Fergus the Mule, age 18, was rescued from an auction and rehabbed by Last Chance Ranch, Quakertown, PA.
Animal abuse has been a hot topic in the news in recent months, after the tragic mass shooting of students and faculty in Parkland, Florida. Acquaintances of the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, reported that he shot at small animals with pellet guns, and tried to get a dog to attack a baby pig.
Some psychologists point to this behavior as a precursor of more dangerous violence. They reason that children who experience abuse or witness violence in their homes feel powerless to stop the abuse. Without appropriate guidance, they may begin to assert power by victimizing small animals or household pets—initiating a new cycle of violent behavior.
The connection between animal abuse and violent behavior—particularly domestic abuse—has attracted the interest of political leaders who have sought legislative remedies to interrupt the cycle of cruelty and violence. One idea that has gained some traction in several states is a registry of animal abusers. The idea of these registries, similar to sex offender registries, is to provide veterinarians, animal shelters and others with a database of individuals who should not be permitted to adopt or care for animals.
In October 2010, Suffolk County, NY passed legislation to create a county-wide registry of individuals convicted of animal abuse. It was first in the nation but did not become a reality until early 2014. Convicted animal abusers remain on the Suffolk County list for five years after conviction or release from incarceration. Other counties in New York are working on similar registry legislation.
The first statewide animal abuser registry was created in Tennessee in 2016, and other states are now looking to create their own registries, among them are New Jersey and Maryland. There is no pending legislation to create a registry in Delaware. In Pennsylvania an attempt to pass legislation that would create a registry failed in 2015.
Try and Try Again
Several legislators have been pressing for a statewide animal abuse registry in New Jersey for years, but the bills never attracted enough support to pass. The legislature’s latest attempt ended in a pocket veto by outgoing Governor Chris Christie in early January 2018. It’s likely that the legislators who co-sponsored the bills before will eventually try to pass the legislation again, but nothing had been proposed in early March.
Maryland’s HB1629, sponsored by Delegate Michael A. Jackson (D) Calvert and Prince Georges Counties, was sent to the Judiciary Committee on March 1, and received an unfavorable report. That action effectively ended the bill’s prospects for this legislative session.
Advocates point to compelling reasons to create and maintain these registries. For one thing, there is the correlation between animal abuse and domestic violence. In addition, proponents of these registries believe that the registries can prevent abusers from acquiring animals from shelters and thus more animals will be protected from abusers. Prosecuting abusers represents significant opportunities to protect victims of domestic violence as well as any children in the household and the pets that live with them.
A reliable, searchable, up-to-date database would likely be a key asset for people on the front lines protecting animals from abuse. Conversely, a database that is riddled with out-of-date and incorrect information would be wasteful and counterproductive. So, any legislation intended to create an animal abuser registry would presumably require funding for management and database development.
A New FBI Asset?
In 2016 the FBI began tracking animal abuse data in their National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). NIBRS is the latest iteration of the FBI’s data aggregation effort to make sense of the country’s crime statistics. The FBI has been shepherding the agency’s data collection from their legacy Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) system to NIBRS. Along with that, they have added animal abuse data into the NIBRS. Local and state police agencies are not required to upload data to NIBRS, and the goal was to spend 2017 trouble-shooting the system so that this year’s data would be meaningful. But not all police and enforcement agencies in the United States currently supply data to the FBI. The reporting system is voluntary. Also, it’s possible there is some confusion about how data are to be entered.
Corporal Adam Reed of the Pennsylvania State Police says that in Pennsylvania it is mandatory to report all crime data to NIBRS. He says the category of crime into which animal abuse would fit is “a very broad catch-all category.” He says the category includes “different miscellaneous offenses. It’s a general header for all other offenses.” According to Reed, it’s difficult to tease out the animal abuse data from the rest of the information.
So, any statewide registry of animal abusers would likely be built from data collected within the state. This, too, may be a difficult and complicated effort, given the number of agencies and organizations that deal with animal abuse. A check of Tennessee’s statewide registry in early March revealed only 13 individuals who had been convicted of animal abuse. The registry has been online since 2016.
Among the factors that make these registries complicated to develop and run are questions about whether any individual can be held liable for failing to check the database and inadvertently transferring an animal to a convicted abuser. Also, there are questions about which agency would be responsible for maintaining the online registry. If that responsibility falls on the shoulders of humane organizations, there could be financial consequences for those organizations, most of which no longer employ humane police officers to investigate abuse. Finally, there are issues of priorities. Money spent developing and maintaining a database and website is money that can’t be used directly to help abused animals.
Even though there are assumptions that the perpetrators of animal abuse will be forced to pay registration fees to the agencies maintaining the registries, it’s unlikely those fees will offset the costs completely. This is possibly the reason individual states are having difficulty turning the idea of animal abuse registries into realities.