‘When there’s family violence... the spouse is being battered, the children are being abused, and the dog is being killed.’
– an interview with Mary Lou Randour
by Marianne Arbogast

Mary Lou Randour is a psychologist and the author of several books, including Animal Grace: Entering a Spiritual Relationship with Our Fellow Creatures (New World Library, 2000). She currently serves as director of "Beyond Violence: The Human-Animal Connection," a joint project of Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Doris Day Animal Foundation, providing training to mental health workers, law enforcement professionals, teachers and others on the link between human violence and animal abuse. She is co-author of a manual for counselors on treating animal abusers, and is currently working on a second manual on treating children involved in animal abuse.

M.A.: How is abuse of animals connected with domestic violence?

M.L.R.: There is a very significant link between family violence and animal cruelty. Animal cruelty also relates to other forms of violence and criminal activity. The co-occurrence rate of domestic violence and animal abuse in households is somewhere between 71 to 83 percent. When there’s family violence, the person who is the violent member in the family isn’t just confining their violence toward one type of family member. People became alert to that, and the other thing they noticed is that women were not leaving dangerous situations for fear of what would happen to their pets. So domestic violence shelters and animal shelters are forming cooperative arrangements where the animal shelter takes the family pet while the women and children go to a safe place.

M.A.: What issues are important in working with people who have abused animals?

M.L.R.: Working with adults, the two major principles of the treatment are, first, to directly address accountability, challenging the person to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions – which is the linchpin of domestic violence work, also. And the second is to try to teach empathy, to try to teach what it’s like to be that other being, whether it’s the spouse that’s being battered or the dog you’ve just knifed or the cat you’ve put in the microwave. And there’s a heavy educational component, because sometimes people are just ignorant about what the needs and capacities of animals are. They may be ignorant that they really can suffer and feel pain, or that they really feel psychological pain, or that they have certain needs – like dogs are pack animals.

If you’re counseling a child, asking questions about animals should be another part of the assessment, to see if there’s any animal abuse in the house, and if the child is involved in any way. If you know that a child is abusing an animal, that should alert the clinician that there might be other forms of family violence going on. Also, it’s important because sometimes animals are used to coerce children. With sexual abuse of children, if they have a favorite pet, the animal may be either injured or threatened to gain their silence. Then, treating children would probably be similar, it would be a question of empathy and accountability and education.

In working with children there is also animal-assisted therapy. There’s a woman named Susan Krinsk whose therapy partner is a 160-pound bull mastiff named Taz, and he is very important to the treatment. She works at the Child Protection Center in Sarasota, Florida. There was one little boy of 9 who was referred to the center by his school for being sexually aggressive. When he first came to the center he was seeing another psychologist, but he wouldn’t talk – he crawled inside a toybox and literally disappeared. Susan was called in, and she walked in with Taz and said, "I hope there’s no one in here who’s afraid of really big dogs, and I hope there’s no one in here who minds being sniffed and licked." He popped out of his hiding place, his eyes big, and asked if he could play with her dog. She said, "Yes, but you came here because you have some problems, and we have to talk about these problems – but Taz is a really good listener. And I can interpret and tell you what Taz thinks." So he said, okay, I’ll do it. As it turned out the boy did have a lot of problems – he had actually killed his own cat, as well as harmed other animals in his neighborhood. But in the course of therapy he was able, first of all, to learn about boundaries. He always wanted to play with Taz or climb on him, and sometimes Taz didn’t want to. So he learned that another creature also had needs and interests that he had to consider. He also had the pure enjoyment and nurturing of physical contact with Taz and Taz’s acceptance of it.

M.A.: I understand that you’ve been working with a campaign to make extreme animal abuse a felony.

M.L.R.: We were successful in Maryland, and this past May it was signed into law by the governor that extreme acts of animal cruelty – which would be severely beating, torturing, killing or mutilating an animal – would be a felony offense. Maryland was the 32nd state to add a felony provision to the animal cruelty statutes, and there will be campaigns until there are 50 states. People are recognizing that there is a link between animal abuse and human cruelty, and that severe acts of animal cruelty are a crime of violence, and that crimes of violence need to be taken seriously and attended to.

M.A.: How do you respond to that criticism that animal suffering is way down on the list of priorities that we ought to be dealing with?

M.L.R.: I think that any social justice philosophy that pits one suffering group against another is questionable. Our lives are inextricably linked. It’s not a choice between them or us. I remember people being concerned that if we worried about feminism, it would take away from the civil rights movement. But it’s not either-or, it’s both-and. I also think the argument that you have to wait until all the human issues are solved can be a way of blocking out information.

M.A.: Why do you think it is that, even though many people experience positive relationships with animals, we’re generally taught to discount them? We’re taught that it’s our relationships with human beings that really matter, while human-animal relationships are trivialized or seen as insignificant.

M.L.R.: It’s human narcissism, I guess. Why is it that people think their race is superior to another, or their gender, or their nationality, or their religion? In some ways it’s the same kind of thinking, dismissing the Other as being less-than. Certainly the species barrier is wide and deep. You can trace it historically to lots of different philosophies and it’s embedded in our thinking. But I think it’s a very pernicious philosophy. Once you cross the species barrier, because it’s such a wide one, I think it’s easier to see the damage that can be done by viewing other groups as "less-than" or "other-than." So you’re more inclined not to make distinctions between yourself and other races or nationalities – whatever the group distinction is – and to see how we share more than we differ.

M.A.: In your own experience, is that true of people who are committed to animal rights? Do you find them to have more of an openess to human beings who are different from themselves?

M.L.R.: Definitely, that’s my own experience. There has been some research on this published in Society and Animals, which is a journal of Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Researchers gave different attitude scales to animal rights activists compared to other groups of people. What they found was that people who were more sympathetic to animal rights and animal welfare were, first of all, more likely women. They also were more likely to endorse all the different progressive causes – gay and lesbian rights, civil rights, world hunger issues.

The other thing that I’ve noticed, the few times I’ve been at a table in front of a grocery store trying to get people to become aware of something like testing on the Bion monkeys – which were monkeys that were used in space, and really barbaric things were done to them – when people walked by, it was the less affluent African Americans who were much more likely to stop and look at the material and be sympathetic. People have noticed this about circus leafletting, too. I think it’s the same with women, because if you’re a member of a group that gets the short end of the stick, you can identify with the suffering.

M.A.: That certainly isn’t the picture that comes across in the media. So often, people who are advocating for animals are portrayed as kooks. Why do you think that is?

M.L.R.: Because with the animal rights community, our constituents are billions of animals with absolutely no money or any influence in society, and we are opposing the economic forces of the meat and dairy industry, the biomedical industry and other economic powerhouses. There are huge economic forces opposed to animal rights, and they have a lot of access to the media.

Also, because animals are interwoven in our lives in so many ways, people understand that by opening to the animal rights argument, they’re going to be moved to make changes in their daily lives, and I think that’s threatening. So it’s easy to develop defenses where you can just dismiss the people, dismiss the argument, go along your merry way and not really think about it.

There are many really respectable people who support animal rights. Carl Sagan was an animal rights person. Jane Goodall is an animal rights person – she attends animal rights conferences and she’s against biomedical research. Steve Wise, an attorney at Harvard, recently wrote a book called Rattling the Cage. Steve is making a case for the legal rights of chimpanzees, bonabos and orangutans. He uses legal arguments, philosophical arguments, arguments based on what we know now about biology and ethnology, why there should be legal rights for these kinds of animals, and I’m sure he would extend that further as we advance. His book got a lot of critical acclaim and people like Larry Tribe – a Harvard Law scholar who, if there was a Democratic administration, might have been the next Supreme Court justice – said the only problem with Steve’s book is that it didn’t go far enough.

The animal rights argument is substantial and it’s based on sound reasoning and a lot of evidence. If you’re consistent in your ideas about social justice, and if you really study issues and look at all the data, I believe the conclusion is inescapable that our moral consideration has to be extended to animals.