Torturers find it easy to leap species barrier
Acts of abuse are about power and control regardless of the species of the victim, and crossing the species barrier is but a small step.
Thinkers as far apart as Thomas Aquinas and Albert Schweitzer warned about the link between violence towards human and non-human animals. Research in recent decades has firmly established this link.
In the US, for example, the FBI has found that a history of cruelty to animals is one of the traits that regularly appears in its computer records of serial rapists and murderers, while a recent British study showed that people who abuse animals are five times more likely to commit violent crimes.
With such crime on the increase, one might think that for purely selfish reasons that we, and our lawmakers in particular, would take more seriously the need to promote the more humane treatment of non-human animals.
Sadly, this is far from being the case. Pitifully inadequate legislation exists to deal with individuals who mistreat animals in this country the legislation is almost 100 years old.
As a society we sanction institutionalised cruelty on a scale almost too massive to comprehend.
From the 'rape rack' of the intensive pig farm to the 'gas chamber' of the fur farm, from the torture inflicted on animals behind the locked doors of the world's laboratories to the savagery of foxhunting in full view of the public, we daily turn our backs on the most powerless and vulnerable among us.
Just as cruelty to animals on an individual level brutalises and desensitises, cruelty on an institutional level must similarly damage our collective psyche.
It may be a faint hope, but perhaps one day we will cease our relentless persecution of the other animals with whom we share the earth if not for their sakes, then at least for our own.
Nuala Donlon,
Alliance for Animal Rights,
PO Box 4734,
Dublin 1.
