Testing the direct, indirect, and moderated effects of childhood animal cruelty on future aggressive and non‐aggressive offending

Abstract

The relationship between childhood cruelty toward animals and subsequent aggressive offending was explored in 1,336 (1,154 male, 182 female) participants from the 11-wave Pathways to Desistance study (Mulvey, 2013). Aggressive and income offending at Waves 1 through 10 were regressed onto a dichotomous measure of prior involvement in animal cruelty and four control variables (age, race, sex, early onset behavior problems) assessed at Wave 0 (baseline). Results indicated that childhood animal cruelty was equally predictive of aggressive and non-aggressive (income) offending, a finding inconsistent with the hypothesis that cruelty toward animals desensitizes a person to future interpersonal aggression or in some way prepares the individual for interpersonal violence toward humans. Whereas a significant sex by animal cruelty interaction was predicted, there was no evidence that sex or any of the other demographic variables included in this study (age, race) consistently moderated the animal cruelty-subsequent offending relationship. On the other hand, two cognitive-personality measures (interpersonal hostility, callousness/unemotionality) were found to successfully mediate the animal cruelty-subsequent offending relationship. Outcomes from this study imply that a causal nexus-partially or fully mediated by hostility, callousness/unemotionality, and other cognitive-personality variables-may exist between childhood animal cruelty and subsequent offending, although the effect is not specific to violence.

Associations between different motivations for animal cruelty, methods of animal cruelty and facets of impulsivity

“…Arluke, Levin, Luke, & Ascione, 1999;Ascione, 1999;Ascione, Thompson, & Black, 1997;Bucchieri, 2015;DeViney, Dickert, & Lockwood, 1983;Felthous, 1980;Felthous & Kellert, 1987a;Hellman & Blackman, 1966;Henderson, Hensley, & Tallichet, 2011;Hensley & Tallichet, 2008;Hensley & Tallichet, 2009;Hensley, Tallichet & Dutkiewicz, 2009;Hensley et al, 2012;Holoyda & Newman, 2016;Kellert & Felthous, 1985;Levitt, Hoffer, & Loper, 2016;Merz-Perez & Heide, 2003;MerzPerez, Heide, & Silverman, 2001;Miller & Knutson, 1997;Overton, Hensley & Tallichet, 2012;Tapia, 1971;Tallichet & Hensley, 2004;Walters, 2014). Whilst it is crucial to understand the relationship between childhood animal cruelty and later offending against humans, it is equally important to understand why people are cruel to animals to begin with.…”

Family Context and Externalizing Correlates of Childhood Animal Cruelty in Adjudicated Delinquents

“…The theoretical implication of the current results is that childhood cruelty toward animals may owe its ability to predict subsequent violent and nonviolent offending to its association with variables that are part of a proactive subdimension of the externalizing spectrum. The capacity of animal cruelty to predict violent and nonviolent crime is well documented (Arluke et al, 1999;Lucia & Killias, 2011;Walters, 2014b). What the current study adds to our understanding of animal cruelty is the insight it provides on how early cruelty to animals achieves its effect on later criminality.…”

Your Pain, My Gain: The Interpersonal Context of Sadism

“…Merz-Perez et al (2001) discovered that violent offenders were nearly three times more likely to report having perpetrated animal cruelty compared to nonviolent offenders in the same maximum-security setting. Walters (2014) in a large longitudinal study demonstrated that childhood animal cruelty predicted subsequent violent (and nonviolent) offending and that this relationship was mediated by interpersonal hostility and callousness. Animal cruelty has also figured prominently in numerous case histories of serial killers (e.g., Wright and Hensley 2003).…”

“…First, the negative consequences of sadistically motivated behaviors seem difficult to contain: Gratification of the sadistic motive often seems to involve multiple victims and/or escalation from non-human to human targets (e.g., Buckels et al 2013;Walters 2014;Wright and Hensley 2003). This is aggravated considerably by sadism's hypothesized mechanism: displaced aggressive impulses, provoked by insults to the self, that often reap powerful affective rewards when expressed.…”