You rarely know what happened to an abused animal when you come face to face with one. You can only see the outward symptoms and can make a rough guess at the history, but you will never know exactly what led to this terrible result. In most cases the perpetrator themselves remains unknown.
To define animal abuse is relatively simple. It is a violent act that harms the health of an animal either temporarily or permanently, and in extreme cases it leads to the death of the victim.
Reducing the commission of acts of cruelty against animals has been a hot issue for many animal welfare organisations. Best known tactic is to fight for stricter legislations and judicial verdicts. If someone commits a crime of this sort, they should be brought to justice for their deeds.
But question here is whether any punishment can solve or fix a problem like this? Does it benefit an abused dog if the abuser is charged with committing a criminal act?
I very much doubt it. But the guilty must be punished. Without question, what society accepts or rejects needs to be an ethical position as well as a legislative consequence. Verdicts are important but will not save animals from suffering. There are so many things forbidden by the law, yet they happen all the time.
When one wants to move the focus point from dealing with animal abuse that has already taken place to the prevention of acts of cruelty being committed in the future, one comes up against the complexity of behaviour that makes a person evil enough to beat, tie and leave animals at a tree in an extremely bad condition or even to deliberately kill them.
Human Rage
We all have those dark, difficult days when struggling through seems to take an eternity, and we’re stuck in our most desperate moods. Just imagine a day when you get bullied and humiliated with no chance to deal with the situation at the time. Or when you had to face injustice without the chance to fight back because you were afraid of facing serious consequences. What would you do after such a rough day to ease the frustration consuming you?
Some people might call and arrange to meet up with their best friend to talk about everything in depth. They might open a bottle of wine and drink one glass or even the whole bottle. But others go home and turn their whirling rage, their need for revenge into action, using violence against someone or something to ease their sense of injustice, their frustration, just to achieve some mental relief.
Scientists have conducted numerous experiments to find the answer to the question of the origin of the evil side of human nature, including aggressive and violent tendencies. Are we born this way? Or is it our environment or our upbringing that makes us this way? Can we find somewhere a triggering factor to turn our globe into a better and more peaceful place, and reduce all the different kinds of violent acts committed? The quest for this highly anticipated clue is still on, and we still can’t determine the exact nature of human brutality.
Current scientific studies state that there is no one simple answer such as this or that element being the root cause; we haven’t yet found a specific magic gene or a certain experience in a person’s life that is responsible for triggering aggressive behaviour and violence. Both genetics and the influences from the world around us matters. The outside world in this case means the family that supplies the initial behaviour patterns that each person copies, plus the overall social environment where one interacts, learns how to solve everyday issues, builds up daily routines, faces problems and deals with conflicts. What we bears in our genes and what we learn through our experiences jointly define our personality.
There are certain circumstances that make it likely to create a violent personality. People living in an abusive family, suffering domestic violence as victims can tend to become perpetrators themselves as studies of adults have shown.
It is vital what sort of opinion about violent acts the environment broadcasts to the individual. In some societies or segments of societies, it is absolutely acceptable to use physical power against someone to solve a situation or end an argument. If we are socialised with the idea that using physical power is absolutely acceptable as a reaction for solving certain problems, it becomes part of our behaviour and it becomes an everyday, normal tool within all our interactions.
It is also important to determine how the social skills of the individual have been developed. In a fierce argument one person can keep calm and debate with facts for hours whereas another loses their temper within seconds and hits back. Totally different responses to coping with the same situations depend entirely on the individual’s social skillset.
Behind Closed Doors
Besides the skill of handling social interactions, there is one trait which is really significant regarding violence: empathy. The way this ability builds up and the level it reaches is really complicated. So many environmental elements have an influence on us, and in addition the way the brain emits different hormones has an equally relevant part to play.
Sociological studies also reveal that when one has a malevolent attitude towards animals, in most cases domestic abuse has also been committed by the perpetrator. Becoming a victim is mostly about being an easy and vulnerable object. Violence is rarely about the victim themselves. It is just the target in the process of compensation. Someone cannot cope with the inner frustration caused by, for instance, being humiliated unjustly, and it is easy to find relief when that person can hurt someone or something even more vulnerable.
Certainly there are situations when a spoiled dog causes damage yet again, and the direct reaction is hard physical punishment. It is a much quicker tool to unleash emotional reaction, especially if the owner is prone to lose his or her temper rapidly.
We usually consider as animal abuse those cases where it is immediately obvious that an animal has suffered physical injuries. But what about mental damage caused due to inflicting unbearable stress that a dog cannot cope with and which has long term effects on its behaviour? Or what about neglecting the needs of the animal, causing serious health issues?
We could also mention the consequences of carelessness, when a dog escapes having been frightened by the usual fireworks at New Year’s Eve and gets involved in a terrible road accident.
All these scenarios can be considered as abuses of animal welfare, so we can conclude that there are a really wide range of activities or events that can cause suffering to a dog.
Fighting Violence
Animal abuse is still a topical issues and that is certainly going to be true for quite a while. It’s hard to examine any trends as we have virtually no comparative surveys with sufficient data, thus it is hard to say if there has been any change either in a positive or a negative direction in recent times. If you think you see more cruelty committed against animals you may be right, but bear in mind that due to social media and the internet, shocking news can be spread rapidly and we read about cases we would not have heard about years ago.
The suffering of animals as a consequence of negligence and the ignorance of the owners can be reduced with complex and far-reaching education campaigns. But what is the solution in cases when an animal is the victim of abuse by the deliberate act of a human being?
The general reaction and the opinion of the public usually demands legal processes and seeks to put the solution into the hands of law. Punishment and the rejection of such activities by society as a whole through legal means is really important. That is how we show what is acceptable, and what is absolutely objectionable to the members of society.
The law might be effective for setting up standards and defining what is regarded as a deviant act but it is hardly able to prevent further abuse. Prevention means you find the root of the cause and you can have effect on it to trigger change.
In the classic cases where animals are abused intentionally I have some bad news. This type of animal abuse is really not a direct animal welfare problem. It is a malfunction of human behaviour. It really has nothing to do with animals at all.
When someone considers and actually uses physical or mental threat or physical abuse as a response to a situation, it is a behavioural issue of the individual who is just trying to cope with inner frustration and tension. And when they are faced with a vulnerable person or animal who cannot fight back, the violence runs free.
It makes no difference if the victim is someone in a pub, a dog waiting at home, a family member talking back, or someone writing an offensive comment on Facebook. The life of the human has always been packed with violence, and if you look around, it is everywhere. Sadly, we somehow have the ability and even the inner need to hurt others in order to make ourselves feel good and as if we have control over our lives.
To teach people how to manage negative emotions and not to see violence as a tool for solving problems and conflicts is not really an animal welfare issue. But the consequences of this problem is what keeps all those animal welfare organisations really busy in their desperate fights to combat the suffering of all those animals.
Images: Dreamstime
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