Guns, explosives, and puppy dog tails: The social function of animal cruelty

Though there exists a widespread belief in American society that children who engage in animal cruelty will go on to be violent toward other humans later in life, there is, in fact, little empirical research examining this presumed correlation. This dissertation examines diagnostic interview data reporting on childhood/adolescent and adult anti-social behavior for 570 individuals. Correlations between animal cruelty and other childhood/teenage anti-social behaviors are examined, as is the extent to which childhood/adolescent animal cruelty predicts adult violence. The results indicate that, during childhood/adolescence, animal cruelty is associated with both violent behavior such as bullying and hurting siblings but also with non-violent behavior such as shoplifting, vandalism, and fire setting. Men are much more likely than women to report having been cruel to animals during childhood/adolescence and to have engaged in a range of other childhood/teenage anti-social behaviors. Logistic regressions indicate that animal cruelty, when considered against a range of other anti-social childhood/teenage behaviors, shows no significant predictive power in discerning which individuals will go on to engage in human-directed violence as adults.; Quantitative data is supplemented by open-ended interview data collected from 21 of the 570 initial study participants. Analysis of these interviews identifies several themes that offer an alternative model by which to understand animal cruelty. Rather than animal cruelty being a reflection of a violent disposition, it is argued that animal cruelty generates from: (1) feelings of youthful frustration, (2) a sense of boredom, (3) social learning processes by which one might engage in violent behavior after observing an adult role model or peer doing similar acts, and (4) explorations of personal and social identities, whereby one might explore being "tough" or "mean" by engaging in violent acts against.