by Hal Herzog
DO CHILDREN WHO ABUSE ANIMALS
BECOME VIOLENT ADULTS?
On a recent visit to Manhattan, I spent an afternoon strolling through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for paintings depicting human-animal relationships. There were lots of them, but one of the most striking was an oil painting by a sixteenth-century Italian artist named Annibale Carracci aptly titled Two Children Teasing a Cat. The painting portrays an innocent-looking young boy and girl and a cat. The boy is holding the cat with his left hand and a large crayfish in his right. He has provoked the crayfish into clamping one of its massive claws onto the cat’s ear. That the children are angelically smiling, apparently delighted with their “game,” makes the painting especially chilling. What should we make of this wanton cruelty? Is it just a childish prank or an indicator of deep-seated psychopathology that will someday erupt into far worse violence?
The infliction of abject cruelty toward members of other species illustrates how our interactions with animals reflect larger themes in psychology. For example, is animal abuse the result of nature or nurture? Some scientists believe that roots of cruelty lie in our evolutionary history, particularly the fact that our ancestors were likely meat-eating apes that delighted in ripping their prey to pieces. Others, however, argue that human children are naturally kind, and that callousness toward animals is instilled in us by a culture that promotes activities like hunting and eating flesh. Cruelty also offers fodder for those looking for moral inconsistencies in our treatment of animals. What, for instance, is the moral difference between the pleasure that a hunter derives from shooting deer and that a mean child gets from tying a tin can to the tail of a dog?
The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that “one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.” She was echoing a theme that has been knocking around for hundreds of years. John Locke and Immanuel Kant connected animal cruelty and human-directed violence. In fact, Kant thought that the only reason we should be nice to animals is that animal cruelty leads to human-directed brutality. Some anthrozoologists are convinced that animal abuse in children is often the first step on a path that leads to adult criminality. Others, however, are not so sure.
One of the first systematic studies associating animal cruelty and criminality was conducted by Alan Felthous, a psychiatrist, and Stephen Kellert, a leader in the study of human-animal interactions. They interviewed groups of aggressive criminals, nonaggressive criminals, and noncriminals. The highly aggressive criminals were much more likely to repeatedly abuse animals than men in the other groups. And their level of violence was different. They cooked live cats in microwave ovens, drowned dogs, and tortured frogs.
In the wake of this and similar studies, I have taken to asking my friends if they ever abused animals when they were children. It was an eye-opener. For example, my buddy Fred, a builder, confessed that he and his childhood pals blew up frogs with firecrackers. When he was five, Henry’s mom bought him a little brown puppy with floppy ears. One day Henry and his friends decided to play catch with the puppy by tossing it back and forth over a picket fence. The dog banged into the pickets over and over. The pup died a couple of days later. Henry told me that just thinking about it now makes him want to cry. When I asked Linda if she had participated in animal cruelty as a child, she got very quiet and suddenly serious. She said yes but that she just could not talk about it. Ian was the least of the offenders. All he did was fry ants with a magnifying glass.
I was surprised that so many people I knew admitted to abusing animals when they were little. Yet none of them turned to the dark side—no felons, wife-beaters, or serial killers among them. Neither did Charles Darwin, who wrote in his autobiography that, as a boy “I beat a puppy, I believe simply from enjoying the power.” (However, Darwin then wrote, “This act lay heavily on my conscience as shown by my remembering the exact spot where the crime was committed.”)
I plead guilty, too. When I was growing up in Florida, my friends and I used land crabs and toads for target practice with our Daisy Red Ryder BB guns. One morning, BB gun in hand, I saw a songbird sitting on a limb. I figured, why not take a shot at it? I was sure I would miss. And, after all, a BB wouldn’t do much damage. I was wrong. A puff of air, and the bird silently dropped to the ground, dead. I was horrified. There was a huge gulf between an ugly land crab and a lively bird perched in a tree. It was the last animal I ever shot.
The idea that there is a strong link between childhood animal cruelty and violence directed toward people is so well established that the term “The Link” is now a registered trademark owned by the American Humane Association. Public presentations by Link advocates often begin with tales of tragedy. First, the serial killers: Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), Jeffrey Dahmer, Lee Boyd Malvo (the D.C. sniper accomplice)—all of them accused of childhood animal cruelty. Then the school shootings: Columbine, Colorado; Springfield, Oregon; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky—again, all committed by boys reputed to have a history of animal abuse.
I have never been overly impressed with this type of anecdotal evidence. Some Link advocates would have you believe that most or even all serial killers and school shooters had a history of childhood animal abuse. Not true. An analysis of 354 cases of serial murders found that nearly 80% of the perpetrators did not have a known history of cruelty to animals. The connection between school shootings and animal cruelty is even more tenuous. In 2004, a joint task force of the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Education undertook a thorough examination of the psychological characteristics of the perpetrators of thirty-seven school shootings. The researchers found that only five of the shooters had a history of animal abuse. They concluded, “Very few of the attackers were known to have harmed or killed an animal at any time prior to the incident.” Clearly, some Link proponents overstate the relationship between childhood animal abuse and adult violence. There is, however, some evidence that the two are somehow related. The problem is determining how close the relationship is and why it exists.
There are several reasons why you might think that animal cruelty in children and later violence would be connected. I call the first one the bad seed hypothesis. Some children are liars, cheats, thieves, and bullies by the time they are in elementary school. Psychiatrists refer to this pattern of behavior as a conduct disorder. In the 1960s, it was thought that three traits were especially characteristic of these kids: fire-setting, bed-wetting, and animal cruelty. While this trio is not as closely connected as originally thought, the American Psychiatric Association still includes animal cruelty as a diagnostic criterion for conduct disorders. The bad seed hypothesis holds that animal abuse is not a cause of delinquency, but a sign of a seriously troubled child, many of whom will become psychopathic adults.
A stronger version of Link thinking is called the violence graduation hypothesis. This is the idea that pulling the wings off butterflies or beating a dog is the first in a series of steps that can eventually end in prison. The title of an influential book by Linda Merz-Perez and Kathleen Heide captures this idea—Animal Cruelty: Pathway to Violence against People. One implication of this theory is that animal abuse in children can be used as a form of profiling, a way of identifying the potential serial killers and school shooters before their violence escalates.
So, are the data in? Can we conclude that childhood animal cruelty causes later violence? Not necessarily. A group of researchers led by Arnold Arluke, a sociologist at Northeastern University, came up with an innovative way to test the graduation hypothesis. They compared the criminal records of individuals who had been convicted of animal abuse with a group of law-abiding citizens from the same neighborhoods. The researchers reasoned that if the graduation hypothesis were true, the animal abusers would show a propensity for violent crimes rather than run-of-the-mill offenses such as selling drugs or auto theft.
Their results did not support the graduation hypothesis. True, t
he animal abusers were big-time troublemakers. You would not want to live next door to any of them; they committed many more crimes than the noncriminals they were matched with. But they were equal-opportunity bad guys. They were no more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than they were to be arrested for nonviolent offenses like burglary or peddling drugs.
There are other reasons we should be careful about making causal connections between childhood cruelty and adult violence. In Philosophy 101 (Logic), you learn that “all As are Bs does not imply that all Bs are As.” Thus the fact that most heroin addicts first smoked marijuana does not imply that most first-time marijuana smokers will become junkies. Similarly, even if every school shooter and every serial killer had abused animals as a child (a dubious claim), we could not logically conclude that children who pull the wings off moths are apt to become murderers.
More important, the numbers do not support the idea that most early animal abusers become violent when they grow up. Emily Patterson-Kane and Heather Piper analyzed the results of two dozen research reports of childhood cruelty among extremely violent men (serial killers, sexual abusers, school shooters, rapists, and murderers) and males with no history of violence (college students, teenagers, and normal adults). They found that 35% of the violent offenders had been childhood animal abusers—but so had 37% of the males in the “normal” control group. Suzanne Goodney Lea, a sociologist, obtained similar results. She studied the backgrounds of 570 young adults, 15% of whom had a history of animal abuse. She found that children who got in fights, lied habitually, used weapons, or set fires did tend to become violent adults. Animal cruelty, however, did not predict later aggressive behavior.
Arnold Arluke has a talent—listening to people. He puts them at ease, and they tell him things they would not normally reveal. He would have been a good homicide detective. Arluke used this ability to delve into the minds of college students who had tortured animals. They weren’t hard to find. He just asked students in his classes. The students he interviewed had poisoned fish with bleach, ripped the legs off flies, burned grasshoppers with lighter fluid, and played Frisbee with live frogs. This statement by a woman he interviewed is typical: “It was like we didn’t have anything to do and we were bored, so it’s like, ‘OK, let’s go torture some cats!’”
Arluke’s students were not an anomaly. In one recent study of college students, 66% of male students and 40% of female students admitted that they had abused animals. Arluke has come up with a radical suggestion. He believes that for many children, animal cruelty is a normal part of growing up. He calls it dirty play. It’s forbidden fruit, like swearing or smoking cigarettes. He thinks animal abuse enables children to play adult power games in secret. It is also helps cement bonds between the co-conspirators, your partners in crime. Granted, the types of childhood cruelty that Arluke uncovered in his presumably normal sociology students were generally not of the microwaving cats and dropping puppies off the roof variety. And, unlike the hard-core criminals interviewed by Felthous and Kellert, most of Arluke’s students felt remorse for their youthful indiscretions. But the fact remains that childhood animal abuse is more common than is generally recognized.
The awkward fact is that most wanton animal cruelty is not perpetrated by inherently bad kids but by normal children who will eventually grow up to be good citizens. For me, animal abuse raises a big question, but it is not why deranged psychopaths are cruel. The answer to that question is obvious; they are mentally ill, morally blind, or evil. No, the more interesting and important issue transcends our relationships with animals: Why do fundamentally good people do fundamentally bad things?
For some researchers and animal protection organizations, the connection between animal cruelty and human violence has become a moral crusade pursued with missionary zeal. Some researchers, however, have come to question simplistic Link thinking. They worry that Link advocates and the media are perpetuating an irrational moral panic among the public. Link skeptics don’t argue that we should ignore animal abuse. Rather, they believe that we should treat animal abuse as a serious problem in its own right, not because it turns children into adult psychopaths.
Anthrozoologists are divided over the strength of the connection between animal abuse and human violence. This debate is no different than contentious issues in other areas of human behavior. For years, psychologists have argued over whether violent TV causes aggression in children, whether pornography fuels sex crimes, and whether day care is good or bad for children. Like these questions, the controversy over the causes and effects of animal cruelty is not going away. The issue is too important.
As you can see from these examples, the scope of anthrozoology is broad. We investigate issues like personality differences between cat and dog people simply because they are interesting. On the other hand, studies of the effectiveness of animal-assisted therapy and the link between animal cruelty and adult aggression have important real-life implications. But there is another reason that the study of our interactions with other people is both fascinating and important. It is that our interactions with animals offer an unusual glimpse into human nature. As I show in the next chapter, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss got it right when he wrote, “Animals are good to think with.”
2
The Importance of Being Cute
WHY WE THINK WHAT WE THINK ABOUT CREATURES THAT DON’T THINK LIKE US
It’s easier to empathize with the dog than with the flea.
—ERIC GREENE
Judy Barrett of Greensboro, North Carolina, had a problem. She and her husband were crazy about bluebirds. They had spent a lot of money to entice a pair of them to nest in their backyard, even purchasing a snake-proof bluebird nest box and special bird baths. Judy kept a supply of meal-worms in her refrigerator because she heard that bluebirds love them. The Barrett’s amenities did attract a pair of birds, but not the kind they wanted. When they weren’t looking, a common sparrow hijacked the nest box and laid five eggs in the bluebird house.
Not knowing what to do, Judy sent a letter to Randy Cohen, who writes “The Ethicist,” a Dear Abby–style advice column on everyday moral problems in the New York Times Magazine.
Would it be ethical, Judy asked, for her to destroy the eggs of the lowly sparrow to make room for a pair of lovely bluebirds?
Cohen said no. “In ethics, cuteness doesn’t count.”
Logically, of course, he is right. But while cuteness may not count in the rarified world of moral philosophy, it matters a lot in how most people think about the treatment of other species. For instance, one of the biggest factors in how much money people say they would donate to help an endangered species is the size of the animal’s eyes. This is bad news for the rare giant Chinese salamander. It is the largest and possibly most repulsive-looking amphibian on Earth, a beady-eyed six-foot-long mass of brown slime. You don’t see pictures of them gracing the fund-raising brochures of environmental organizations. But contrast the giant salamander with another Chinese animal, the equally rare but infinitely more appealing giant panda, whose eyes are exaggerated by giant dark circles. They are so endearing that the panda is the logo of the World Wildlife Fund.
Of the 65,000 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians on the planet, only a handful merit much human concern. Why do we care about the giant panda but not the giant salamander, the eagle but not the vulture, the bluebird but not the sparrow, the jaguar but not the Dayak fruit bat (one of only two species of mammals in which males produce milk)? The ways that we think about animals are often determined by species’ characteristics—how attractive the creatures are, their size, the shape of their head, whether they are furry (good) or slimy (bad), and how closely they resemble humans. Too many legs or not enough legs are negatives. So are disgusting habits like eating feces or sucking blood. How an animal’s flesh tastes also counts, though not as much as you might think.
The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from
the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters.
What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.
BIOPHILIA: IS LOVE OF ANIMALS INSTINCTIVE?
In an elegant little book written in 1984, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson hypothesized that our species has an instinctive affiliation with the natural world. He called this trait biophilia and argued that it is a built-in part of human nature. Though I was initially skeptical of the idea, evidence is amassing that he is right. The developmental psychologists Judy Deloache and Megan Picard have discovered that even very young infants pay more attention to films of real animals than they do to films of inanimate objects. A team of evolutionary psychologists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, have shown that the human visual system is particularly adept at picking out animals in the environment, a capacity that would have served our ancestors well as they needed to be on the lookout for both predators and prey. They call this idea the animate-monitoring hypothesis, and their experiements show, for example, that people are quicker to spot the movements of an elephant than those of a truck.
