Blue Mountains Legal Research Centre

The link between animal cruelty and child abuse

OUR PHILOSOPHY

'Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world...We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity.' - Rachel Carson (Biologist, Writer, Ecologist - 1907 - 1964)

“Rise, Palmer,” said she graciously. “The defender of the absent has a right to favourable reception from all who value truth...” p.72 Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott Collins' Clear-Type Press, London & Glasgow “1830”

'Family abuse and violence derives from a need to control and intimidate others who are more vulnerable..The abuser abuses the companion animal not only to injure the animal but to intimidate other family members, inflicting emotional and psychological harm. Thus all family members are either directly or indirectly the target of the abuser and the abuse...The first step in addressing the link involves timely communication to detect family abuse before it escalates' (Joan E Schaffner "Linking Domestic Violence, Child Abuse, and Animal Cruelty" 2006 ).

'If mere being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all that belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a being that lives fully' Plotinus (205 - 270) First Ennead IV.3

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The Blue Mountains Legal Research Centre is based in New South Wales, Australia and aims to minimise child and animal harm by improving the quality and availability of legal information concerning the care and protection of both children and animals. send us an email.

Animal Abuse/Domestic Violence Fact Sheet

(The Humane Society of the United States)

Senator Andrew Bartlett - Animal Cruelty & Violence in Australia

Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach

"Cruelty against animals is no minor misdemeanour"

If you have a particular interest in the protection of children in China then please visit:

Animals Asia - End Animal Exploitation Video Link

"Cruelty against animals is no minor misdemeanour"

"Everybody knows what the production, breeding, transport, and slaughter of these animals has become. Instead of thrusting these images in your face or awakening them in your memory, something that would be both too easy and endless, let me simply say a word about this 'pathos'. If these images are 'pathetic', if they evoke sympathy, it is also because they 'pathetically' open the immense question of pathos and the pathological, precisely, that is, of suffering, pity, and compassion; and the place that has to be accorded to the interpretation of this compassion, to the sharing of this suffering among the living, to the law, ethics, and politics that must be brought to bear upon this experience of compassion. What has been happening for two centuries now involves a new experience of this compassion. In response to what is, for the moment, the irresistible but unacknowledged unleashing and the organized disavowal of this torture, voices are raised - minority, weak, marginal voices, little assured of their discourse, of their right to discourse, and the enactment of their discourse within the law, as a declaration of rights - in order to protect, in order to appeal..to what is still presented in such a problematic way as animal rights, in order to awaken us to our responsibilities and our obligations vis-a-vis the living in general, and precisely to this fundamental compassion that, were we to take it seriously, would have to change even the very cornerstone..of the philosophical problematic of the animal" (Jacques Derrida - The Animal That Therefore I Am - Fordham University Press New York 2008 pp.26-27)