Intentional Cruelty Versus Neglect: New Insights on Animal Cruelty Crimes and Implications for Policy

• Author: Lynn A. Addington,Mary Lou Randour
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/08874034221098918
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022

https://doi.org/10.1177/08874034221098918

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2022, Vol. 33(9) 966 –988

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/08874034221098918

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Article

Intentional Cruelty Versus

Neglect: New Insights on

Animal Cruelty Crimes and

Implications for Policy

Lynn A. Addington1* and Mary Lou Randour2*

Abstract

Animal cruelty has received growing scholarly attention over the past few decades.

One ongoing challenge for researchers has been the lack of readily accessible data.

This situation changed in 2014 with the addition of animal cruelty offenses to the

Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program as part of its

National Incident-Based Reporting System. In addition to providing a much-needed

source of animal cruelty information, these data shed light on two distinct forms of

cruelty: intentional animal abuse and neglect. Previous research tended to group both

forms of cruelty together, which limited the ability of these findings to inform the

development of targeted prevention and intervention policies. The present study is

one of the first to examine the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s animal cruelty data

and to distinguish between neglect and intentional cruelty. The findings obtained are

discussed in terms of application to policy and guidance for future work.

Keywords

animal cruelty prevention policy, intentional animal cruelty, animal neglect, animal

cruelty offenders, NIBRS animal cruelty data

Introduction

Animal cruelty has received growing research attention over the past few decades.

This interest can be traced back to the 1970s where connections between animal cru-

elty and interpersonal violence began to be explored, especially in the psychiatric

1American University, Washington, DC, USA

2Animal Welfare Institute, Washington, DC, USA

*Authors are listed alphabetically but contributed equally to this study.

Corresponding Author:

Lynn A. Addington, Department of Justice, Law & Criminology, American University, 4400 Massachusetts

Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016-8016, USA.

Email: adding@american.edu

1098918CJPXXX10.1177/08874034221098918Criminal Justice Policy ReviewAddington and Randour

research-article2022

Addington and Randour 967

literature (Felthous, 1979; Rigdon & Tapia, 1977; Tapia, 1971). By the 1980s, social

scientists and mental health experts identified animal cruelty as an important factor in

the development of anti-social and aggressive behavior and added “physical aggres-

sion toward people and animals” as a criterion for a diagnosis of conduct disorder to

the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev.; DSM-III-R;

American Psychiatric Association, 1987). Around the same time, Walker (1984) sug-

gested a link between pet abuse and domestic violence as batterers used companion

animals as a way to intimidate victims. These linkages prompted studies that focused

on various connections between animal abuse and family violence as well as other

forms of interpersonal violence (Ascione, 1998, 2001; Faver & Cavazos, 2007; Knight

et al., 2014; Merz-Perez et al., 2001; Walters, 2016).

In 2014, the evolving research on animal cruelty and its association with violence

against humans led the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to add animal cruelty

offenses to its collection of incident-based crime statistics in the Uniform Crime

Reporting (UCR) Program’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

Inclusion of animal cruelty to NIBRS expands the opportunities to explore these

crimes as well as address some of the shortcomings in previous research on animal

cruelty and its association with criminal behavior.

Before the addition of these crimes to NIBRS, animal cruelty research was limited

due to a lack of available data. These limitations were highlighted in a recent critical

review of the literature on the link between animal cruelty and violence (Longobardi &

Badenes-Ribera, 2019). Of the 32 research articles included in the review, 28 relied on

non-probabilistic sources, such as convenience samples from prisons, schools, or clini-

cal settings. Moreover, the studies used often were limited to a single jurisdiction over

a short period of time due to the labor-intensive nature of original data collection.

While most previous research did not rely on official police or court data, a few

exceptions exist. These studies not only provide insights about animal cruelty offenses

that come to the attention of the criminal justice system, but they highlight the chal-

lenges for researchers to access these data prior to the changes in NIBRS. For exam-

ple, three studies that used police records were limited to data from a single city

(Arluke et al., 1999; Burchfield, 2018; Febres et al., 2014). Researchers also have

relied on conviction records (Gerbasi, 2004). Conviction record data, though, are sub-

ject to the filters of arrest and prosecution decisions.

The current state of the literature highlights the need for animal cruelty data that

can provide not only details about individual incidents but also permit comparisons

across jurisdictions and over years. Obtaining information at the early stages of the

criminal justice system process, specifically from police reports, allows for the broad-

est number of incidents to be captured when they first come to the attention of offi-

cials. The addition of animal cruelty to NIBRS creates an important resource that fills

this need. Given the relatively recent availability of these details, few articles could be

published analyzing these data prior to the present study.

This study provides an initial exploration of two recent years of NIBRS data and

helps improve the understanding of animal cruelty crimes with a focus on comparing

two subtypes: intentional cruelty and neglect. Research that distinguishes between