prompt that measures an
array of cognitive interpretations (i.e. some would deem
pulling the wings off a fly to be abusive, while others could
rationalize drowning a kitten), the reliability of responses to
this question may be somewhat questionable. Some people
may answer negatively to this prompt when it is asked
within a battery of questions but then “remember” incidents
if they are specifically questioned about their involvement
with and possible mistreatment of animals. Also, as there
is no choice to indicate that one had engaged in a particular
category only once, there is no way by which to adequately
gauge the importance of frequency in these measures, and
this could well be a significant dimension to consider by
way of explaining violent adult behavioral outcomes.
Other Measures of Childhood/Teenage Anti-Social

Behavior
Table 3.2 summarizes the descriptive statistics for the

measures used in this study. Please see Appendix A for the
exact wording of each measure used. Most of the DIS
items were used to inventory childhood/adolescent
behavior. Only DIS items #38 and #39 measure adult
behavior; those items are used as outcome variables in the

logistic regressions, as proxies for adult violence (see
below). Several demographic measures are also included
in Table 3.2.
Logistic Regression: Dependent Variables
There were three possible measures I could have used to

operationalize adult violence. These included a measure of
domestic violence and two measures of adult fighting
behavior. The question about domestic violence is worded
as “hitting or slapping” one’s spouse or long-term partner,
and the response rate to this question seemed somewhat
misleading. More women than men answered in the
affirmative, but this could have been an artifact of the
wording, in particular “slapping,” a behavior many men
may not identify as doing. Lottes and Weinberg (1997),
however, in their study comparing rates of reported sexual
coercion among university students in the United States and
Sweden, found that U.S. men reported higher rates of non-
physical sexual coercion than did Swedish men. They
posited that this was perhaps due to (a) higher general rates
of violence in the U.S. or (b) an effort by American women
to enact aggressive roles in sexual interactions that were
traditionally occupied by men. Finally, because the
average age of the respondents in this study was quite
young, there is less chance that the study participants may
have had occasion to marry or live with a romantic partner.
There were a few other measures available on the DIS
that measured adult violence, such as robbery or rape, but
the response rate to these questions was extremely small.
The two most usable measures of adult violence, then, were
fighting and fighting with weapons, which are the measures
I used here. These were operationalized as yes-no

variables, and, for the logistic regressions, these variables
were pooled so as to create a larger group of study
participants who admitted some kind of violence.
Table 3.2. Descriptive Statistics for the Measures Used in

this Study (N = 570)
Standard
Measure Mean5 Deviation Range
DIS 2: In Trouble at School .29 .45 0-1
DIS 4: Suspended .26 .44 0-1
DIS 5: Expelled .13 .38 0-1
DIS 7: Fighting .19 .39 0-1
DIS 8: Fighting w/Weapons .08 .27 0-1
DIS 9: Animal Cruelty .14 .34 0-1
DIS 10: Bullying .13 .34 0-1
DIS 11: Hurting Siblings .20 .40 0-1
DIS 13: Lying .38 .47 0-1
DIS 15: Stealing .52 .50 0-1
DIS 17: Vandalism .35 .48 0-1
DIS 18: Firesetting .27 .45 0-1
DIS 19: Juvenile Arrest .13 .38 0-1
DIS 38: Fighting as an Adult .18 .38 0-1
DIS 39: Fighting w/Weapons
as an Adult .07 .25 0-1
Sex
0 = Female; 1 = Male .49 .50 0-1
Age 20.95 1.99 18-26
Education 14.24 1.62 8-20
Ethnicity
0 = White; 1 = Non-White .84 .37 0-1
5
Because the DIS measures were coded on a 0-1 scale, the mean
indicates the percentage of study participants who report that they have
engaged in the specified behavior.
Demographic Variables
I incorporate three standard demographic variables into the

logistic regressions: age, level of education, ethnicity, and
sex. I modified the measure of ethnicity, which initially
included eight options, to create a bimodal variable. Since
this data was collected in Bloomington, Indiana, the ethnic
variation of the recruited pool of study participants is fairly
limited. I thus code ethnicity as 0 (white) or 1 (non-white).
Sex is coded as 0 (female) and 1 (male). Education and age
were left as continuous variables.
Labeling
The DIS includes several questions that incorporate some

measure of labeling theory. Labeling theory suggests that
the more one is remarked upon by others as someone who
does particular things or possesses certain characteristics,
the more likely one is to incorporate and reify those
characteristics within one’s self. It seems plausible, then,
that extensive application of negative labels upon an
individual, i.e., delinquent or malcontent or troublemaker,
might correlate with this person embracing and further
enacting those behaviors (Lemert 1951).
Several of the items included in the DIS capture
varying dimensions of labeling. In total, there are five
items from the DIS that can be considered potential
measures of the labeling process, as occurring during the
childhood and teenage years. One in particular, DIS #19,
seemed an appropriate measure for use in this study:
“Were you ever arrested as a juvenile or sent to juvenile
court?” Response options included “No,” “Occasionally,”
and “Frequently.” As with the other questions that listed
“No,” “Occasionally,” and “Frequently” response options,

these response options were collapsed into a 0-1
construction for the purpose of analysis. This question
seems to most overt and significant measure of labeling
during the childhood/teen years (age 18 and younger) since
it discriminates between those who have experienced
official labeling and those who have not.
The Model
The basic form of the model used in the logistic regressions

is as follows:
⎡ πi ⎤
log ⎢ ⎥ = β xi
⎣1 − π i ⎦
where Bi is the probability of adult fighting behavior for

person i. The model is used to estimate the odds of adult
fighting behavior for all study participants combined. $j is
the vector of regression parameters associated with the
explanatory variables. The vector of explanatory variables
(Xi) includes demographic variables such as age, education,
and sex as well as the childhood/adolescent anti-social
behavioral measures described above.
Supplemental Interview Data
I aspire to provide depth and texture to the broader

quantitative findings with the interview data. In this
portion of the study, I explore respondents’ narrative
accounts for explaining their relations with animals, both
positive and negative. Some subjects may begin by
identifying themselves as non-abusers but then, in the

course of the interview, reassess this assertion. Others,
even when confronted with the social demands of the
interview environment, wherein the respondent is engaged
in an explicit discussion of a past behavior and thereby
forced to reconsider an act that might be deemed cruel, will
resist such a designation.
As Weinberg et al.’s (1994) and others’ (for example,
Doug Pryor’s [1996] study of men who sexually abuse
children) work has suggested, sometimes the very
engagement of such questions of identification during the
interviewing process marks the first occasion at which a
subject has overtly attempted to articulate their impressions
of past events. For many subjects, this interview will mark
the first time that they have carefully considered their
Table 3.3. Interview Question Guide
Interview Questions:
Did your family have any pets as you were growing up?
• How would you describe some of the relationships you’ve
had with animals over the years?
What kinds of cruel things have you seen done to animals?
Who have you witnessed doing these sorts of things?
• If parents, probe as to the discipline employed within the
household.
Please describe the most memorable incident of such cruelty that you
have witnessed.
• How old were you then?
• What happened?
Please tell me about the kinds of cruel things you’ve done to
animals?
(Table 3.3, cont.)
Did you do these things alone or in a group?

• ALONE: How did you tend to view the animal? What do
you think caused you to do these things?
• IN A GROUP: What was the gender composition of the
group? How did the typical incident start out?
Tell me about the most memorable incident you’ve participated in.
Take me back to this event. . .
• How old were you?
• How many people participated?
• How many Men/Women?
• Had you/anyone else been drinking?
• Please tell me how the event unfolded?
• How did you feel before/during/after the incident?
• Did you feel any kind of thrill due to your participation?
• Why do you think you did what you did?
Tell me what you consider to have been the worst thing you have
done to an animal. Take me back to this event. . .
• How old were you?
• How many people participated?
• How many Men/Women?
• Had you/anyone else been drinking?
• Please tell me how the event unfolded?
• How did you feel before/during/after the incident?
• Did you feel any kind of thrill due to your participation?
• Why do you think you did what you did?
What kinds of violent acts have you imagined doing to an animal?
What acts of violence have you imagined doing to another person?
• Have you ever acted on such inclinations/been in a physical
altercation with another person?
• What, would you say, is the worst thing you have ever done
to another person?
behavior toward animals with another person. The

interview is designed to clarify (a) how the subject views
him- or herself in relation to animals, (b) what patterns of
human-animal interaction he or she may have learned in his

or her family of origin, (c) the degree to which the subject
feels alienated from other humans and/or compelled to act
out in deviant ways, and (d) the meaning the subject infers
upon any reported acts of cruelty.
The interview questions are open-ended and designed
to clarify and augment the survey data. Because of the
nature of my topic and the subjects recruited for the study,
all of the questions or core concepts are asked at some
point during the interview, though the ordering of questions
may differ from interview to interview. Additionally, of
course, probing may vary among interviews.
Interview data was examined using a grounded theory
approach, succinctly summarized in Becker’s (1990) article
regarding generalizing from case studies and conceptual
matrixes (Miles and Huberman 1994) to identify common
themes given by interviewees by way of explaining why
they had been cruel to animals. Additionally, efforts by
interviewees to define or conceptualize cruelty were also
examined for themes. Once themes were identified, code
words were created to systematically search the transcribed
text of the interviews using Nud*st qualitative data analysis
software. This software was especially useful for search
text based upon the logic of the matrixes, i.e., for searching
for theoretically related key words and concepts occurring
in close proximity to one another.
The next chapters (Chapter 4 and 5) reports upon my
quantitative analyses, divided into two sets of hypotheses.
The first set of hypotheses, reported in Chapter 4, discusses
the basic question of whether or not there was any
indication in these data that animal cruelty during
childhood correlates with later adult violence. The second
set of hypotheses, reported in Chapter 5, examine how
reported rates of animal cruelty differ by sex and whether

or not animal cruelty is more likely to lead to adult violence
among men, in particular. The results of the qualitative
interviews are indexed for themes, using the grounded
theory approach, in Chapter 6.
CHAPTER IV
Does animal cruelty during

childhood correlate with being
violent toward humans later in life?
Here, I present the results of the analyses of my central

hypotheses, that animal cruelty is (a) not a rare behavior,
and (b) less associated with a violent or sociopathic
trajectory than with a wide range of relatively minor anti-
social infractions during adolescence. I begin by
examining whether animal cruelty during childhood
correlates with human-directed violence later in the life
course, organizing my presentation by four hypotheses:
• Ho1: Reports of animal abuse during the
childhood or teenage years are not an especially
unusual event—- for instance, at least 1 in 10
individuals will report this behavior.
• Ho2: Animal cruelty enacted during
childhood/adolescence is more strongly
correlated with other non-violent, anti-social
behaviors rather than with violent anti-social
behavior.
59
• Ho3: Animal cruelty is not a strong predictor of

future human-directed violence.
• Ho4: Labeling theory more reliably predicts
which individuals will carry anti-social
behavioral tendencies into adulthood.
Individuals who displayed anti-social, and
especially violent, tendencies as children and
were then labeled as deviant or delinquent
during their formative years are especially likely
to continue violent behavior into adulthood.
I examine each of these hypotheses, below. I first identify
relevant patterns of anti-social behavior for my entire study
group (N = 570) to address hypotheses 1-4.
Reported Involvement in Anti-Social Behavior
Descriptive data for the childhood and adolescent

behavioral measures used to test these hypotheses explored
in this study are reported in Table 4.1, below. There were
570 participants in this study group, and this first table
presents the percentage of these 570 individuals who report
having engaged in any of the identified anti-social
behaviors.
Evident in Table 4.1 is that 14% of the sample reports
having engaged in acts of animal cruelty as a child. Also
interesting is that 25-35% or more of the study group report
involvement as children in a range of other deviant acts—
some as minimal as lying (38%) and some more serious,
eg. fire-setting (27%), stealing (52%), vandalism (35%),
and school suspension (26%). Of course, some individuals
may very well have reported multiple acts, but, for this
study, my focus is on the reported incidence of the acts
Childhood Cruelty and Later Adult Violence 61
Table 4.1. Percentage of Study Participants Reporting the

Anti-Social Childhood/Adolescent Behavioral Measures
Examined in this Study (N = 570)
Percent Reporting
Behavior during
Measure Childhood/Adolescence
DIS 2. IN TROUBLE AT SCHOOL
When you were a child or teenager, did you frequently get into
trouble with the teacher or principal for misbehaving in school? 29%
DIS 4. SUSPENDED
Were you ever suspended from school? 26%
DIS 5. EXPELLED
Were you ever expelled from school? 13%
DIS 7. FIGHTING
Did you ever get in trouble with the police, your parents, or neighbors
because of fighting (other than with siblings) outside of school? 19%
DIS 8. FIGHTING w/WEAPONS

Did you ever use a weapon (like a stick, gun, or knife) in a fight? 8%
DIS 9. ANIMAL CRUELTY

When you were a child or a teenager, were you ever mean or cruel
to animals or did you intentionally hurt animals (mammals, not
insects, etc.)? 14%
DIS 10. BULLYING

When you were young, did people ever complain that you bullied or
were mean to other children? 13%
DIS 11. HURTING SIBLINGS

When you were a child or a teenager, did you ever intentionally hurt
your siblings or other children seriously enough to cause notice by
parents/surrogate? 20%
DIS 13. LYING

Of course, no one tells the truth all of the time, but did you tell a lot
of lies when you were a child or a teenager? 38%
DIS 15. STEALING

When you were a child, did you more than once swipe things from stores
or from other children, or steal from your parents or from anyone else? 52%
Table 4.1, cont.
DIS 17. VANDALISM

When you were a kid, did you ever intentionally (on purpose) damage
someone’s car or house or do anything else to destroy someone else’s
property? 35%
DIS 18. FIRESETTING

When you were a child or a teenager, did you ever set any fires you
were not supposed to? 27%
DIS 19. JUVENILE ARREST

Were you ever arrested as a juvenile or sent to juvenile court? 13%
themselves, not upon the characteristic types of individuals

who might be performing these acts.
Thus, while not as common as behaviors such as lying,
stealing, or fire-setting, animal cruelty is on a par with
bullying and expulsion from school but more likely to be
reported than fighting with weapons. Arguably, then, this
confirms my first hypothesis, that animal cruelty is not an
especially rare behavior.
The next question becomes one of examining the
correlation between animal cruelty and these other anti-
social behaviors.
Childhood/Adolescent Anti-Social Behaviors Associated

with Animal Cruelty
In total, of the 570 subjects who participated in this study,

77 report having engaged in animal cruelty as children. All
but five subjects also report engagement in other delinquent
acts. My second hypothesis addresses an important
question: does animal cruelty, perpetuated during the
childhood or teenage years, associate more closely with
other delinquent acts that are violent or with other
delinquent acts that are non-violent? The role of animal

cruelty in delinquent identity formation demands not only
an examination of how animal cruelty during childhood or
adolescence relates to adult behavior but also of how it
correlates with other delinquent youth behaviors.
Table 4.2 (below) examines the extent to which animal
cruelty correlates with other anti-social acts during
childhood/adolescence. For each of the twelve reported
behaviors, two breakdowns are provided: (a) the percentage
of study participants who report engaging in the specified
behavior but do not report engaging in animal cruelty and
(b) the percentage of study participants who report
engaging in the specified behavior and also report engaging
in animal cruelty. By clarifying the overlap between study
participants who report each of the specified behaviors and
animal cruelty, these comparisons provide a clearer portrait
of how extensively reports of involvement in each of the
twelve other anti-social behaviors examined in this study
correlate with reports of involvement in animal cruelty.
Gammas and their significance levels are reported for the
purpose of assessing the validity of these correlations.
Note that the reported N varies by the measure being
examined. For instance, while 116 study participants report
hurting siblings, only 33 report being expelled from school.
From Table 4.2 it is evident that animal cruelty
correlates with trouble at school (gamma = .48), fighting
(gamma = .62), bullying (gamma = .60), hurting siblings
(gamma = .53), stealing (gamma = .45), vandalizing
(gamma = .68), fire setting (gamma = .62), and juvenile
arrest6 (gamma = .50). In fact, animal cruelty significantly
6
It should be noted that the juvenile arrest would not necessarily have
been for an act of animal cruelty (with such arrests, though often high-
profile, being rare).
Table 4.2. Percentage of Subjects Reporting Engagement

in Anti-Social Behaviors During Childhood/Adolescence,
as Correlated to Animal Cruelty, Including Gammas and
the N for Each Behavior Examined
Percent Reporting Percent Reporting
This Behavior but Both This Behavior
Measure NOT Animal Cruelty AND Animal Cruelty Gamma
In Trouble
w/Principal (N=163) 76.7% 23.3% .48***
Suspended
from School (N=146) 79.5% 20.5% .35**
Expelled
from School (N=33) 66.7% 33.3% .56*
Fighting (N=106) 68.9% 31.1% .62***
Using
Weapons (N=45) 68.9% 31.1% .54**
Bullying (N=74) 67.5% 32.4% .60***
Hurting
Siblings (N=116) 73.3% 26.7% .53***
Lying (N=216) 81.9% 18.1% .29*
Stealing (N=294) 81.3% 18.7% .45***
Vandalizing (N=200) 73.5% 26.5% .68***
Fire-setting (N=155) 72.3% 27.7% .62***
Juvenile
Arrest (N=102) 73.5% 26.5% .50***
*** p < .001 ** p < .01 * p < .05
correlates with all of these behaviors. Thus, there is little

pattern evidenced in terms of the characterization of the
clustering with regard to animal cruelty being violent or
non-violent so that my second hypothesis is not confirmed.
Although various non-violent childhood and correlation
with animal cruelty, there is a similar pattern of association
between animal cruelty and reports of such violent acts as
fighting (gamma = .62), bullying (gamma = .60), and
hurting siblings (gamma = .53). One might argue that the
non-violent behaviors such as trouble at school (gamma =
.48), stealing (gamma = .45), and vandalizing (gamma =
.68) may correlate only because they are so common, but
lying is also quite common. It is reported by 38% of study
participants (see Table 4.1), but its correlation here, though
significant, is weak (gamma = .29). Also interesting is that
fire setting, which, along with animal cruelty, is also
considered a “sign” of sociopathy per McDonald’s (1963)
“triangle,” is reported by 27% of study participants and
shows a strong correlation with animal cruelty (gamma =
.62). One would not likely count fire setting as a violent
act, unless it were done with the intention of harming
someone, but it certainly could be viewed as an aggressive
act.
This bifurcated result suggests that there may be two
broad patterns with regard to reported childhood/teenage
behaviors: one that is characterized by an inclination to
break a wide range of rules by engaging in both violent and
non-violent anti-social behavior and another that is
characterized by “thrill-seeking” behaviors but not by
violent acts. Again, these patterns refer to acts, not
individuals, since any individual study participant might
have reported any number or combination of acts.
A factor analysis of the thirteen measures of

childhood/adolescence deviance listed in Table 4.1,
following the procedures outlined by Kim and Mueller
(1979), suggests that all of these measures could be
associated as one factor. More likely, though, as suggested
by a principal components analysis, there are three
components, the first of which has an Eigenvalue of 3.74
(explaining 28.76% of variance). The Eigenvalues for the
second and third components fall precipitously: 1.15
(explaining 8.85% of variance) for component two and 1.24
(explaining 8.64% of variance) for component three.
However, based upon the Kaiser criterion, Eigenvalues of 1
or more suggest the possibility of separate, unique factors.
This suggests that the thirteen behaviors under
consideration are characterized by three factors, one of
which is very strong and two of which are weaker.
Examining the components matrices using Varimax
rotation with Kaiser Normalization (Table 4.3), three
factors are identified. The following table summarizes the
factor loading on all of the items considered for each of the
factors.
The factor loading pattern suggests that each of the
three factors is characterized by a distinct loading of
components. The first factor loads the school trouble
variables most strongly, including getting into trouble at
school, being suspended from school, and being expelled
from school. Juvenile arrest also loads into this factor. The
next factor loading is characterized by the human-directed
aggression measures (fighting, bullying, and hurting
siblings) but also includes animal cruelty. Curiously,
fighting with weapons does not load on the second factor,
nor does it load on any other factor. The final factor loads
lying, stealing, vandalism and fire setting.
The factor analysis results suggest a disconfirmation of

my second hypothesis in that animal cruelty explicitly
loads, here, with violent behavioral components. However,
Table 4.2 suggests mixed results, as it shows animal cruelty
to be correlated with both violent and non-violent
behaviors. Taken together, these two findings suggest that,
at the very least, the relationship between animal cruelty
and other childhood or teenage anti-social behaviors is
neither evident nor simplistic.
Table 4.3. Rotated Components Matrix, Based upon

Varimax Rotation with Kaiser Normalization (Rotation
Converged in 5 Iterations)
Component 1 2 3
In Trouble at
.61 .22 .32
School
Suspended .77 .04 .21
Expelled .73 .09 -.08
Fighting .32 .52 .19
Fighting
.36 .21 .14
w/Weapons
Animal Cruelty -.02 .67 .15
Bullying .31 .56 -.02
Hurting Siblings .15 .58 -.03
Lying .14 -.11 .74
Stealing .19 .10 .72
Vandalizing .15 .42 .55
Fire Setting .06 .47 .50
Juvenile Arrest .45 .23 .38
Eigenvalue
3.74 1.15 1.24
(variance
(28.76%) (8.85%) (8.64%)
explained)
The next question is whether animal cruelty, regardless

of its contemporaneous affiliations during childhood or
adolescence, predicts violent behavior during adulthood.
Is Animal Cruelty Predictive of Future Violence?
I employ two measures of adult violence: fighting and

fighting with weapons. While 100 respondents report
fighting as an adult, only 39 report using a weapon in a
fight. It is not, unfortunately, especially reliable to do a
logistic regression with such a small set of subjects (i.e., an
N of 39), but I do not want to lose the information on study
participants who report fighting with weapons as adults.
Hence, I create two dependent variables for use in these
logistic regression models: (1) simple fighting as an adult,
which 100 study participants report, and (2) a combination
of those study participants reporting fighting and those
reporting fighting with a weapon, of which there are 139
reports by a total 111 study participants (i.e., some
participants reported both fighting and fighting use of a
weapon in a fight). The logistic regression results for
models run with each of these dependent variables prove
very similar in their structural patterns, so I report herein
the models using the combined measure as the dependent
variable.
I use logistic regression to measure how well various
factors predict the dependent variable, in this case fighting
as an adult. Results are reported in Table 4.4, above. Note
that, in reporting logistic regression results, I am reporting
odds ratios, which are standardized to 1.0. That is, for
values greater than 1.0, as I report in Table 4.3, there is an
Table 4.4. Odds of Fighting or Fighting with a Weapon as

an Adult as Predicted by Childhood/Adolescent Anti-Social
Behaviors (Logistic Regression)
DV: Fighting as an Adult Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Age 1.20** 1.19** 1.06
Education .69*** .69*** .82
Gender (0 = females)
Males 3.52*** 3.18*** 2.34**
Ethnicity (0 = whites)
Non-whites .39*** .38*** .48*
Animal Cruelty 1.99* 1.11
In Trouble w/Teacher 1.05
Suspended from School 1.91*
Expelled from School 1.81
Fighting 4.22***
Using Weapons 8.72***
Bullying 1.24
Hurting Siblings/Others 1.11
Lying 2.32**
Stealing 1.50
Vandalizing 1.50
Fire-setting .47*
Log-likelihood 502.96 497.86 374.55
Degrees of freedom 4 5 16
Number of cases 570 570 570

***p<.001 **p<.01 *p<.05
increase in odds. For values less than 1.0, there is a

decrease in odds. Hence, 1.19 suggests a 19% increase in
the likelihood of the outcome of the dependent variable, in
this case fighting behavior. Alternatively, .81 would
suggest a 19% decrease in the likelihood of the outcome of
the dependent variable.
Within Model 1, each demographic variable shows a

relationship to fighting as an adult. For each additional
year of age, an individual is 20% more likely (p < .01) to
report fighting as an adult. Recall, though, that the mean
age of this sample population is quite low (20.72) so that it
is likely that the predictive trajectory of age would wane,
even reversing itself as this population ages. Several
studies, most notably Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) and
Sampson and Laub (1995), have found that the propensity
toward criminality and anti-social behavior more generally
diminishes as one progress through the life course.
For each additional year of education, one is 31% less
likely (p < .001) to report fighting as an adult. Men are
252% more likely (p < .001) to report fighting as an adult
than are women. Non-whites are 61% less likely (p < .001)
to report fighting as an adult than are whites, which is
perhaps explained by the small number of non-whites in
this sample and the likelihood that those non-whites who
did participate are more likely to be more highly educated
than their peers.
In Model 2, I add the measure of animal cruelty to the
demographic variables and find that individuals who
reported abusing animals as children or teenagers are 99%
more likely (p < .05) than those who did not report abusing
animals to report fighting as an adult. Each of the
demographic variables remains significant in this model, as
well.
In Model 3, I add the other measures of
childhood/teenage anti-social behavior and find that the
effect of animal abuse disappears. In this model, education,
gender, and ethnicity remain significant. Reporting to have
fought, used weapons, or lied as a child also evidences
highly significant explanatory power. Those who report
fighting as a child/teenager were 322% more likely (p <

.001) to have report fighting as an adult than those who did
not report fighting as a child or teenager. Those who report
using weapons in fights as a child/adolescent were 772%
more likely (p < .001) to report having gotten into fights as
an adult than are those who do not. Finally, those who
report having lied routinely as a child/teenager were 132%
more likely (p < .01) to report fighting as an adult than
those who had not reported lying regularly as a
child/teenager. Here, again, it is interesting that animal
cruelty is not associated with adult violence once we
control for other childhood/teenage behaviors. Still, violent
behaviors such as bullying are also not associated with
adult violence. It is behaviors such as lying, fire setting,
and being suspended from school that are more strongly
associated with adult violence.
These are intriguing results, which support my third
hypothesis that being cruel to animals, as a child or
teenager, does not render one more likely to engage in
violent behavior as an adult. Though animal cruelty does
show predictive power in Model 2, it does not show
predictive power net of other childhood/teenage anti-social
behaviors. When we combine the full range of deviant
childhood or adolescent behaviors, we find that there are a
few key behaviors associated with fighting as an adult and
that animal cruelty is not one of them. Interestingly,
neither are some violent behaviors such as bullying.
The next table, Table 4.5, examines the possibility that
animal cruelty may drop out of significance because so
many other terms are included in Model 3. I test this
possibility, below, by running logistic regression models
based upon the factor analysis presented earlier, in which
three distinct factors were evidenced. The components of
the first factor included trouble at school, suspension from

school, expulsion from school, and juvenile arrest. The
second factor loaded fighting, bullying, and hurting
siblings. The third incorporated lying, stealing, vandalism,
and fire setting. These models permit the ability to test the
relationship of these different sets of variables against
animal cruelty.
Table 4.5 reports three models, the first of which uses
the first factor’s components plus the measure of animal
cruelty. The second and third models follow a similar
pattern, using the components from factors two and three as
independent variables for models two and three,
respectively. As in Model 1, the second and third models
also include the measure of animal cruelty.
The results of the assessment presented in Table 4.5
suggest that there are some interesting complexities within
this data. Though animal cruelty loads as a significant
component upon the second factor proposed by the factor
analysis, it is not significant at all in any of the models
shown in Table 4.5. In the first model, outside of the
demographic variables, suspension and expulsion are
significant predictors of adult anti-social behavior. In the
second model, only fighting is significant, beyond the
demographic variables. Finally, in the third model, lying,
stealing, and vandalism are significant. All of the
demographic variables except age7 are significant across
the models, with gender having the most consistent and
sizable impact upon adult violence. Animal cruelty
consistently drops out of significance even when
considered against relatively minor, non-aggressive items
7
Education is actually not significant in the first model, but this is
likely only because the model incorporates several specific measures of
school behavior.

an Adult as Predicted by Youth Anti-Social Behaviors,
Models Derived from Factor Analysis Results (Logistic
Regression)
DV: Fighting as an Adult Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Age 1.06 1.13 1.17
Education .87 .74*** .74***
Gender (0 = females)
Males 2.70*** 2.56*** 2.66**
Non-whites .38*** .35*** .39*
Animal Cruelty 1.79 1.42 1.68
In Trouble w/Teacher 1.55
Suspended from School 2.83***
Expelled from School 2.41*
Fighting 5.07***
Using Weapons
Bullying 1.64
Hurting Siblings/Others 1.37
Lying 2.38***
Stealing 1.83*
Vandalizing 2.19**
Fire-setting .80
Juvenile Arrest 1.34
Log-likelihood 452.19 444.87 453.15
Degrees of freedom 9 8 9
Number of cases 570 570 570

***p<.001 **p<.01 *p<.05
like the educational measures of “trouble at school” or

“suspension from school.” One might expect animal
cruelty to drop out of significance when considered against
fighting as a child/teenager, but it falls out of significance

in all combinations of variables.
The question now becomes: what factors, if any, might
do better than animal cruelty in predicting violent
tendencies in adulthood? One guess might be that being
labeled violent or anti-social during childhood might be a
good predictor of violence later in life.
Labeling Theory and Animal Cruelty
The next step is to assess the impact that labeling processes

might have upon adult anti-social behavioral outcomes. I
demonstrated earlier that study participants reporting
animal cruelty are also likely to report a range of other anti-
social behaviors. According to labeling theory, if someone
is inclined to break the rules, it is likely that he or she will
be much more likely to break the rules once he or she is
officially labeled a “troublemaker” or “deviant.”
This idea is consonant with the pattern of correlation
between study participants who report both being arrested
or having had to go to court as a juvenile and the other
reported anti-social behaviors. Table 4.6 illustrates these
correlation patterns.
Here we see that study participants who report having
been arrested or forced to appear in court as children were
much more likely to have been engaged in a range of anti-
social enterprises. They are especially more likely to report
having had encounters with authority figures at school, i.e.,
to have gotten in trouble with teachers and principals
(gamma = .71) or to have been suspended (gamma = .67) or
expelled (gamma = .73) from school. These individuals are
Table 4.6. Percentage of Subjects Reporting Engagement

in Anti-Social Behaviors During Childhood/Adolescence,
as Correlated to Juvenile Arrest or Court Appearance (N
for Each Behavior Reported in Parentheses), Gammas
Reported
Percent Reporting
Percent Reporting BOTH this Behavior
ONLY the Behavior AND Juvenile Arrest
Measure Listed at Left or Court Appearance Gamma
In Trouble
w/Principal (N=163) 61.3% 38.7% .71***
Suspended
from School (N=146) 61.6% 38.4% .67***
Expelled
from School (N=33) 45.5% 54.5% .73***
Fighting (N=106) 59.4% 40.6% .65***
Using
Weapons (N=45) 66.7% 33.3% .43*
Animal
Cruelty (N = 77) 64.9% 35.1% .50***
Bullying (N=74) 62.2% 37.8% .55***
Hurting
Siblings (N=116) 70.7% 29.3% .40**
Lying (N=216) 73.6% 26.4% .42***
Stealing (N=294) 73.5% 26.5% .53***
Vandalizing (N = 200) 66.5% 33.5% .66***
Fire-setting (N=155) 66.5% 33.5% .57***

also particularly more likely to report fighting (gamma =

.65) or vandalism (gamma = .66). Also, because there is no
longitudinal dimension to this data during the
childhood/teenage years, i.e., given that all the data is based
upon retrospective reporting by adults, it is impossible to
know whether the official labeling was a causative factor in
the behavior or solely a consequence. All that can be said
for certain is that there is correlation between this measure
of labeling and several of the other childhood/adolescent
behaviors.
The next step, then, is to assess the impact that labeling
processes might have upon adult anti-social behavioral
outcomes. The following table (Table 4.7) adds a fourth
and fifth model to Table 4.4, so as to incorporate the
dimension of labeling, as measured by arrest or court
appearance as a juvenile, into the logistic regression model.
Model 4 considers the measure of labeling on its own.
Model 5 includes an interaction term for labeling and
animal cruelty, to gauge the impact of the interaction of
labeling and animal cruelty upon future adult fighting
behavior.
Here we see that, in Model 4, the explanatory power of
several variables that were significant in Model 3 remains
rather stable. In fact, there seems little evidence here that
labeling processes, as measured here, have any significant
effect on adult fighting outcomes. The most significant
childhood/adolescent behaviors remain fighting, which
increases the odds that one will fight as an adult by more
than 300% in both Model 4 and 5 (p < .001), and fighting
with weapons, which increases the odds of one reporting
fighting as an adult by nearly 800% (p < .001).

an Adult as Predicted by Youth Anti-Social Behaviors,
Including Labeling Measures (Logistic Regression)
DV: Fighting
as Adult Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5
Age 1.20** 1.19** 1.06 1.06 1.06

Education .69*** .69*** .82 .82 .82
Gender 3.52*** 3.18*** 2.34** 2.34** 2.31**
Ethnicity .39*** .38*** .48** .48* .47*
Animal Cruelty 1.99* 1.11 1.11 1.44
Fighting 4.22*** 4.23*** 4.24***
Using Weapons 8.72*** 8.70*** 8.47***
Bullying 1.24 1.24 1.26
Hurting Siblings/Others 1.11 1.11 1.09
Lying 2.32** 2.31** 2.35**
Stealing 1.50 1.50 1.50
Vandalizing 1.50 1.50 1.49
Fire-setting .47* .47* .46*
In Trouble at School 1.05 1.05 1.05
Suspended from School 1.91* 1.92* 1.89*
Expelled from School 1.81 1.82 1.81
Labeling .98 1.12
Interaction of Labeling & Animal Cruelty .54
Log likelihood 502.96 497.86 374.55 374.55 373.66
Degrees
of freedom 4 5 16 17 18
# of cases 570 570 570 570 570

***p<.001 **p<.01 *p<.05
In Model 5, I add the labeling interaction term to the

model, and this also produces no significant results. The
measure of labeling shows no significance, nor does the
interaction term. Again, the structure evidenced in Models
3 and 4 is retained in Model 5, with fighting during
childhood/adolescence and using weapons during
childhood/adolescence being the best predictors of adult
fighting. These results suggest that I must reject my eigth
hypothesis. I had hypothesized with my fourth hypothesis,

that labeling forces might affect the probability that one
might engage in fighting behavior as an adult, but this did
not prove to be the case. Fighting and fighting with
weapons remain the only variables that show strong
predictive power.
Conclusions
At the very least, my results suggest that the conventional

wisdom arguing that animal cruelty enacted during
childhood or adolescence leads to human-directed violence
later in life is not well-supported by these data. These
quantitative data confirm some of my hypotheses but
disconfirm others. With regard to the first hypothesis, that
animal cruelty is not a particularly unusual event, there is
evident confirmation for this hypothesis, particularly when
considering men. About 14% of the total study population
reports animal abuse, but a full 22% of the men report
animal cruelty.
The second hypothesis, that animal cruelty is more
correlated during the childhood/teenage years with non-
violent anti-social behaviors, is not clearly confirmed.
Examining the correlation matrix for animal cruelty and
each of the other childhood/teenage behaviors (Table 4.2),
one notes that animal cruelty correlates with all of the other
behaviors. Examining the factor analysis results, however,
it is evident that animal cruelty factors with the violent anti-
social childhood/teenage behaviors.
The third hypothesis is confirmed. Animal abuse very
consistently shows no correlation with adult human-
directed violence once other measures of
childhood/adolescent anti-social behavior are incorporated
into the model. Though animal cruelty may, in some ways,

be associated with violent behaviors, this correlation is
quite complicated.
Finally, the fourth hypothesis must be rejected.
Labeling theory provides no better explanation of
tendencies toward violence as an adult than does animal
cruelty enacted during childhood.
CHAPTER V
How do women’s and men’s

reported rates of animal cruelty
differ?
One level of inquiry that seems worth pursuing is that of

gender. The roles and labels that we internalize are
strongly driven by gender. Thus, I explore here the
interplay of gender and anti-social behavior in these data.
It seems plausible that there are distinct differences
between men and women in the prevalence, meaning, and
enactment of animal cruelty and other forms of anti-social
behavior. I consider three hypotheses, which incorporate
ideas extending from theories exploring the intersections of
gender and deviance:
• Ho5: Men are more likely than women to report
having engaged in an act of animal cruelty
during their formative years, i.e., when they
were a child or teenager.
• Ho6: Overall, men are more likely to be
officially labeled as deviant than are women.
81
• Ho7: Animal cruelty, though more commonly

reported among men, nonetheless shows no
correlation with reports of adult violence among
men.
An examination of the logistic regression models explored
in the previous sections will likely evidence stronger,
clearer patterns once the dimension of gender is considered.
In terms of being able to calculate odds ratios for the adult
outcome of fighting behavior, however, I am relegated to
running a men-only model because there are so few women
who report fighting as an adult (i.e., there are insufficient
numbers to run a stable logistic regression model).
Many More Men than Women Report Having Engaged

in Animal Cruelty
The study participant population includes 282 men and 288

women. Responding to the query, “When you were a child
or a teenager, were you ever mean or cruel to animals or
did you intentionally hurt animals (mammals, not insects,
etc.)?” just 5% of women answered yes (with a standard
deviation of .215), while 22% of men answered that they
had (S.D. = .417).
Table 5.1 presents the incidence of various forms of
deviance by gender and presents chi-square data, which
indicates whether there is a significant difference between
the sexes in terms of the listed behavior.
The difference between men and women with regard to
their involvement in animal cruelty was highly significant
(chi-square = 30.79 with 1 degree of freedom; p < .001).
Therefore in terms of Ho5, I can reasonably conclude that,
not only do a sizeable number of men report engaging in
animal cruelty, but men’s reported involvement in this
Contrasting Women’s and Men’s Rates of Cruelty 83
Table 5.1. Descriptive Statistics for the Anti-Social

Behavioral Measures Used in this Study, by Gender (N =
570) with Chi-squares Reported (Degrees of freedom in
Parentheses)
Pctg. of Men Pctg. of Women
Reporting Reporting
Behavior Behavior
During During
Childhood/ Childhood/
Adolescence Adolescence Chi-square
Measure (N = 282) (N = 288) (df = 1)
DIS 2. In Trouble
at School 36.9% 20.5% 18.75***
DIS 4. Suspended 30.9% 20.5% 8.03**
DIS 5. Expelled 8.5% 3.1% 7.58**
DIS 7. Fighting 27.3% 10.1% 27.96***
DIS 8. Fighting
w/Weapons 13.1% 2.8% 20.96***
DIS 9. Animal Cruelty 22.3% 4.9% 30.79***
DIS 10. Bullying 14.9% 11.1% 1.81
DIS 11. Hurting Siblings 25.2% 15.6% 8.02**
DIS 13. Lying 40.4% 35.4% 1.52
DIS 15. Stealing 58.5% 44.8% 10.74***
DIS 17. Vandalism 51.8% 18.8% 68.22***
DIS 18. Firesetting 46.1% 8.7% 100.76**
DIS 19. Juvenile Arrest 23.4% 12.5% 11.53**

***p<.001 **p<.01 *p<.05
behavior is significantly more common than is that of

women’s reported involvement. It also becomes evident,
looking at Table 5.1, that several other childhood/teenage
anti-social behaviors can also be distinguished in terms of
gender. In fact, only bullying and lying do not demonstrate
a significant difference in terms of the reported
involvement by men and women. Finally, per Ho6, men are
twice as likely as women to be officially labeled a deviant,
with 23.4% of men reporting juvenile arrest and only 12%
of women reporting the same (chi-square = 11.53 with 1
degree of freedom; p < .01).8
Logistic Analysis of How Animal Cruelty Affects Adult

Fighting Behavior, Considered for Men
The logistic regression analysis is again limited by the

number of cases available where study participants report
adult fighting behavior (“fighting as an adult” and “using
weapons as an adult” are again considered as a combined
category). With only 30 women in the study reporting
fighting as an adult and only 8 reporting use of weapons,
there are insufficient numbers of women to perform a
reliable logistic regression to examine adult outcomes of
women’s behaviors in terms of childhood/adolescent
involvement in animal cruelty.
However, with regard to men, there are a total of 80
men who report fighting and/or using weapons in a fight as
an adult. Thus, this section examines logistic models for
8
Note: an analysis such as that reported in Table 4.2 (above), in which
I examined the extent to which reported animal cruelty correlated with
other anti-social behaviors, is not advisable with regard to comparing
men with women because women comprise only 14 of the 77 study
participants who report engaging in animal cruelty.
men only so as to address the ninth and tenth hypotheses.

The following model replicates Tables 4.4 and 4.5 into a
combined table reporting for men only.
Table 5.2, below, demonstrates very similar patterns to
those found in Tables 4.4 and 4.5, which is not particularly
surprising given that most of the study participants who
report engaging in fighting as an adult are men.
What is evident in Models 1 and 2 is that education is
the only demographic variable that is significant. For every
year of education, one has a 23-24% less chance of
engaging in fighting behavior as an adult. In Model 2,
animal cruelty is significant, suggesting that having abused
animals renders one 100% more likely to engage in fighting
behavior as an adult. As in the earlier models (4.4 and 4.5),
however, this correlation subsides as other measures of
childhood/teenage anti-social behavior are added to Model
3. Consistent across Models 3, 4, and 5, engaging in
fighting behavior or using weapons in a fight as a child
most dramatically increases one’s odds of fighting as an
adult.
The labeling measure again proves inconsequential
when introduced in Model 4. Even after the interaction
term for animal abuse crossed with labeling is introduced,
the basic structure of the model remains unfettered.
Fighting as a child, and especially fighting with weapons as
a child remains the strongest predictor of fighting as an
adult.
These results confirms my seventh hypothesis,
suggesting that animal cruelty indeed offers no reliable
prediction of adult violent behavior in men.
Table 5.2 Men’s Odds of Fighting or Fighting with a

Weapon as an Adult as Predicted by Youth Anti-Social
Behaviors (Logistic Regression)
DV: Fighting
as an Adult Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5
Age 1.13 1.13 1.07 1.07 1.08

Education .76** 77** .85 .85 .83
Non-whites .57 .53 .52 .54 .53
Animal Cruelty 2.00* 1.09 1.09 1.52
Fighting 3.99*** 4.05*** 4.15***
Using Weapons 7.79*** 7.78*** 7.39***
Bullying 1.55 1.58 1.65
Hurting Siblings/Others 1.07 1.06 1.04
Lying 1.53 1.54 1.57
Stealing 1.24 1.25 1.29
Vandalizing 1.40 1.41 1.39
Fire-setting .51 .52 .52
In Trouble w/Teacher 1.07 1.10 1.11
Suspended from School 1.58 1.60 1.51
Expelled from School 1.29 1.33 1.31
Labeling .81 1.17
Interaction of Labeling & Animal Cruelty .29
Log-likelihood 326.69 321.80 250.88 250.76 248.37
Degrees of freedom 1 4 15 16 17
Number of cases 282 282 282 282 282
***p<.001 **p<.01 *p<.05
The following table, Table 5.3, examines the dimension

of labeling not as a predictive factor but as a variable that
might be correlated with other anti-social behaviors. This
replicates Table 4.7, above, but considers these correlations
for men and then women.
Table 5.3 illustrates that, among men, many of the
childhood/teenage anti-social behaviors correlate with
labeling, as measured by juvenile arrest. In particular,
getting into trouble at school (gamma = .77), suspension
from school (gamma = .72), expulsion from school (gamma

= .74), fighting (gamma = .65), bullying (gamma = .66),
and vandalism (gamma = .66) show an especially strong
correlation with juvenile arrest or court appearance.
Table 5.3. Percentage of Study Participants Reporting

Both the Listed Childhood/Adolescent Behavior (X) and
Juvenile Arrest (JA), by Sex (gammas reported in
parentheses)
MEN WOMEN
MEASURE N Only X JA+X Gamma N Only X JA+X Gamma
In Trouble
w/Teacher
or Principal 104 53.8% 46.2% .77*** 59 74.6% 25.4% .54**
Suspended
from School 87 52.9% 47.1% .72*** 59 74.6% 25.4% .54**
Expelled
from School 24 37.5% 62.5% .74*** 9 66.7% 33.3% .58
Fighting 77 54.5% 45.5% .65** 29 72.4% 27.6% .52*
Using Weapons
in Fights 37 59.5% 40.5% .44* 8 100% 0% -1.00**
Animal Cruelty 63 76.6% 23.4% .36* 14 87.5% 12.5% .63
Bullying 42 47.6% 52.4% .66*** 32 81.3% 18.7% .27
Hurting
Siblings 71 62.0% 38.0% .46** 45 84.4% 15.6% .15
Lying 114 66.7% 33.3% .43** 102 81.4% 18.6% .39*
Stealing 165 68.5% 31.5% .54*** 129 79.8% 20.2% .57***
Vandalizing 146 64.4% 35.6% .66*** 54 72.2% 28.8% .59**
Fire-setting 130 66.2% 33.8% .50*** 25 68.0% 32.0% .60*

For women, fire setting (gamma = .60), getting in

trouble at school (gamma = .54), suspension (gamma =
.54), fighting (gamma = .52), stealing (gamma = .57), and
vandalism (gamma = .59) all demonstrate a significant
correlation with juvenile arrest. Use of weapons as a child
shows a completely negative correlation with juvenile
arrest among women.
These patterns suggest that men who are labeled as
children present a wider range of behaviors that correlate
with their being labeled. For women, the behaviors
showing the strongest correlation with juvenile arrest are
fire setting, vandalism, and stealing. Again, of course, it is
impossible to tell whether the study participants who report
labeling were labeled for the specific behavior(s) that show
correlation with labeling.
Conclusions
With regard to my hypotheses specific to gender, I find that

men are indeed quite a bit more likely than women to
report having engaged in an act of animal cruelty during
their formative years (Ho5). Additionally, men are much
more likely to be officially labeled deviant than are women
(Ho6). Per Table 5.1, men are nearly twice as likely to have
experienced juvenile arrest as are women. Also, as
reported in Table 5.3, juvenile arrest correlates with a much
wider array of behaviors for men than it does for women.
Thus, confirming Ho7, animal cruelty is no more predictive
of adult human-directed violence for men than it is for the
combined group of men and women, which is not
surprising given that it is mostly men that report fighting
behavior as adults. Labeling theory also shows no
predictive power with regard to adult violence when
considering men only, causing me to reject Ho8. The

logistic regression results’ structure is almost identical
between the analysis done on the entire study population
and those done for men only. This is likely because it is
largely men who report having engaged in animal cruelty.
CHAPTER VI:
Telling Tales to Account for

Incidents of Animal Cruelty
Introduction
In addition to examining the 570 cases discussed above, I

also interviewed 21 of the subjects included in these 570
cases about their experiences with animals and animal
cruelty. I interviewed nearly an even number of men (N =
12) and women (N = 9). Specifically, I had the chance to
speak with quite a few of the women who acknowledged
having abused an animal in their DIS interviews. Since
reports of animal abuse are relatively rare among women, I
was especially interested in talking with admitted abusers
who were female. I sought a mix of respondents, overall,
however, some who had admitted to abusing animals in
their DIS interview and some who did not. Also, I talked
with some study participants who were classified as having
Anti-Social Personality Disorder (the adult extension of
Conduct Disorder, per the DSM-IV [1994]), and I talked
with some study participants who were not so-classified.
91
Curiously, I interviewed six individuals who were

classified as ASP and who responded to the initial DIS
questions about previous animal cruelty with a negative
response, suggesting they had never abused an animal.
Three of these subjects were women and three were men.
Of these three men, however, only one, in fact, maintained
throughout the interview that he had never abused an
animal. The other two remembered during the course of
the interview that they had engaged in some act of cruelty
as a child. All three of these ASP women who answered
“No” to DIS Question #9 maintained throughout the
interview that they had never abused an animal.
Because of the small number of interview respondents,
I am disinclined to draw any grand conclusions from the
qualitative data. I view this chapter more as a hypothesis-
generating enterprise than as an effort to confirm or
disconfirm any particular hypothesis as to how and why
people might abuse animals. There has been relatively
little open-ended interviewing of people— particularly non-
incarcerated individuals and non-student populations (as
were used in Arluke [2002])— regarding their abuse of
animals. Hence, any data collected at this point will
necessarily serve as a heuristic guide to future inquiry.
Each interview lasted from 1 - 2.5 hours, so I gathered
information on quite a number of actual incidents of animal
abuse, since some study participants described more than
one such incident to me. This presentation of my data will
mainly focus upon three matters: (1) factors involved in the
way interviewees talk about their abusive episodes; (2)
differences in the character of men's and women's acts of
animal cruelty; and (3) an exploration of the process by
which an individual might cease to abuse animals.
Telling Tales 93
Factors Involved in Animal Abuse Incidents
In examining the accounts that study participants offered by

way of explaining their abusive acts, I am struck not only
by the themes that characterized these accounts but also by
the effort on the part of interviewees to define cruelty. In a
number of cases, interviewees attempt to glean from me
some sense of whether or not an act they had described was
really cruel, asking for instance, “Isn’t that horrible?” or
“That’s not so cruel, is it?”
In terms of the themes that characterize the accounts
given in explaining abusive acts, three particular concepts
emerged. First, many interviewees articulate some version
of the idea that they were bored, possibly drunk, and simply
looking for something “fun” to do. Next, some accounts
seem to orient themselves around a theme of justified
violence, i.e., violence effected toward an animal as a way
of getting back at someone, such as the owner of the
animal, or, alternatively, expressing some more generalized
frustration. Finally, some accounts seemed to illustrate an
impetus to discipline animals, often in the same way that
the respondent him or herself might have been disciplined
by his or her parents.
Many study participants reported that they had engaged
in acts of animal abuse as a part of a group of, usually, men
(or, more specifically, boys). The following excerpts
illustrate how these events typically unfolded. The
following excerpt is from an account in which a respondent
describes launching bottle rocket firecrackers at
neighborhood cats:
You got to have an idea of how long it (a bottle
rocket) is going to take before it blows up.
Depending if you want it to blow up next to or not
next to the animal [sic]. But a lot of the time the

bottle rocket will just screech by [and] will scare
them [the animal] to death anyway. Mostly it’s just
the reaction. Jumps in the air and hair all poofs out
and takes out [sic] running.
In this account, it is evident that the main attraction to
doing such a thing is the reaction generated in the animal.
In effect, the reaction seems comical to the young
perpetrators: the hair “all poofs out,” as it might in a
cartoon. Another respondent recounted having spray-
painted a neighborhood cat while drinking with some
friends. As he tells it, “we were hanging out, drinking, and
there was a cat and there was a can of spray paint and it just
went from there.” What happens from there is that the
respondent and his friends go on to spray the cat with paint,
just because it was something to do. Another respondent
describes roaming about the neighborhood with a friend in
the evenings and grabbing cats to toss into neighbors’
pools: “it was hilarious— that cats would just freak out.”
Sometimes, interviewees attempt to moderate the
perceived harm or negative dimensions of their actions by
noting that their acts had “not caused any terrible harm.”
Several study participants try to rationalize an act as “not
that cruel,” for instance: “we would tease the dog, but not
really anything cruel.” In many such cases, there seems to
be an effort at forging a distinction between causing
physical harm and “just teasing,” which is more likely
inclined toward some sort of emotional torment. In one
such case, the participant claims that he “never really did
anything to animals” but then remarks in the very next
breath that, “I’ve swung a cat around by the tail.” He also
notes that he “shot at a horse” and had “thrown cats up in
the air” and “into the pool,” though he had, “never tried to
Telling Tales 95
hold them underwater or anything like that.” In such cases,

it seems as though the respondents are either not in fact
sure an act was “cruel” or perhaps feel slightly bad about or
embarrassed about some act done much earlier in life. I
noticed an obvious effort by some respondents to frame, or
account for, their behavior— and to test my reaction to the
behavior they were sharing with me. The effort to cast an
act as “not that bad” seems a way of negating the harm of
such actions and, by extension, the actor. Sometimes, too,
respondents will make distinctions between what they seem
to deem as mischief and “real” cruelty. For instance, as in
the previous quote, a respondent might consider tossing a
cat into a pool to be funny and mischievous but not really
cruel, as would be something like trying to drown the cat.
Alternatively, other respondents rationalize that there
was simply nothing for them to do in their neighborhoods,
as if they were left little choice but to wreak havoc on
animals. Telling of his motivations for stalking
neighborhood cats and throwing them into swimming
pools, one respondent observes:
There was just nothing to do. It was so boring. So,
we’d go around and just walk around the
neighborhood and we’d find something to do. It
was fun with a cat or something because it’d run
and you’d get to chase it. And there was some
excitement because it’d scratch at you and it wasn’t
that easy to grab it.
Another respondent, in this case a female, recounts driving
solo and trying to run over an animal:
Yah, a couple of times I have [tried to hit an animal
while driving]. Just to see if I could do it. You
know, just for my, my curiosity kind of thing, you
know, but…um…in those incidents I never really

hit the animal either, even though I tried [laughing].
Such accounts seem to most strongly the idea that these
abusers are seeking— and finding— some sort of fun or
distraction in their acts.
An interesting illustration of how the violent treatment
of animals might provide some sort of intense
“entertainment,” in effect “something to do” came from a
few subjects who appropriated the idea of “mercy killing”
an injured animal but yet evidenced a strong enjoyment of
this killing in their account of it. Describing an incident
wherein he had “mercy killed” a cat whose head had
accidentally been slammed inside a car door, the
respondent explains:
Well, we didn’t tell people for awhile cause we
didn’t know what they would say, you know, they
were like, ‘where’s the cat at.’ We’re like, well, we
had an accident. They were like I can’t believe you
all did that. It’s like we didn’t do it on purpose.
And they’re like how’d you step on its head? Well,
I had to do something to it. But they’re like, well
how could you step on its head? Like. . . it was
laying there dying, I mean [laugh], I helped it by
steppin’ on it’s head b/c I mean it wasn’t gonna to
live [laugh]. I mean its head was smashed in
[laugh], so. . .
This individual clearly understands that his acts might be
frowned upon by his peers— particularly female peers.
However, he also seems to find some amusement, or
entertainment, from “helping” the animal to die. Hence,
killing the animal is ostensibly done so as to put the animal
Telling Tales 97
out of its misery, but the legitimized, or rationalized, use of

such aggression is also enjoyed.
Another interviewee describes several incidents of
“mercy killing” animals. Here, it seems as though this
individual is experiencing some sort of an intense pleasure
from these acts. Consider:
These are kinda humane, in a sense they’re humane
acts, but umm. I can remember once. . . I can
remember three times I’ve killed an animal with my
hands in the last few years. Once a squirrel ran in
front of my car; I knew I hit it. But it ran off—it
ran off no problem. But I caught it. It broke, it had
a broken leg, and I, I just thought, well, I’m not
gonna be setting the squirrel’s [laugh] leg, so I just,
you know, I grabbed it—I had gloves on,
fortunately—I grabbed it by a hind leg, and I just hit
it’s head against the—a– log and blood sprayed
everywhere and it died instantaneously. For me that
was kinda being humane; other people [laugh] may
well disagree.
A common tactic, exemplified here, is to attribute intention
or purpose, thereby shifting blame, to the animal: “a
squirrel ran in front of my car.” Note as well the extent to
which this respondent questions how humane his actions
really are— it is as if he is trying to convince himself,
which is interesting since many people would probably
condone killing an animal that one had accidentally run
over so as to put it out of its misery. The respondent,
though, seems to realize that he may be taking some
pleasure in these killings, which would surely not be
condoned by most of his average, American adult
counterparts— again, particularly female peers. The study

participant continues:
Another circumstance similar— someone else hit a
rabbit; I didn’t. But, I saw it on the side of the road
and it was kickin’ around—it wasn’t dead yet, and
so I stopped. And I tried to wring it’s neck. What a
mistake that was. A rabbit’s neck is incredibly
flexible, so I twisted it around [laugh] I could hear
all these bones and sinews poppin,’ and I all the
way around and then I let go and it wasn’t dead
[laugh]. I couldn’t believe it. I had to like do it
twice and it was like ickkkk—get away from me.
Throw it away, and like oh man, that was really. . .
Here, he admits that he has gone out of his way at times to
“end the suffering” of an animal that he did not even
himself injure. And, again, the emphasis given to the
physical and emotional experience of killing this creature
implies the respondent’s pleasure. Though he indicates
being repulsed or disgusted, the detail he provides in this
account suggests a rather primal enjoyment of an act
wrapped within a thin veneer of rationalization.
Even this sort of abuse arguably mimics the sort of
reasoning that may motivate at least some incidents of
vandalism. As one respondent puts it:
My cousin and I actually hung out with this other
guy and together we would go to people’s houses
and torment cats and stuff like that. Actually, I still
hang out with him quite a bit, and now we focus on
other people. So, it’s like we shifted from no
animals, to animals, to other people. The animals
weren’t doing anything to me. But now, we don’t
have the money and don’t really feel we can go to
Telling Tales 99
school. And we’re sitting around with friends and a

group of guys that look like frat guys go walking by
or frat girls walking by and we would yell things at
them. It’s jealousy. And sometimes it becomes
fighting, or we might follow them and trash their
cars later.
In this case, the interviewee is evidently effecting
vandalism in the same way that some of the other
respondents are engaging in animal cruelty, as a way of
relieving frustration.
Other respondents seem to be motivated by factors,
such as frustration, as well. One of the interviewees, for
instance, extensively detailed his aggression toward a high
school girlfriend’s pet rabbit. The respondent felt that the
girlfriend paid too much attention to the rabbit and cared
too intently about it. He became jealous of her affection for
the rabbit, feeling that she did not care enough for him:
I just hated the rabbit because it was, it was like uh,
instead of spending time, I’d be like, hey why don’t you
come over here. Well, I’m gonna hang out with the rabbit,
you know, and we’re gonna. . . cuz she was so into this
rabbit like, seriously, if it was a choice between my life and
the rabbit’s life, she would totally have to sit there and, I
dunno. So, like I had such a problem with this rabbit that it
was just like I would just hit it whenever I would see it.
And she paid more attention to the rabbit.
This individual became so frustrated with the rabbit that
he would spend significant amounts of time fantasizing
how to hurt or kill it:
I hated it; it was almost like she was going out with
someone, you know, someone else. I was thinking
to myself at the time that I wanted to nail it to the
wall and like split it open or something; I was also

crazy at the time. And I wanted to do something to
it but I didn’t want her to know that I had anything
to do with it, and it just kinda worked out that way.
Like if I could do something like set it on fire and
then like cross the wires on the washing machine so
that would catch on fire so it’d look he chewed
through the wires or something. I would just be
totally down for that, if I wasn’t worried about the
ramifications of the house burning down.
Eventually, he resorted to hurting the rabbit one day when
the girlfriend left it in his care:
I basically dropped it [the rabbit] and umm it was
scratching me so I picked it up and I was telling it,
umm, I think I was telling it how much I hated it or
something [laugh]. And it was like scratching at my
hand, and you know, I dropped it, and it broke its
arm. [Prompt: Did you just drop it?9] It was a
drop, but it was an intentional drop. I actually took
it to the vet, you know—acted like I cared.
This respondent reports having been similarly cruel to a
friend’s pet dog when he was in grade school because the
boy would often spend time with the dog rather the subject.
Another interviewee reports similar reasons for
mistreating a roommate’s cat: [I would] “just hurt enough
to where it won’t, to where it’ll leave you alone. . . it won’t
jump on your clothes or get on the couch or get on the
table.” He continues:
9
My prompt.
Telling Tales 101
If I didn’t want it there that bad, it would be dead. I

think the thing I really didn’t like, what made me
hate this cat, was my roommate went on an
internship this semester and he didn’t ask us if we’d
take care of this cat. I mean he just like assumed
that we would take care of it—feed it, clean out its
litter box. He didn’t even ask.
This respondent is evidently transferring his animosity
toward his roommate to the roommate’s cat.
In the case of both scapegoating an animal or exacting
punishment upon them, the animals affected in these sorts
of incidents are typically household animals that are
familiar to the abuser. Though these abusers may feel
somewhat regretful about their abusive acts and even have
developed a general ethos that mistreating animals is not
acceptable, they can ultimately quite readily justify such
mistreatment to themselves.
Some of the interview data illustrates aggression being
explicitly directed towards an animal, in this case a pet
which had annoyed the interviewee:
My dog chewed the door from the house to the
garage off the hinges—literally—and I severely
beat him for it. I punched him as hard as I could in
the head— it probably hurt my hand as bad as him.
I've also kicked him for disobeying and tearing up
other household items. I felt very bad, remorseful,
but he doesn't listen. I've tried several types of
punishments, but nothing seems to work. Not even
beating. So I have ceased to punish him in this
fashion.
Another respondent expresses the same sentiment of

justified punishment, even in the case that such punishment
might be violent or aggressive:
My friend’s father beat their dog severely. The dog
bit me on the leg, not very hard or deep, but his
father still beat the dog. [How did you feel about
this incident?] Felt the dog should have been
punished, but not that severely.
Evidenced in both of these accounts is an ethos of physical
punishment. These young people may be acting upon
smaller creatures for which they are responsible for training
or managing in ways similar to those employed by parents
and others to train and manage them.
The abuser may feel “bad” about how they have acted
toward the animal, but they also rationalize that
“something” had to be done to control the animal properly.
More often than not that something tends to be expressed in
a physical manner. Caring for animal companions (and
possibly younger siblings or babysitting charges) thus
arguably becomes an early practice ground for the “cycles
of violence” (Athens 1989; Widom 1992), which underlie
the “discipline” practices of our culture. As Straus and
others such as Greven (1991) suggest with their work, the
level of violence used in child rearing need not be severe or
“abusive” to have a significant impact upon the child and
how he or she relates with other human, and arguably non-
human (Flynn 1999), beings.
In a number of cases, respondents recounted how their
parents had disciplined a household pet, often in the same
way in which they had disciplined the respondent as well.
These accounts were typified by a physically aggressive
orientation. For instance:
Telling Tales 103
When our dog would pee in the house, my mom

would yell at it and rub its face in it and smack it
and stuff like that.
In a few cases, respondents witnessed a respected adult
doing something terribly cruel to an animal without even
appealing to the rationale of “discipline.” For instance, one
female respondent, who reported having never herself
effected any violence toward an animal, recalled observing
her uncle placing a firecracker in a cat’s anus during a
family Independence Day gathering: “My uncle put the
firecracker up the cats butt and it exploded and everyone
laughed. I didn’t; I just walked away, disgusted. It was
awful.”
Also interesting, as a counterbalance to the pervading
paradigm of children mimicking adult discipline tactics,
was the account relayed by one study participant, who
reported enduring extensive abuse at the hands of his
father. He and his siblings were regularly and severely
beaten, as were the household pets. The subject found,
however, that he empathized with the family dog much
more than he did himself or his siblings:
He [the subject’s father] would do the same stuff to

the dog he did to us…you know, kick it and throw it
against the wall and stuff. I mean I just remember
because it was a Dalmation and it was tall but it was
skinny, so I mean when he would do it, it would
really hurt the dog, you know. He [the dog] would
just come over to us kids, but you could see the dog
was broken, with his ears down and his eyes and
face and everything down and his tail between his
legs and you know, just everything, the dog was just
broken, you know.
In a way, this respondent seems to identify with the dog,

perhaps projecting some of his own feeling to the dog.
Speaking about another dog the family had had, who had
also suffered at his father’s hands but had one day finally
run off, he remarks that he hopes, “he found a better life
somewhere.” In fact, this respondent seemed to feel
frustrated with himself because he had not stood up to his
father. He seemed to rationalize that, in some way, he
deserved the abuse because he reasoned that he could fight
back but had not done so. He applied the same harsh logic
to his siblings but not the family pet:
I felt a kinship with the dog, ‘cause the dog was,
you know, going through the same things, so. I just
felt worse for the dog, ‘cause, you know, I could
handle it, but the dog would like go up to my dad
and want to play with my dad and my dad would
start kicking at him.
Regarding siblings’ crying at the abusive hands of his
father, however, he says, “It’d just kind of like think,
whatever, it happened. I’m surviving it. If it happens to
you, you survive it.”
Of the various factors which might characterize animal
abuse, sex differences emerge as the most profoundly
influential, with regard to their tendency to pattern the
situation and style of abusive accounts reported. This next
section considers some of the sex differences noted within
this study’s interview data.
Telling Tales 105
Sex Difference in the Context of Reported Animal

Abuse
Sex differences orient the most notable distinction with

regard to the contexts under which animal abuse tends to
occur. All but one of the interviewees who maintained
throughout the interview that they had never abused an
animal were women. Five of the six female interviewees
who reported abuse described having engaged in abuse
while at home, generally directing their actions toward
household pets. A typical description of context for the
females was:
I had a friend over, and it was like, look at what the
cat does when you put it under a blanket and you’re
hitting it!
There were several reports of placing animals in a blanket
or sheet and swinging them around or otherwise teasing
them. The same subject who recounts putting her cat in a
blanket and hitting it also remarked that she and her sister
were “generally nice to it (the cat). I mean we fed it, and
bathed it, and well. . . ” When I probed with the
observation that cats generally do not like to be bathed, she
noted that, indeed, the cat did not like to be bathed but that,
“we’d intentionally put it in the bathtub, and it would hate
being in the bathtub, and we’d wash it.”
Another subject notes that she “got more angry than
I’ve ever been at my first puppy.” She recalls “yanking on
her collar with the leash really hard and I almost basically
dragged her because I was so angry.” This study
participant then notes that she kicked her dog once during
that incident but never did so again because she felt so
badly about hurting the dog.
Another woman reports being at a friend’s house,

where the household had pet rats and a pet cat. This
respondent remarks that she and her friend would play the
“popcorn game.” When I asked her to describe the game,
she said, “We took a blanket, and we put two rats in the
blanket and we were like throwing it up in the air.” She
recalls that, one day, there were some guys present when
they were playing the popcorn game with the rats. One of
the guys put a cat in the blanket with the rats. The
respondent notes that, “when we did it, it (the cat) hit the
ceiling, and that was cruel.” She recalls that the game
stopped then, and the girl who resided at the house yelled at
the respondent.
Men were much more likely to report abusing wild or
stray animals in an outdoor setting, typically at a pond,
while driving a car, or while at work. Of twelve male
respondents, only one reported abusing a household pet or
enacting abuse at home; three others reported
“disciplining” a pet. Typical accounts from my male
respondents are exemplified by the following excerpts:
• “You got to have an idea of how long it [a bottle
rocket] is going to take before it blows up.
Depending if you want it to blow up next to or
not next to the animal. But a lot of the time the
bottle rocket will just screech by and will scare
them [the animal] to death anyway. Mostly it’s
just the reaction. Jumps in the air and hair all
poofs out and takes out [sic] running.”
• “We would if we caught an animal like a frog,
um, it’s likely that it would end up being run
over by a bicycle. Like one of us would have a
Telling Tales 107
bike and we, we’d run it over, um, so its guts

would spill out.”
• “We’d like try to shoot birds with BB guns and
our mom wouldn’t let us have any other guns
besides that. But uh we’d just shoot random
birds, sometimes woodpeckers. But we stopped
doing that after a while.”
• “Three of my friends and I had a BB gun and
we started playing around with it. Shooting at a
distance and then shooting smaller things and
then moving things. And then we shot a squirrel
on a tree.”
These more characteristic male accounts offered by male
respondents tend to feature fireworks and BB guns directed
at birds and frogs or fish. Many times, the setting for these
accounts is a small pond near a suburban setting. Most
times, the motivation seems to be a variation on sensation-
seeking i.e., “having something to do” so as to stave off
boredom. Almost without exception, such acts occur in a
small group of exclusively boys.
One man reported teasing pet cats while at home:
“When my brother and I were little we used to mess with
the cats a little, like when we were playing in the garage.
We’d shut all the doors and chase them around. We never
did anything to them, but they were scared running
around.” Except, however, for the three incidents in which
male interviewees reported disciplining a household pet in
what they ventured might have been an abusive manner, all
other reports by men occurred outside their home
environment.
The final consideration in this chapter summarizes
portions of accounts wherein study participants talk about
what, if anything, might have motivated them to stop

abusing animals. Sometimes interviewees’ accounts
suggest they simply “outgrow” the behavior, but other
accounts clarify a very memorable, traumatic event that
motivated the interviewee to stop hurting animals.
Ending Abuse
I routinely noted, in analyzing these accounts, that quite a

few of the individuals who had abused animals, usually in
following along with a set of peers, would find themselves
compelled to acknowledge the harm their behavior had
caused. In some cases, this realization came in the midst of
an act, perhaps because the animal bled or cried out in pain.
Other times, an interviewee would express remorse upon
coming to empathize with the animal in some other way.
In some cases, of course, abusers simply seemed to
outgrow their abusive behavior.
This experience of coming to identify with an animal
one had abused is perhaps quite common. This sort of
interaction was exemplified, for instance, in an episode of
The Simpson’s (Cohen 1998). Bart, under encouragement
by the school bully, took aim at a nesting bird perched
within a tree and hit it, killing the bird. Actually, Bart had
tried to aim away from the bird, evidencing that he did not
really want to shoot the bird at all but also did not want to
look like a “wimp” in front of his peer. Once the bird was
killed, however, Bart felt terrible. Noticing that the bird
had been protecting hatchlings that were now motherless,
Bart took it upon himself to take care of the baby birds.
Several particular accounts characterize the conditions
under which an abuser might come to identify with the
abused animal. In one case, this realization did not occur
Telling Tales 109
until quite awhile after the actual abuse had occurred. One
woman spoke ruefully about the fate of the family cat she
said she had abused and which, eventually, developed
psychological problems and began urinating throughout the
family’s home. The respondent’s mom did not realize what
the respondent and her sister had been doing to the cat, and
the mom eventually decided to send the cat to live with a
family friend who had a farm. The respondent visited the
cat some time later, noting that:
She [the cat] was so skinny and little that, I mean
she was so huge and just seemed more full of life
than she did living on the farm and I felt guilty that
I was the cause of her being, peeing all over the
house, because I was mean, because I didn’t— I
mean I think about the blanket thing, where I hit her
under the blanket a lot.. I didn’t feel we were
responsible enough, like, we maybe were the cause
of why we got rid of her because she had a problem.
Usually, though, something during the abusive interaction
prompts an abuser to feel pity for the animal. Consider the
following observation:
After we shot the bird, the other bird kept flying
around the dying bird. Like it was grieving or
something. It was weird to see a bird do that. I felt
really bad about what I did.
In this case, a group of boys was shooting at birds with a
BB gun. The respondent hit one of the birds and then
remarked upon the surviving birds’ reaction to its mate’s
(or perhaps its friend’s) injury. The respondent had
apparently not imagined that a bird might evince a human-
like reaction such as grief.
For those who do not come to realize the harm they are
causing, at least the idea seems to emerge that significant
others— particularly, for straight males, female others—
would disapprove of behavior such as abusing animals.
This realization seems to occur as the young person
finishes high school and moves on to college and more of
an adult set of roles. Alternatively, in a few cases, there
seems to emerge a gradual realization that animals might
have feelings. For instance:
There was a time when they [animals] were just
there. They were living, but they didn’t really have
personalities. There was no humanity at all
involved in it. Now, the boundaries have sort of
shifted and I wouldn’t [intentionally hurt an
animal], just because it would be cruel.
More common, though, is the sentiment expressed by one
study participant, articulating more of a self-interested
stance, observing that, “girls wouldn’t want to hang out
with a guy that did that sort of stuff,” in explaining why he
curtailed his involvement in vandalism, shoplifting, and
acts of animal cruelty. He had previously engaged in such
behavior with his male peers. This reasoning process
nicely illustrates Schur’s (1973) observation in Radical
Non-Intervention that, left along, many delinquent boys
will correct their deviant behavior on their own, often in an
effort to better impress female counterparts sought as
romantic partners.
The onset of an adult mentality will of course vary
depending upon the individual. For instance, an individual
who graduates from high school and then takes a job
directly, remains in the same town, and socializes with the
same peer group is not likely to experience a significant
Telling Tales 111
role change, and thus his or her sentiment, or affective,

structures are likely to remain constant. Only when this
individual marries, has children, or otherwise alters his or
her fundamental role structure would such changes be
expected to occur.
There are a number of factors that are associated with
abuse. Additionally, there are patterns with regard to
gender and gender-based social scripts that characterize
differences in the abuse reported by men, as opposed to
women. Finally, there are certain components that
characterize abuse incidents that lead to an abuser ceasing
to abuse. Under such conditions, an individual may be
“going along with the crowd” and engaging in an abusive
act but then feel some connection with the abused animal
and conclude that such behavior is inappropriate. The next
chapter offers a model which connects some of the
motivational explanations offered by the interviewees in
this study.
CHAPTER VII
The Findings and Limitations of

this Study
Is animal cruelty associated with human-directed

violence?
This project’s findings render it difficult to conclude

whether or not there exists an empirical association
between animal cruelty and human-directed aggression.
While the quantitative findings indicate that there is no
clear and concise association between animal cruelty and
human-directed violence and thus contradict some of the
claims made by the animal rights community (Ascione et
al. 1999, Lockwood and Ascione 1998), these findings do
not evidence that there is no relationship between animal
cruelty and human-directed violence; clearly there is. I
must therefore reject my first hypothesis, which proposes
that there exists no association between animal cruelty and
human-directed aggression.
The one conclusion that is most evident is that any
association that does exist between animal cruelty and
human-directed violence is decidedly complicated and
113
nuanced. I could find no evidence that animal cruelty

perpetuated during childhood or adolescence is associated
with violence during adulthood. Once other
childhood/teenage anti-social behaviors are incorporated
into the model, any effect animal cruelty has on adult
fighting behavior dissipates. Still, animal cruelty during
childhood/adolescence does correlate with other
childhood/adolescent measures of anti-social behavior.
Examining a correlation matrix of animal cruelty and each
of the other twelve childhood/adolescent anti-social
behaviors included in this study, one notes that animal
cruelty correlates with just about every other behavior,
violent and non-violent. A factor analysis of animal cruelty
and these other anti-social behaviors suggests, however,
that animal cruelty associates most closely with the
measures of violent childhood or teenage behaviors, such
as fighting, hurting siblings, and bullying. Once this group
of factors is regressed against adult violence, however,
animal cruelty again fails to predict adult violence.
One dimension that might complicate the findings
observed herein is that the measure of violence during
adulthood used in this study is limited by the definitions of
adult violence that are available within this data. I use the
proxy measures of fighting and fighting with weapons to
represent “adult violence.” Note that I did have other
measures such as child abuse and domestic violence, but,
because the mean age of my sample was so low, these other
measures did not prove very robust, even if considered as
an index. Perhaps interviewing an older community
sample would yield more insight into the correlation
between animal cruelty and later violence throughout the
life course.
Findings and Limitations 115
While animal cruelty shows no predictive power in

discerning who might go on to engage in fighting behavior
as an adult, it may be a predictor for other types of violent
adult behaviors that could not be represented in this study.
For instance, animal cruelty may indeed discern between
those who will go on to murder a human being and those
who will not. To truly test this relationship empirically,
however, one would need a study group comprising both
murderers and non-murderers. If the entire such study
group answered, for instance, a battery of DIS questions,
logistic regression models could be created to examine
empirically whether or not something like animal cruelty
predicts whether or not one might engage in murderous
behavior. As it stands, the “evidence” which links animal
cruelty with such human-directed violence as murder or
multiple murder relies only on data collected from the
murdering group. Without a control group, it is impossible
to know which behaviors demonstrate statistical predictive
power (Harris 1977).
It is possible that a larger sample, for which there was
more variability in the extent of animal cruelty reported,
might find that extensive involvement in animal cruelty as
a child does predict fighting behavior (or other violent
behavior) in adulthood. As Kazdin (1990) finds with
regard to firesetting, the frequency, duration, and context of
anti-social behavior likely matters more than whether or not
it was simply enacted. The sample used in this study is
limited in several other ways. First, it was a community
sample drawn from newspaper advertisements. Thus, it is
not a systematic, representative sample. Additionally, the
sample was drawn from a predominantly white, college
town. Thus, there is likely to have been an oversampling of
younger, more-educated people and an undersampling of

non-whites.
While the quantitative results do not firmly clarify
whether or not animal cruelty is associated more with
violent and non-violent behaviors during
childhood/adolescence, the qualitative results suggest that
animal cruelty does demonstrate at least some association
with non-violent, anti-social behaviors during the
childhood and teenage years. For instance, many
interviewees report engaging in animal cruelty as a means
of sensation-seeking in much the same way they might
engage in vandalism, stealing, or fire setting. However, the
qualitative data also indicate mixed results, in that
sometimes animal cruelty is effected by young people
based upon an aggressive motivation extending from
frustration. The next section of this chapter explores a
sociologically-based model of why young people engage in
animal cruelty. The advantage of a phenomenologically10-
driven sociological model is that it extends the analysis
afforded by a symptomological, quantitative analysis of
indicator-based data to one in which process, experience,
and the complexity of human motivation can be better
incorporated.
10
By phenomenological, I refer to the approach that Katz (1988)
introduced to the study of deviance/criminal behavior. This method
demands careful examination of the situations in which deviance and
crime occur. Katz contends that it is in the doing of crime (and the
recounting thereof) that the motivations and experiences of participants
can be best understood.
A Sociological Model of Childhood/Adolescence Animal

Cruelty
With regard to the context of abuse, I seek here to model

the conditions under which reported abuse tends to occur.
The quantitative findings suggest that animal abuse
proffered during childhood/adolescence is correlated, at
least to some extent, with non-violent delinquent acts, such
as stealing, vandalism, and fire setting. The interview data
provides more clarification as to the conditions under
which animal abuse occurs, suggesting that some animal
abuse seems to be characterized by a sensation-seeking
motive and quite a lot of it also seems to be characterized
by violent or aggressive motivations. Motivational
categories indicated in the data include an imitation of
behavior learned from adults and peers, an effort to express
frustration, an attempt to clarify one’s personal and social
identity commitments, and a desire to seek sensation.
Chart 6.1, below, offers a model illustrating how these
motivations might both relate to animal cruelty and
interrelate with one another. Based upon the accounts
provided in the interviews collected during this study, the
model depicted in Chart 6.1 illustrates four factors that
might motivate animal cruelty. Additionally, the model
illustrates proposed interactions between these four
variables.
Sensation-seeking and identity explorations, for
instance, may interact in that an individual might attempt to
explore a potential social identity by doing something with
a group of peers so as to have something “exciting” to do.
While engaging in an act of cruelty with the ostensible
motivation of having something exciting to do, someone
may find that they are unwilling to commit personally to a
particular social identity. For instance, if someone is trying

to hang with the “tough” guys and accidentally kills an
animal during such a sensation-seeking adventure, he or
she may draw some conclusions with regard to his or her
identity commitments.
Chart 6.1. A Model of Relationships Between Motivations

Provided by Abusers
Sensation-
Seeking
Releasing Identity
Frustration Exploration
Learning
Similarly, identity exploration may interrelate with

learning processes because one will inevitably be inclined
to “try on” those identities with which one is familiar. In
one’s development, one is inclined to pursue identity
options based upon imitation. For instance, if one’s father
is a hunter, one is more likely to try out hunting and to
learn certain rules of hunting as they are embraced by one’s
father. One may try out hunting with one’s father,
however, and find that he or she is disgusted by it and thus
unable to commit to this particular identity. Learning
interacts with the release of frustrations in similar ways.
One is likely to imitate one’s parent(s), older sibling(s), or

peers when releasing frustration. One learns how to act
after a bad day, for instance, by watching one’s parent’s
behavior after returning from a difficult day at work.
Alternatively, when one is feeling frustrated, one may also
invent some release, which one may then internalize, or
“learn,” for future use.
The release of frustration very possibly interacts with
sensation-seeking in that one might release aggression but
then feel excited by its release. Alternatively, one may be
doing something “for fun” but find that the activity serves
to release a sense of frustration or aggression. Finally,
sensation-seeking may in turn interact with learning
processes. One may, for instance, learn to blow up frogs
with firecrackers from a peer but then later find that one in
fact enjoys doing this act.
The sections below explore in more detail some of the
findings and conclusions generated by the interview data
collected in the course of this study.
Identity Exploration
Individuals who demonstrate an inclination to most readily

identify themselves as having abused animals seem either
to be (a) highly remorseful about some incident of abuse,
particularly if the incident resulted in the death or serious
injury of the animal; or (b) inclined to have incorporated a
“badass” identity (Katz 1988). Under the rubric of such an
identity, engaging in mean, tough, or alien behaviors
augments one’s masculine worth (see also Athens 1989 and
Gilligan 1997). What is intriguing is that several
interviewees did not answer in the affirmative when asked
DIS Question #9, yet during an in-depth interview detailed
several cruel incidents to which they have been party.

Effectively, they did engage in abuse, but they do not
readily identify themselves as having been cruel to animals,
i.e., they have not identified themselves with the role of
“animal abuser.” Identity-testing seems, then, to be one of
the keys to understanding why young people abuse animals
and how they experience such abuse.
I noticed that virtually none of my respondents fit the
role of a truly committed “badass.” Katz (1988) alludes,
however, that there exist at least two variants of a “badass.”
Some “badass” characters are genuinely capable of being
sadistic and malicious, but most may be seeking simply to
project toughness and seem socially “alien” to mainstream
adults and other “squares” so as to fit into a perceived
“tough” social identity (Ulmer 2000). However, these
individuals do not seem to instigate or particularly enjoy
cruelty. Though several of my interviewees had been in
trouble with authority figures and even in legal trouble,
most did not evince a commitment to being truly mean or
cruel.
What I observed in the accounts interviewees provided,
however, was a recurring theme. Many interviewees had
gone along with or even initiated abuse, but then something
they did caused some harm to an animal, a harm to which
the abuser could relate. For instance, an animal perhaps
bled, died, or otherwise evinced a sense of suffering, and
the abuser was emotively affected by this, activating a
sense of guilt (Owens and Goodney 2000). Typically, after
such an incident, an abuser will report that they avoided
engaging in such abusive acts again, even amid peer
pressure. Some admitted abusers, of course, never
experienced such an incident and thus simply seemed to
outgrow abusive behavior without incident, perhaps finding
little social support for such acts as they took on more adult
roles.
Broadly speaking, better understanding of the
situational dynamics of violence is needed. What
distinguishes an individual who instigates an incident of
animal cruelty from someone who reports having simply
gone along with a cruel act so as to fit in with a group of
peers? How do people come to categorize those cruel acts
in which they may have gleefully engaged from those that
they felt “crossed the line”? A glimpse into the
phenomenon of small-group violence as exemplified in
these accounts of animal cruelty offers some insight into
the phenomenological social dynamics of this violence. It
is rare that such an event will be witnessed by a researcher
or caught on videotape and thus we must rely on
participants recounting their involvement in these activities.
Perhaps the process of abusing with a small group of
friends has a normalizing influence upon some young
people. Instigators of such acts are likely to have already
normalized such “senseless” violence within their moral
calculi. Effectively, they may be personally committed to a
“badass” identity. This would be consistent with much of
the deviance literature, specifically Sutherland’s differential
association (Sutherland and Cressey 1974) and Sykes and
Matza’s (1957) neutralization techniques.
Also relevant here is a consideration of the differences
in social scripts that underlie variations in patterns of
animal cruelty, particularly with regard to gender. Such
social scripts extend from the availability of differing social
roles according to one’s gender. As Henry and Short
(1954) observe, it is often easier for men to appropriate
violent identities. Reifying this observation, Affect Control
Theory (Heise 1979, as discussed in the first chapter)
suggests that such normative role designations which

categorize certain identities as masculine still apply fifty
years later. Specifically, violent identities such as “thug,”
“murderer,” or “robber” generate an image of a male in
most Americans’ minds.
Social scripts by which women might engage in abuse
tend to be oriented to the home and family. As Schur
(1984) notes, much of women’s violence tends to occur in
the home setting. Women are likely, when they do become
violent, to enact violence towards a spouse or child. In
fact, it may be that the reason we do not, as a society,
consider women to be particularly violent is that the
patterns of the violence they do engage do not tend to be
officially counted. A woman must effectively kill a spouse
before her violence towards him might be noted; though
relatively few women kill a spouse or domestic partner,
many more than might be expected report being violent or
abusive toward a spouse or partner (Lottes and Weinberg
1997). Similarly, abuse of a child would need to be
sufficient enough to warrant official intervention if it were
to be noticed. Women who report having abused animals
similarly note that their abuse tended to occur at home,
often towards a household pet. Men were more likely to
abuse an unknown (a stray or a neighbor’s pet) or wild
animal away from home.
Learning to Abuse
By the theory of differential association, or learning theory

(Sutherland and Cressey 1974), some individuals may learn
that aggression toward animals may be appropriate if one is
trying to “teach” the animal to behave “properly.” Several
of the accounts listed in the qualitative results chapter
above, recount an occasion during which an interviewee

“disciplined” a pet, often in the same way that the
interviewee him or herself had been disciplined and always
in the way in which he or she had observed the pet being
disciplined by a parent or other adult.
If a pet dog, for instance, urinates in the house, it is a
good bet that a young person in that house will rub the
animal’s nose in the urine. The young person may also
smack the pet, as they have seen a parent do. One can
observe this same sort of behavior within sibling sets. An
older child will inevitably attempt to “discipline” a younger
sibling in the same ways in which an adult has disciplined
him or her. The older sibling may correct their younger
sibling in a tone that sounds very much like their adult role
model’s. The older sibling may even smack the younger
sibling or take something away from the younger sibling by
way of punishing the youngster.
The subject who reports having been extensively and
brutally beat by his father has a story that echoes the ideas
recounted in Athens’ study of abused children—
particularly boys—and the cycle of violence that may lead
such children to themselves become violent. The first step
of that cycle is to be victimized by violence as a child and,
unable to defend one’s self, to feel hapless and weak
(Athens 1989). Such a child is typically inclined to view
him or herself as worthless or weak-willed, hence the self-
condemnation evidenced in the account reported in the
previous chapter, which illustrates an interesting twist upon
the cycles of abuse paradigm. In some cases, such as this,
however, that cycle of abuse can be curtailed by an abused
youngster realizing, in this case by empathizing with a
beloved pet, that abuse is something he detests and will
thus likelynever perpetrate on his own children.
According to the theory of differential association,

people learn not only to act in the ways mentored by
significant others, but they also learn how to rationalize, or
explain, why and when it is acceptable to act in those ways.
Thus one learns not only a repertoire of acts, but also the
explanatory tracks that go with these acts by way of
rendering them more socially acceptable. For instance, one
perhaps learns that it is acceptable to hit the dog if it soils
the carpet.
Not only will a young person learn behaviors and the
associated moral reasoning from adults, but he or she will
also learn from his or her peers to try certain acts. For
instance, one might not reason, on one’s own, that it might
be “fun” to paint the dog, but one might get the idea from
an older sibling. Similarly, one might get ideas of things to
do to animals from television and movies. Again, an older
sibling or peer may be the one to decide it would be “a
good idea” or “a lot of fun” to try and re-enact a scene from
a film with the family cat (e.g., do cats really land on their
feet if dropped from the roof?), but the younger sibling
might learn from this that it is appropriate or even
especially “cool” to do such things.
As suggested earlier, there are arguably some
interesting connections between learning and sensation-
seeking, particularly among peers. One’s friend or sibling
might introduce the idea of abusing an animal, but after
engaging in such behavior, some individuals will find that
they enjoy the behavior, or even feel a release of frustration
from it. Consider the interviewee who reports obvious
enjoyment at “euthanizing” an animal. He had learned to
abuse animals from an older sibling and peers, but through
his own participation, he arguably incorporated a behavior
he enjoyed and later came to use as a means of releasing
tension. Now, as an adult, he seems to find some cathartic

release from his occasional chance to “euthanize” an
animal.
Releasing Frustration
Several accounts provided by interviewees did suggest that

some of the study participants engage in animal cruelty as a
means of releasing day-to-day frustrations. This is the most
commonly-suggested explanation as to why people abuse
animals that is given by animal rights groups and their
researchers. By their reasoning, the idea that animals might
be a “practice” realm for eventual violence against humans,
termed the “graduation hypothesis,” might make sense.
However, examining the context under which even
frustration-driven abuse is reported, such reasoning does
not make as much sense.
Sometimes, this type of abuse is directed toward a pet
belonging to a person with whom the abuser might be
frustrated. This is the one frustration-driven scenario under
which the graduation hypothesis might be plausible.
Harming a person’s pet because you are frustrated with
them could graduate into hurting them directly. However,
it may also indicate that the abuser views hurting another
person as taboo. Thus, he or she may be able to rationalize
harming another person’s beloved pet, and may even feel a
thrill in doing so, but will be unable to cross the line they
have drawn against doing physical harm to another person.
Individuals who do not draw such a distinction are likely to
physically harm not just the animal but also the owner.
Another type of frustration-driven abuse occurs when a
frustrated individual encounters an animal rather
unexpectedly. On those occasions the individual may have
been having a bad day, and might take advantage of the

animal’s availability or vulnerability. Under these
circumstances, the abuser’s frustration may be more
generalized. The animal just happens to, effectively, be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. Such individuals may
be just generally frustrated with their life circumstances and
feel sufficiently comfortable morally to take their
frustration out on the animal.
Morally, these acts seem best facilitated when the
individual can rationalize that the harm is serving some
good, for instance that the animal is hurt and needs to be
put out of its misery. Sometimes, accounts like this
generate when the individual observes an animal being hit
by a car or otherwise injured and then decides to “help”
ease the animal’s suffering by “putting it out of its misery.”
It is evident, though, that this “aid” feels very satisfying to
the perpetrator. A similar sort of event occurs sometimes
when someone is having a bad day and driving home from
work. He or she may see an animal by the side of the road
and swerve to hit it, often on a whim, so that he or she
might release a bit of the generalized frustration he or she is
feeling.
Finally, there are still other occasions wherein the
animal itself is causing or, more likely, aggravating existing
frustration, so that the individual may strike out at the
animal to alleviate this tension. Here, the aggression
shown toward the animal may not be anything the person
would be willing to direct toward an adult peer. Rather, he
or she may simply have integrated a rationale under which
physical punishment of an annoying animal or child is
appropriate. The section (above) exploring learning
processes discusses this dynamic in more detail. Though
this behavior may be learned, and thus easily rationalized,
it will still often serve to release feelings of aggression.

Here, again, the idea of a “graduation” hypothesis does not
necessarily make sense. Rather, Arluke’s reasoning (1999)
seems a better explanation; in their study, animal abusers
went back and forth between animals and humans. Some
abused an animal and, later, a human, and then again an
animal. Others abused a human first and then, later, an
animal. Flynn’s (1999) and, later, Curries (2006) research
on animal cruelty as correlated with domestic violence
suggests a similar, mixed pattern. In cases of domestic
violence, abusers might abuse a spouse, kids, and family
pets. In such cases, then, it would seem that there may be,
for some people, certain categories of people and animals
with whom it is acceptable to use physical aggression.
Thus, while one might take out frustration in a physical
way upon a household pet or a child, or even a spouse, he
or she would not express aggression in a physical manner
toward a co-worker, boss, teacher, or pastor.
Sensation-Seeking
The 21st century in America is increasingly dominated by a

“mass society” culture, characterized by sprawling, un-
centered cities which have emerged from the post-industrial
redefinition of economically-desirable skills. While
American society has always been characterized by small,
isolated towns, the social structure afforded by a town
square is now frequently usurped by the dominance of a
Walmart or other major shopping chain, reachable only by
car (Duany et al. 2001).
Bored young people seem to be left wondering what
they might do “for some excitement” (Elias and Dunning
1986). Adolescence has long been an ambiguous stage of
life with regard to role definitions and their associated

activities. By its very modern structure, i.e., since the post-
World War II era, adolescence serves as an extended
“holding pen” designed to delay young people’s entry into
the workforce by as long as possible, presumably so that
they can gain marketable skills (Felson 1998). In fact,
though, schooling is increasingly generic and aimed to
“process” ever-larger mega-schools rendering it not
particularly challenging or engaging for most students.
Additionally, work opportunities for teens are limited in the
increasingly competitive American economy. Hence,
young people are left bored and may look for mischief.
When men talk of their boyhood cruelty toward animals
and other such anti-social engagements (shoplifting,
vandalism, fire setting, etc.), they recount these stories
using a vocabulary that highlights the concept of sensation-
seeking (Matza 1964b). This rhetoric echoes Katz’s (1988)
exploration of thrill-seeking among shoplifters. Stories
provided him by young people who had engaged in shop-
lifting suggests that these youngsters did not shoplift
because they particularly needed, or even wanted, the items
they stole. The motivation for the behavior is explicitly
and consistently articulated as being the feeling of
excitement that is garnered by feeling as though one has
gotten away with something.
Many accounts of animal abuse evince this same rubric
of expression. Maybe reported abusers recount
experiencing the abuse as something that was fun, or, often,
funny. Most such accounts feature settings wherein
abusers felt there was “nothing to do.” Many times, the
account features alcohol consumption and an impromptu
opportunity to do something to an unsuspecting animal.
The young people, for instance, may be sitting around on a
porch, perhaps drinking, feeling bored. A neighborhood

cat might happen by, and someone will suggest doing
something to the cat, selling the idea as something
potentially “hilarious.” The others in the group may go
along, excited to have something to do. As some accounts
suggest, however, behavior that begins with the motivation
of relieving boredom via seeking sensation can turn into an
unexpectedly negative experience if the animal is killed or
injured in such a way as to emotively affect the abuser.
Conclusion
Though each case of animal cruelty is unique, we can see

some patterns in its motivations. Additionally, we can see
crossovers in motivations in that some accounts incorporate
multiple motivational forces. Moreover, it seems evident
that such acts usually tell richer tales of social dynamics
and dysfunctions than they do of any particular individual’s
pathologies.
CHAPTER VIII
Conclusions and Implications:

How Understanding the Social
Construction of Animal Cruelty
Helps Clarify Other Acts of
Juvenile Delinquency
Animal cruelty is but one of many kinds of behaviors that

are commonly categorizes as juvenile delinquency. Animal
cruelty, as has been explored herein, is, however, more
likely to be considered a serious act than are other kinds of
delinquency, such as shoplifting or lying. And, though
most acts of animal cruelty are probably no more serious
than shoplifting or vandalism in terms of the developmental
psychology of the young perpetrator, some young people
seem to be demonstrating a new kind of “extreme”
violence: school shootings, “bumfights,” “wilding,” etc.
Are these acts really more common and, if so, why? Or, do
these acts simply generate moral panics played out on the
always-hungry stages of talk-show TV and twenty-four
hour news networks?
131
Gottfredson and Hirshi’s (1990) identify ineffective

parenting (defined as parents not recognizing and punishing
deviant behavior) as the major “cause” of low self-control
in future adults. A punitive approach to socialization,
however, virtually ensures that a child will not develop his
or her own “spirit of discipline” (Piaget 1997:361).
Discipline in our society is largely meted out via
punishment and negative reinforcement (i.e., “Don’t do
that!”). Explanation and reasoning are seldom given much
attention, aside from in the idealized family dramas enacted
on television, such as in the TV show 7th Heaven. As
Piaget (1997:363) argues, “it may very well be that it is in
spite of adult authority that the best of our young people
sooner or later adopt a disciplined way of living,” or, as he
argues, a compassionate outlook toward others.
Ironically, as we give less time and attention to our
children as a social priority, overwrought parents are left
with too little time and too many demands. The familial
conditions inherent to this period in history— busy parents,
broken families, overcrowded classrooms, “latchkey” kids,
and a hegemonic mass media (Postman 1994)— arguably
underscore the desire for a simplified means of identifying
at-risk youth. Such approaches, however, tend toward
demonizing young people and minimizing our cultural
responsibility for their behavior. Thus, when “good,”
middle-class youth violently act out, “civilized” society is
left grasping for explanations which incorporate biological
or parental attributions rather than a social or collective
sense of responsibility. Modern, round-the-clock, instant
access media only helps to generate a “panic” mindset,
leading many people to think there is some new and terrible
outbreak in teen violence/deviance. In fact, concern over
“out of control” teens has characterized American society
Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) 133
for the past many decades (Cohen 1972; also, see Ron
Mann’s film Grass [1999] for an excellent depiction of
historical panics over young people’s marijuana use).
We want quick warning signs by which to identify the
children who might be most likely to become problems.
The difficulty is that these warning signs are typically
constructed via reverse engineering. Children who turn
into monsters are examined under a microscope. Anything
“intuitively” evil is suspect. Past engagement in animal
cruelty, for instance, might be identified as a culprit.
Looking rigorously, however, we can see that many young
people engage in animal abuse, often quite coldly and
callously. Still, few of these young people go on to engage
in adult human violence. It is our responsibility as
researchers to guarantee that “helpful” indicators of
assumed social problems have been carefully tested
because they now have considerable policy import, as any
young person who likes to wear black and play video
games might report:
I still feel kind of uncomfortable here; the kids have
so much money. I think of myself as somebody
different. And since the thing in Colorado, we get
looks from everybody. After those shootings, they
talked about the warning signals, and they’re
describing kids like us. What am I supposed to do
with that? (from a student at an Arizona high
school, as reported by The New York Times [Martin
1999]).
To make monsters of the modern alienated teen is to follow
suit with prior eras, wherein marijuana, car racing, and
rebellious hair or dance styles were demonized. To do so
however, ensures us no better understanding than “the
confused impressions of the crowd” (from Spaulding and
Simpson’s translation of Durkheim’s Suicide, 1951:41).

Extending Durkheim’s perspective and presuming that
animal cruelty may indeed be an indication more of social
than individual patterns, the moral consensus that animal
cruelty is inhumane seems to be strongly counterbalanced
by the reality that many of us have, at times, been cruel
toward animals.
School Shooters
While the Columbine shootings represented the

culmination of a year of violent school shootings during the
1998-99 school year, rendering that particular school year
uniquely violent, school shootings in fact are not an
historical anomaly. One of the more infamous cases dates
back to 1979 and was perpetrated in San Diego by a young
woman, 17-year-old Brenda Spencer. She shot up the
elementary school across the street from her home with a
gun she received for Christmas.
What was unique to the school shootings of 1998-99
was that there were so many of them in such quick
succession. Newman (2004) in the book Rampage explore
the phenomenon by visiting the town of each of that year’s
school shootings and doing in-depth interviews with
members of each community. Their study documents a
complex web of factors, conflating around the nexus of
rural, insulated societies, isolation and boredom, and a
desire for attention mixed with feelings of desolation on the
part of the shooters.
In the case of Columbine, for instance, shooters Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris proved a deadly pair. Had Klebold
never met Harris, he might not have ever done such a thing.
However, Harris and Klebold proved a nasty match. For
months, they had plotted a militaristic attack on their
school, but Harris had applied to the Marines. He was

turned down because he had taken anti-depressants, and in
the same week was rejected by the college of his choice
and his date to the prom. This series of rejections arguably
pushed Harris over the edge. Had any of these factors gone
differently, that terrible day might never have happened.
Harris and Klebold might have joked years later about their
“plots” against their high school.
The societal reaction that our teens are “out of control”
that unfolded after Columbine did more, arguably, to
underline the racial, ethnic, and socio-economic divisions
within our society than it did to address the supposed
danger within America’s schools. In fact, still, the chance
of any particular child being shot at school was low, but for
mainstream, white, upper and middle class parents, seeing
blonde, blue-eyed middle-American kids being shot to
pieces in the schoolyard rattled them. In the 1980s, the
gang violence that plagued youngsters in urban centers
served only to keep white suburbanites locked up in their
gated communities. In cities like Detroit and Philadelphia,
white suburbanites abandoned the urban core. But, this did
little to affect their everyday life. Seeing seemingly
senseless violence seeping into their communities,
however, beset these affluent white communities with a
moral panic. Teens were out of control and needed to
better monitored and managed. Still, most wealthy or
upper-middle class teens who were identified for relatively
petty crimes were excused just as many of the school
shooters of the 1998-99 school year had been, but any teen
who did anything truly violent was likely to face adult court
and life sentences or even the death penalty. Meantime,
teens from urban areas and working-class or rural
communities were facing more hyper vigilant monitoring

and punishment.
“Bum Fights”
One behavior that has been receiving increased media

scrutiny, appearing recently on both the “Dr. Phil” show
and 60 Minutes, is “bum fighting.” Young people are, in
increasing numbers, reportedly beating up and even killing
homeless people (Bradley 2006). It is theorized that teens
are watching videos from a series called “Bum Fights” that
is marketed by Indecline Films via the
www.bumfights.com web site by a 23-year-old man named
Ryan McPherson. McPherson promises people $100 to
$1000 for clips they send in of “bum fights” they incite.
Some teens seem to be mimicking the behavior they see on
tape, either finding homeless people to beat up or inciting
homeless people to fight one another and then videotaping
these acts. Homeless people are characterized as
“outsiders,” or less than human. The videos portray the
fights as comical, almost cartoon-like. That some young
people might imitate such behavior is not implausible. In
fact, such attacks seem to parallel “wilding” attacks by
young people on unsuspecting strangers that were
commonly reported a few years back and were also
typically videotaped (as, by the way, are not a few acts of
animal cruelty). Such incidents of small-group, all-male
violence among adolescents also sounds eerily familiar to
the rape and murder of Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena, a
transgendered individual whose story is recounted in the
film Boys Don’t Cry (1999).
Arguably, this could be similar to the phenomenon of
animal cruelty as it is detailed in the narratives presented in
Chapter 5 of this text. Bored and seeking something
“exciting” to do, young people—in particular small groups

of males—go out seeking some excitement. They might
see a hapless homeless person and decide to act out against
him or her. It is my guess that, just as within many of the
incidents of animal cruelty, one person probably starts the
act and then cajoles the others to participate.
This phenomenon of small group violence can be seen
in other situations, as well, such as the case of the 1998
dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. There were
three men that killed Mr. Byrd. One, John William King,
24, was clearly the ring-leader. Another had a
developmental condition that rendered him much less
mature than his chronological age; he simply seemed to go
along with the leader. The third knew the group was doing
wrong but was too intimidated to stand up to the leader and
so he went along, doing as little as possible to actually
participate. In an interview later, this man tried to claim
that, though the leader was tattooed in racial epithets, this
third man had never used the “N” word and did not believe
in any of those idea. I find this hard to believe; this third
man likely shared the racist attitudes of the leader.
However, I do think that this third man was probably
caught in the moment. He probably would not have done
something like this on his own, much as Dylan Klebold
probably would not have had he never met Eric Harris.
When these behaviors occur, it is likely because there is
one individual who likely comes from an at-risk or violent
background who then influences others to “go along.”
Finding the Dangerous Needles among the “Boys Being

Boys”
Rather than attempting to effectively profile all teens, it

would be more prudent to watch for those teens that come
from troubled home environments. However, what this
often means to people is homes where a child is very
evidently being abused or neglected. Many times, an
abusive home environment is one where the child is
erratically punished, sometimes very harshly. It is a home
where the child is derided and ridiculed and where he or
she must watch a parent or siblings being similarly derided,
ridiculed, or even beaten. These sorts of things, where
there is aggressive, erratic parenting, happens in far too
many American homes, but it is something that, in a culture
that is quite accepting of the adage, “Spare the rod, spoil
the child,” gets overlooked. And so, these kids, who
potentially might really be dangerous, who are learning to
be violent by their caretakers and learning the
neutralization techniques to justify this violence as well, are
missed until, one day, they snap. Once they have snapped,
we then parade them on CNN and TV shows like American
Justice or Oxygen Network’s new Snapped, which seems
to profile violent teenage girls, warning that these were
“normal” kids who just suddenly became violent one day.
But, people do not just become violent one day. The young
person, or the “mastermind” of such acts, if there is more
than one youngster, has been, effectively, socialized for
violence well before he or she “snapped.” By demonizing
all teens as potentially violent, we attempt to neutralize our
own responsibility for condoning violent parenting and
ignoring dangerous situations in seemingly “normal”
homes.
Post-Columbine and especially now in the post 9/11

environment, at-risk teens have become even more
scrutinized (FBI 2000). Previously dismissed pranks such
as calling in a bomb threat during finals week are now
being prosecuted under terrorism laws. Young, middle-
class Americans are being labeled “terrorists” and given
harsh sentences for such behavior. With TV shows
warning of dangerous teens and teens gone wild, it is easy
to rationalize that such harsh punishment is merited. Is it
really though? Or are young people just being young
people. The juvenile justice system was created because it
was understood that young people do not possess the same
decision-making capabilities of adults. And, though they
may dress and act like twenty-something’s, indeed, these
children do not possess the logical and evaluative faculties
that their twenty-something peers do.
Subjecting such young people to adult criminal court
and even adult correctional facilities only ensures that these
children are truly hardened. Could we, as Schur (1973)
suggests, find a way to overlook much of this behavior and
allow children to simply grow out of such phases? Of
course, a child who murders might not be able to be
overlooked so easily, however, even in this case, would it
not seem plausible that such a child could be reformed?
In effect, if such labels such as “thug” or “killer” tend
to connotate images of men in most citizen’s minds (per
Affect Control Theory—see Heise 1979 and MacKinnon
1994), a young man who starts to traverse a deviant
pathway might find that such labels are applied to him as
in, “this is where you are headed.” Courts and correctional
systems may think that they are trying to curtail a problem
before it becomes too severe. This embodies the “scared
straight” approach. In effect, we seem to think that, if we
come down hard and fast on a troubled child, they will get
scared and choose a better course. Human behavior is not
so simple, though. Young people often engage in,
especially negative, behavior for irrational reasons. In the
end, such a young man might instead tend to internalize
such a label via the “looking-glass” self process (Cooley
1902). Thus, the label will carry more power over a longer
period of time, thereby potentially proving more salient in
terms of identity structure than it was ever intended to be.
The impetus to punish young people for what amounts
to school pranks arguably extends from an overflow of
funds being diverted to “protecting” schools from terrorist
attacks. Schools apply for these funds and then have to
justify their efforts. The teenage prankster becomes a
natural target for such enforcement. In the same way, as
the correctional system has expanded over the last twenty-
five years, the juvenile part of this system has followed the
overarching paradigm. In effect, there is a financial need
for “dangerous” teens to now fill these facilities and
employ the workers within them. The more dangerous teen
who, for instance, have murdered another person are
typically transferred to adult facilities. So, who is left
behind to fill the beds?
How might we better socialize young people to be

empathetic?
Bandura (1990:43) suggests that: “civilized conduct

requires social systems that uphold compassionate behavior
and renounce cruelty.” Outwardly, our society does just
that. However, our culture also clearly accommodates all
sorts of cruel images and ideals. The discipline norms
embraced by the vast majority of parents are replete with
violence (Greven 1991; Strauss 1994). Our television and
film media display scores of violent images during almost

any given hour of programming. More than simply the
wide availability of such images however, is the way in
which certain identities are portrayed. Officially, “Officer
Friendly” is the way in which middle-class children are
taught to think of a police officer. But this ideal is hardly
confirmed by the “real cop” shows that many of these
young people watch quite regularly. Children are taught to
be honest and noble, but can the movies they love depict
more ambiguous characters, such as Dirty Harry, garnering
the most social respect.
Piaget (1997), extending Durkheim’s (1964)
consideration of modern, industrial society, argues that
children effectively manage two moral codes. The first is a
solidarity-styled system marked by constraint and
hierarchy. Familiar adults such as parents or teachers, as
well as older peers, are largely simply obeyed based upon
their social authority. As the child matures, however, he or
she ideally acquires a “common morality” (Piaget
1997:351), which is inferred based upon a reasoned
integration of the moral codes that govern the various
social relations that the child maintains. As the child
becomes capable of taking the role of the other, i.e., as s/he
incorporates Mead’s (1934) concept of a “generalized
other”, he or she becomes more inclined toward a
cooperative morality. This, argues Durkheim (1964), is the
sort of moral code we would expect to emerge in an
advanced, differentiated society. As people become more
individuated, they are expected to take more responsibility
for themselves and to govern themselves via an internalized
“spirit of discipline” (Piaget 1997:361).
Unfortunately, if we consider Postman’s reasoning in
The Disappearance of Childhood, we must question how
effectively a common morality is being internalized in a

society that is increasingly dominated by mass media. As
Green et al. (2004) suggest, in a discussion of why many
people so deeply enjoy watching television and movies,
that TV allows viewers to effectively transport into a
narrative world but that such narrative cannot be considered
interaction per se, since social interaction necessitates that
we encounter forceful, demanding, real others. Real
interaction forces us to stand before Cooley’s (1902)
looking-glass and adjust our presentation of self to ensure
more pleasant cooperation with others. Television, while it
can provide “company” and simulate “interaction,” is not at
all similar to real interaction that necessitates constantly
taking on the role of the other so as to consider how to keep
the other person content and engaged.
In effect, by not interacting with real others and thereby
being forced to negotiate and incorporate their needs and
demands, one potentially becomes anti-social and
impatient, perhaps preferring the “simplicity” of televised
“companions” and virtual relationships. How can we
expect young people in this society to act in compassionate
ways when we too often raise them within a home
environment in which violence is tolerated as a means of
enacting power and discipline and then, increasingly, do
not—as a society—facilitate the sort of interaction which
would allow them to learn empathy and self-discipline?
That animal cruelty is in fact quite common and not
especially correlated with human-directed violence should
perhaps frighten us, as a society, more than if it were
unusual and reliably predicted individual social-
psychological pathology.
APPENDIX A
Diagnostic Interview Schedule

(DIS) Items
143
144 Appendix
DIS BEHAVIOR CHECKLIST
Subject #________
Date Administered _____\__ __\_____
Administered By _______
1. When you were a child or a

teenager, did you frequently No___
break the rules at home or at Yes___
school?
teenager, did you frequently get
No___
into trouble with the teacher or
Yes___
principal for misbehaving in
school?
3. When you were younger,
were you ever blamed for No___
cheating in schoolwork or in Yes___
games with your friends?
No___
4. Were you ever suspended Yes___
from school? If Yes – How many
times? _____
No___
5. Were you ever expelled from Yes___
school? If Yes – How many
times? _____
No___
6. Did you ever play hooky
Occasionally___
from school?
Frequently___
Appendix 145
7. Did you ever get in trouble

with the police, your parents or No___
neighbors because of fighting Occasionally___
(other than with siblings) outside Frequently___
of school?)
8. Did you ever use a weapon No___
(like a stick, gun or knife) in a Occasionally___
fight? Frequently___
teenager, were you ever mean or No___
cruel to animals, or did you Occasionally___
intentionally hurt animals Frequently___
(mammals, not insects, etc.)?
10. When you were young, did
No___
people ever complain that you
Occasionally___
bullied or were mean to other
Frequently___
children?
teenager, did you ever
No___
intentionally hurt you siblings or
Occasionally___
other children seriously enough
Frequently___
to cause notice by
parents/surrogates?
No___
teenager, did you ever run away
Yes___
from home overnight?
13. Of course no one tell the
truth all the time, but did you tell No___
a lot of lies when you were a Yes___
child or a teenager?
14. Have you ever used a false No___
name or an alias? Yes___
146 Appendix
15. When you were a child, did

you more than once swipe things
No___
from stores or other children, or
Yes___
steal from parents or from
anyone else?
16. Have you ever taken money
or property from someone else
No___
by threatening to use force, like
Yes___
snatching a purse or robbing
them?
17. When you were a kid, did
you ever intentionally (on
purpose?) damage someone’s car No___
or house or do anything else to Yes___
destroy someone else’s’
property?
No___
teenager, did you ever set any
Yes___
fires you were not supposed to?
19. Were you ever arrested as a No___
juvenile or sent to juvenile Occasionally___
court? Frequently___
20. Have you ever been arrested
No___
since you were 18 years old for
Occasionally___
anything other than traffic
Frequently___
violations?
21. Have you had at least 4
traffic tickets in your life for No___
things like speeding, running a Yes___
red light or causing an accident?
Appendix 147
22. Have you forced someone

else to have sex when they didn’t No___
want to using physical force or Yes___
threat of physical force?
23. Have you ever had an affair No___
with a married person? Yes___
24. During (any) marriage, did
you have sexual relations outside No___
of marriage with at least 3 Occasionally___
different people (heterosexual or Frequently___
homosexual)?
25. Have you ever been paid
No___
money to have sex with
Yes___
someone?
26. Have you ever had sex with
No___
someone in order to obtain
Yes___
drugs?
27. Have you ever made money
by finding customers for No___
prostitutes or call girls or male Yes___
prostitutes?
28. Have you ever made money
outside the law by buying or No___
selling stolen property or selling Yes___
drugs or running numbers?
29. Have you ever done
anything that you could have No___
been arrested for if you had been Yes___
caught?
30. Have you ever gotten into
No___
trouble because you had spent
Yes___
too much money?
148 Appendix
31. As an adult, have you failed

to pay debts that you owed or
failed to take care of other
No___
financial responsibilities that
Yes___
people expected you to take care
of (examples: child support,
loans)?
32. Have you ever intentionally No___
written a bad check? Yes___
33. Have you ever been sued for
a bad debt or had things you No___
bought taken back because you Yes___
didn’t meet payments?
34. Did you ever walk out on
your husband or wife (partner
No___
with whom you were living with
Yes___
as if married) either permanently
or at least a few weeks?
35. Did you ever hit or throw
things at your husband or wife No___
(partner you were living with as Yes___
though you were married)?
36. Have you ever spanked or
hit a child (yours or anyone
No___
else’s) hard enough that he or
Yes___
she had bruises or had to stay in
bed or see a doctor?
37. Have you ever been accused
of child abuse, or been the No___
subject of a complaint on a child Yes___
abuse hotline?
Appendix 149
38. Since age 15, have you been

in more than one fight that came
to swapping blows other than No___
fights with your husband or wife Yes___
(partner you were living with as
though you were married)?
39. Since you were 15, have you
No___
ever used a weapon like a stick,
Yes___
knife, or gun, in a fight?
No___
ever physically attacked anyone
Yes___
(other than while fighting)?
41. Since you were 18, did you
No___
ever hold three or more different
Yes___
jobs within a five year period?
42. Have you been fired from No___
more than one job? Yes___
ever quit a job three times or No___
more before you already had Yes___
another job lined up?
44. Have you ever thought you
No___
lied pretty often since you have
Yes___
been an adult?
45. Have you ever traveled
around for a month or more
without having any
No___
arrangements ahead of time and
Yes___
not knowing how long you were
going to stay or where you were
going to work?
150 Appendix
46. Has there ever been a period

No___
when you had no regular place to
Yes___
live, for at least a month or so?
47. Has there ever been a period
when you did not provide the No___
financial support to you children Yes___
that you were supposed to?
48. Have you sometimes left
young children under 6 years old
No___
at home alone while you were
Yes___
out shopping or doing anything
else?
49. Have there been times when
a neighbor fed a child (of
yours/you were caring for)
because you didn’t get around to No___
shopping for food or cooking, or Yes___
kept your child overnight
because no one was taking care
of him or her at home?
50. Has a nurse or social worker
or teacher ever said that any
child of yours wasn’t being
No___
given enough to eat or wasn’t
Yes___
kept clean enough or wasn’t
getting medical care when it was
needed?
51. Have you more than once
run out of money for food for
No___
your family because you had
Yes___
spent the money on yourself or
on going out?
Appendix 151
52. Have you often felt that co

No___
-workers, neighbors or others
Yes___
were hostile towards you?
53. Have people often said that
you did things deliberately to
annoy or bother them (examples: No___
arguing, teasing, or practical Yes___
jokes until the other person gets
angry)?
54. Have you sometimes
enjoyed being mean (i.e.,
No___
annoying badgering, harassing,
Yes___
hassling, etc.) toward other
people)?
55. Have any of your friends or
other people complained or
No___
gotten mad at you because you
Yes___
borrowed some of their things
without their permission?
56. As an adult, do you change No___
“best friends” frequently? Yes___
57. Have you often felt that
people in authority (police, your
No___
boss, etc.) have gone out of their
Yes___
way to be difficult toward you,
or to give you a hard time?
58. Was there ever a time when
you really enjoyed outsmarting
people in authority (like parents,
No___
your boss, or the police), to the
Yes___
point that you would often go
out of your way to put something
over on them?
152 Appendix
59. As a teenager, did you ever

intentionally spread rumors
about someone (using letters,
telephone calls or just talking No___
with others) to hurt them, get Yes___
back at them, or so that you
could get something you
wanted?
60. As a child or teenager, did
you sneak out of the house at No___
night when you were not Occasionally___
allowed to, so that you could Frequently___
have some fun with friends?
61. Have you ever had the habit
of exaggerating the truth about
yourself, or lying about things No___
you have done or experienced, to Yes___
make yourself look good or
better than others?
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Index
A Arluke, 2, 3, 9, 12, 13,

15, 17, 18, 28, 41, 45,
accounts, 3, 4, 12, 19, 28, 96, 131, 157
33, 37, 40, 41, 46, 58, Ascione, 3, 8, 15, 16, 18,
97, 100, 106, 107, 109, 30, 33, 52, 117, 157,
111, 112, 113, 121, 158, 165
124, 125, 127, 129, ASPCA, 8
130, 133, 134
advocate, 8, 9 B
Affect Control Theory,
36, 126, 143 bottle rocket, 98, 111
anti-social, 4, 11, 12, 13, "bum fights," 140
21, 24, 25, 40, 42, 46, butchers, 2, 3
47, 48, 50, 58, 63, 64,
66, 67, 70, 71, 74, 75, C
76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, cat, 98, 99, 100, 105, 107,
85, 88, 89, 90, 91, 118, 109, 110, 113, 128, 133
119, 120, 133, 146 Chicago School, 29
antisocial personality Columbine, 138, 139
disorder, 5, 95 conduct disorder, 10, 50,
95
163
164 Index
cruelty, vi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, excitement, 34, 100, 132,

10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 133, 140
18, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28,
30, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, F
40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47,
Felthous, 2, 3, 11, 12, 15,
51, 52, 53, 59, 61, 62,
16, 17, 30, 33, 45, 51,
63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69,
52, 161, 164
71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78,
firecracker, 28, 107
79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86,
firesetting, 18, 119
88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95,
Flynn, 2, 3, 12, 15, 19,
96, 97, 99, 103, 115,
29, 32, 33, 45, 51, 52,
117, 119, 120, 121,
107, 131, 161
122, 124, 125, 126,
Foucault, 5, 161
129, 131, 133, 134,
frustration, 27, 29, 30, 34,
135, 137, 138, 140,
97, 103, 120, 121, 123,
144, 146
129, 130, 131
frustration, 29, 129
D
Dahmer, 13, 15, 160, 166 G
Diagnostic Interview
gender, 15, 24, 25, 27, 32,
Schedule, 24, 46, 49,
34, 35, 38, 47, 53, 60,
50, 53, 147
75, 77, 85, 86, 88, 92,
dirty play, 28, 41
115, 126
dog, 1, 13, 32, 40, 52, 98,
graduation hypothesis,
105, 106, 107, 108,
11, 129, 130
110, 127, 128
driving, 20, 39, 100, 111,
H
131
DSM, 10, 48, 49, 50, 96 Hare, 3, 5, 25, 162
homicide, 29
E Humane Society of the
United States, 8
empathy, 1, 37, 146
Index 165
I N
identity, 26, 27, 34, 36, Nazis, 2
38, 39, 42, 67, 121, Nilsen, 13, 166
122, 124, 125, 144
O
K offenders, 7, 9, 12, 15, 18
Kant, 2, 168
Katz, 4, 27, 34, 38, 39, P
120, 124, 133, 164
parent, 31, 32, 33, 123,
Kellert, 2, 3, 11, 12, 15,
127, 141
16, 17, 30, 33, 45, 51,
participants, 48, 49, 53,
52, 161, 164
65, 91
Kinkel, Kipl, 5, 10, 170
peers, 3, 28, 30, 31, 38,
39, 52, 75, 101, 102,
L 112, 115, 121, 122,
learning theory, 31, 170 123, 125, 128, 129,
Lemert, 39, 41, 57, 165 142, 145
“link”, 9, 11, 17, 18 PETA, 7
Locke, 1, 165 psychology, 23, 46, 164
Lockwood, 3, 8, 12, 13,
16, 17, 117, 157, 165 R
looking-glass self, 37
rabbit, 102, 103, 104
rage, 29
M rapists, 4, 7
MacDonald, 5, 6, 165 rationalization, 33, 102
masculinity, 35
Matza, 37, 42, 126, 133, S
166, 171
scapegoating, 105
mercy killing, 34, 100,
school shooters, 5, 10,
101
139
Schur, 29, 35, 40, 42,
115, 126, 169
166 Index
sensation-seeking, 27, V
132
shoplift, 27, 133 violent, vi, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11,
siblings, 32, 33, 65, 66, 12, 13, 17, 19, 29, 31,
68, 69, 71, 76, 107, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41, 42,
108, 109, 118, 141, 149 45, 54, 60, 63, 64, 67,
sociopath, 9 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76,
sociopaths 78, 83, 90, 100, 106,
sociopathy, 2, 25 118, 119, 120, 121,
squirrel, 101, 102, 111 126, 128, 138, 139,
suicide, 29 141, 142, 144, 146, 162
Sutherland, 31, 32, 125,
127, 170, 171 W
Weinberg, v, 9, 39, 55,
T 59, 126, 165, 169, 172
teasing, 51, 99, 110, 112, Widom, 32, 35, 36, 48,
155 107, 172
terrorists, 142
TV, 135, 136, 142, 145

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Criminal Justice

A Series from LFB Scholarly

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lea, Suzanne R. Goodney.

Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

and for Marty Weinberg and David Heise,

CONSTRUCTING THE “LINK” 21

DOES ANIMAL CRUELTY DURING CHILDHOOD

HOW DO WOMEN’S AND MEN’S REPORTED RATES

TELLING TALES TO ACCOUNT FOR INCIDENTS OF

THE FINDINGS AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: HOW

I would like to thank Sharon Barnartt and John

encouragement over many years. David Heise taught me to

Suzanne Goodney Lea, Ph.D.

The Presumed “Link” Between

“…unnatural cruelty is planted in us; and what humanity

This study examines human cruelty toward animals, a

dog, but he is doing something wrong to his own moral

animal cruelty clearly signaled these individuals' eventual

social, psychological, and developmental functions that this

How Did Animal Abuse Come to Be Viewed as a

In 1963, John M. MacDonald posited that aggression

and conflicting data, discussed below, the notion that

behavior. It reassures people to believe that there must be

Developing a heuristic opinion based upon one’s

first victim,” said the Humane Society’s Randall

their schoolmates and teacher, Newsweek asserts that,

It reassures people to think that there must be warning signs

histories. Tapia’s (1971) study of children who are cruel to

Lockwood (1997) suggest, the fact that a serial murderer,

such use of an animal as a proxy for one’s frustrations may

Table 1.1: Conceptual Model Illustrating How Animal

Kind to Animals Cruel to Animals

“torture” of animals involved no such thing. He did have a

seem prone to do, Dahmer was outraged and immediately

study, Ascione (1993) remarks: “Although this and related

humans” has not yet been reliably established (Arluke and

commission of animal cruelty (Tallichet and Hensley

particular antisocial behavior may matter more than their

practitioners (Muscari 2003), which asks “Should I assess

animals. The use of a clinical study population,

Constructing the “Link”

Any discussion of a pathological condition, or social

that comprises a psychological diagnosis incorporates a

the second. A careful reliability check of the battery of

class often implies a different response by authority

frustration and aggression release, which is the most

Katz (1988) elucidates a motivation for much youthful

play might be chastised if discovered by adults, children

Frustration and Aggression

Another explanation for aggressive behavior is frustration,

rejected by their peers and/or are socially maladjusted are

Another theory that proves useful in understanding many

social behavior in the same way they learn pro-social

urinating in the house and come to view such treatment as