Animal Cruelty, Antisocial Behaviour, and Aggression: More than a Link

201 Pages·2012·3.456 MB·English

by  Eleonora Gullone (auth.)

The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
Series editors: AndrewLinzey and PriscillaCohn
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our treatment
of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of other scholars
have followed, from historians to social scientists. From being a marginal
issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics and in multidiscipli-
nary inquiry. This series explores the challenges that Animal Ethics poses, both
conceptually and practically, to traditional understandings of human-animal
relations.
Specifically, the series will:
• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out ethical
positions on animals;
• p ublish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished, scholars,
and
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in char-
acter or have multidisciplinary relevance
Titles include
ANIMAL SUFFERING: PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE
Elisa Aaltola
ANIMALS AND PUBLIC HEALTH:
Why Treating Animals Better Is Critical to Human Welfare
Aysha Akhtar
AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS AND POLITICAL THEORY
Alasdair Cochrane
ANIMAL CRUELTY, ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR AND AGGRESSION:
More than a Link
Eleonora Gullone
POWER, KNOWLEDGE, ANIMALS
Lisa Johnson
THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS
Andrew Knight
AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS IN VISUAL CULTURE
Randy Malamud
POPULAR MEDIA AND ANIMALS
Claire Molloy
ANIMALS, EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY
Siobhan O’Sullivan
AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS AND SOCIOLOGY
Kay Peggs
SOCIAL WORK AND ANIMALS: A MORAL INTRODUCTION
Thomas Ryan
AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS AND THE LAW
Joan Schaffner
Forthcoming titles
HUMAN ANIMAL RELATIONS: THE OBLIGATION TO CARE
Mark Bernstein
ANIMALS IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD: ETHICAL PERCEPTIONS
Alastair Harden
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
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Animal Cruelty, Antisocial
Behaviour and Aggression
More than a Link
Eleonora Gullone
Monash University, Australia
© Eleonora Gullone 2012
Foreword © Phil Arkow 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-23923-4
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First published 2012 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-31615-1 ISBN 978-1-137-28454-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137284549
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1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents
L ist of Tables viii
Foreword by Phil Arkoww i x
Series Editors’ Preface x vi
Acknowledgements xviii
1 Introduction: The Aims of This Book 1
2 Historical and Current Conceptualizations of
Animal Cruelty 5
Co-occurrence between animal cruelty
and antisocial behaviour 7
The evolution of current thinkingg 8
The Child Behavior Checklist 10
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders 1 0
Defining animal cruelty 11
Animal cruelty motivations 1 3
Chapter summary 1 5
3 Conceptualizations of Antisocial Behaviourr 16
From behaviours to individuals 1 7
From aggressive behaviours to antisocial behaviours 17
Toward a more developmentally-oriented focus 1 7
A developmental psychopathology approach 1 8
Defining antisocial behaviour 1 8
Defining aggression 1 9
T he importance of the intent requirement 20
Aggression dimensions 21
Chapter summary 24
4 The Development of Antisocial Behaviourr 25
Key issues and considerations 25
Development 26
Infancy and toddlerhood 2 6
Childhood 2 7
Child-onset antisocial behaviour 28
Adolescence 3 0
Adolescent-onset antisocial behaviour 3 0
Child versus adolescent-onset of antisocial behaviour 31
v
vi Contents
Adulthood 3 3
Prevalence 3 4
Stabilityy 35
Chapter summary 37
5 Theoretical Accounts of Aggressive Behaviour
and Animal Cruelty 3 9
Theoretical accounts of aggressive behaviour 39
Cognitive neo-association theory 40
Social cognitive models 40
General Aggression Model (GAM) 4 1
Theoretical accounts of animal crueltyy 42
Antisocial behaviour risk factors 42
Chapter summary 4 3
6 Biological and Individual Difference Risk Factors 4 5
Biological risk factors 4 5
Sex differences 46
Baseline levels of arousal 47
Individual difference risk factors 48
Temperament 48
Personalityy 50
Psychopathy and Callous-Unemotional traits 51
Psychopathy in non-adult populations 54
Chapter summary 5 6
7 Environmental Risk Factors 5 8
Socioeconomic status 58
Provocation 59
Opportunity 59
Aggressive cues and exposure to violence 60
Family and parenting factors 6 2
Attachment relationships 6 4
Parenting practices 67
Parental warmth 6 7
Coercive and inconsistent parenting practices 68
Physical punishment 69
Direct and indirect abuse effects 71
Peer relationships 7 4
Chapter summary 75
8 Emotional and Cognitive Processes 78
Emotion processes 78
Emotion regulation 7 8
Cognitive factors and information processing 80
Contents vii
Knowledge structures 80
Schemas and scripts 81
Attributional, perception, and expectation biases 8 2
Accessibility of aggressive responses 8 3
Self-efficacyy 8 4
Moral disengagement 8 5
Attitudes and beliefs 88
Chapter summary 8 9
9 Aetiological Accounts of Animal Cruelty 91
Theoretical models of animal crueltyy 91
The Violence Graduation Hypothesis 9 1
The Deviance Generalization Hypothesis 98
Conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder,
and psychopathy 99
Criminal behaviour and animal crueltyy 1 01
Federal Bureau of Investigation workk 105
Family violence and animal crueltyyy 109
Bullying and animal cruelty in youth 111
Risk factors for the development of animal cruelty 113
Sex differences 115
Age differences 1 16
Witnessing of violence, and animal crueltyyy 117
Family and parenting experiences 119
Displacement of aggression 123
Cognitive errors, aggressive cues, and
exposure to violence 124
Empathy and emotion regulation 125
Chapter summary 1 27
10 C onclusions and Future Directions 1 29
The development of animal cruelty behaviour 1 29
Cross-cultural research 130
An action agenda 134
Proposed strategies for change 1 35
Concluding comments 137
Chapter summary 1 37
References 140
Glossaryy 165
Index 175
Tables
1 M odels of personality and their dimensions 5 2
2 Descriptions of the disorders associated with animal crueltyy 102
3 C omparative percentages of crimes by category for all alleged
offenders and only alleged animal cruelty offenders based on
Victoria Police data for the years 1994 through 2001 104
4 C hecklist of risk behaviours predictive of future violence 107
viii
Foreword
How does violence, and particularly violence in childhood, begin?
More importantly, how do we prevent it from happening? Philosophers,
writers, and social scientists have asked these questions for thousands
of years, and we are no closer today to ending violence than we were
when Plato observed that without sufficient education, man can change
from the most divine and most civilized to the most savage of earthly
creatures.
The past four decades have witnessed a renaissance of interest in an
age-old notion. This is the concept of what today we call “The Link,”
the idea that acts of interpersonal violence are frequently preceded by,
or co-occur with, acts of cruelty to animals, “red flag” markers that
previously were ignored. Animal abuse is becoming more widely recog-
nized as a potential indicator and/or predictor of interpersonal violence
that escalates in range, severity, and number of victims. This notion
captivates popular thought with its intuitive appeal, but concomitantly
challenges the research community in attempting to validate it empiri-
cally. Fortunately, a small, but rapidly growing, corpus of literature – as
reviewed comprehensively in the book you are about to read – gives
increasing credence to centuries of conventional wisdom that animal
abuse and human violence often go hand-in-hand – or, as we some-
times quip, hand-in-paw.
But exploring the links among animal abuse, child maltreatment,
intimate partner violence and elder abuse involves numerous meth-
odological, semantic, cultural, and legal challenges, all anchored by an
unfortunate reality: whether in the world of legislators, law enforce-
ment officers, academics, or philanthropists, “animal” interests are
perceived to be of lesser import than “human” interests. The ecological
movement may have initiated wider recognition that human beings
are, indeed, animals as well, and that the fates of all species are inex-
tricably intertwined, but the general public and many professions still
harbour internalized barriers that separate us (i.e., humans) from them
(i.e., “beasts,” “only animals,” “the lower orders,” and other terms about
non-humans often applied derogatorily).
Some have called this “speciesism.” Others attribute it to animals’
lacking legal “standing” and their position, enshrined in law, as either
chattel property (companion animals and livestock) or the property of
ix