Virtues: It Is Clearly Chronological

¶ … virtues: it is clearly chronological and defines the process step-by-step, the writer's voice is clearly heard and the logic of her reasoning is easy to follow.

She started with a larger idea and then had to narrow it, so I thought I would try to narrow it from the start. Most of the issues in the news are too broad, and the research required to narrow them at all is a daunting task. I finally decided that violence is a topic which interests me, because I want to do what I can to help eliminate it. It is the one thing which makes me uncomfortable. I thought about child abuse and spanking but that is really probably overdone. Then I discussed the project with friends. One friend suggested I should look at reasons children grow up to be violent. Another friend mentioned the change made in Los Angeles some years ago in sentencing children. Children found guilty of cruelty to animals were sentenced to mandatory psychological counseling, because researchers have found that a large percentage of violent offenders were cruel to animals during their childhood. I decided to check this out.

First I used Copernicus to search several databases using the search string: childhood abuse of animals violent crime. I got tons of hits, and the humane society had a large bibliography of materials. Another helpful article with a great bibliography was found on all-creatures.org. (Hoffman, Frank l. 2006) Some specifically linked abuse of animals by children to violent crime in the grown adults. An article on Petabuse.com said that virtually every adult violent offender had cruelty to animals in his past.

I decided to narrow it further as I read through pages of information. I would look at the connection between abuse of animals by children and adult violence against relative strangers. That is, I would eliminate violence for monetary gain or other logical reasons, and violence between people who know each other well, even though family abuse seems to be linked. Because of the recent cases in the news of school shooting and other crimes against relative strangers, like highway shootings and such, I wondered if there might be a connection. The Petabuse.com article cited two school shootings and the offenders, including Columbine. I think kids might be cruel to animals for one of two reasons: the needs for power, perhaps in dysfunctional families and fascination with death. Maybe both are involved. But the real motivation is to discover if this behavior can be predicted.

I remember the recent shootings in Montreal at Dawson College, the shooting at the Amish school, Columbine, Dunblane? In Scotland and a bunch of copycats. The kids at Columbine seemed to have some things in common with the boy in Montreal, but maybe not the others. I decided to see what I could find out about those crimes and the perpetrators. Then I would look again for information about animal abuse.

I checked the Academic Journals available in the library and the results were just far too many to sort. I tried a really long search string, but still the results were mostly about family violence. Long search string did not work well, so I tried several shorter ones: school shootings, childhood animal abuse and violence animal cruelty. One article about preventing school shootings gave me the term "random violence," which is a good term for the kind of violence I am investigating.

I went to a research site: Highbeam Research and searched publications using animal cruelty by children, and got thousands of hits. When I added adult violence, results were 725, but most had the element of domestic violence and child abuse. However, the first article was all about CD (Conduct Disorder) and its relationship to later violence, and listed cruelty to animals as a significant indicator of future violent offence. The article specifically listed school shootings as one connection! One thing I noticed as I read through results was that animal abuse before the age of ten seems to be a very definite indicator of adult violence. I did not find anything on Los Angeles laws, but I was ready to look at the various cases of random violence.

I searched on this term in all the same places and came up with nothing useful until I added the word "schools." Even then, the results showed far too much. In fact, random violence is far more prevalent than I thought, so my topic narrows again to random school violence. However, these results were very difficult to find. So I tried searching on Columbine and Dawson College in hopes to get more. There is lots written on these, though Dawson is so recent that these are mostly news articles. Most of the books on Columbine deal with prevention of violence at schools, and do not focus on the characteristics of the shooters.

A search for "childhood AND animal AND cruelty AND adult AND random AND violence) AND (school AND shootings) AND (Columbine)" brought up 74 books and no other sources, no journal articles or news. However, when searching within the first 20 books listed on the term "animal cruelty" yielded nothing so I tried several combinations and finally got two books with: "Conduct disorder" "school shootings" "animal cruelty"

Healthy Anger: How to Help Children and Teens Manage Their Anger (Golden, Bernard 2003) is a very comprehensive book on the early sign of Conduct Disorder and he includes cruelty to animals as one. The book is quite helpful in understanding how to predict this kind of behavior, but it still did not answer my question. The second book by Lemond and Allen mentions animal cruelty as a contraindication of trouble. (Lemond, Tim and Allen, David 2002)