Cruelty’s Starting Point: Animal Abuse

It would never have crossed anyone’s mind that we’d have Jeffrey Dahmer to thank for anything but recipe jokes. People remember two things about the Cheese Country cannibal: that as a man, he killed and ate his own kind, and that as a child, he loved to torture dogs. As in math, when two odd numbers add up to an even, in Dahmer’s case, a right can emerge from two wrongs. Murder has always been taken seriously. Now, more and more, so is animal cruelty. Lawyers, judges and cops are beginning to catch on to the fact that a man who beats up or kills four-legged creatures can slide so, so easily into doing the same to two-legged ones.

The Boston Strangler, the Son of Sam, the gunman who killed 21 at the McDonald’s in San Ysidro--the prisons are full of violent men who started not on people but on dogs and cats, and no one stopped them right there.

Researchers have connected the dots. In New Jersey, 88% of families with a child abuser had an animal abuser, too. Some women won’t leave the men who beat them because they can’t take their pets along with them, and they know that if they leave without them, the pets are as good as dead. Even the FBI, with its studies of serial killers, takes these violence-to-violence links seriously, and the Humane Society has used its “First Strike” campaign to drive the point, literally, home.

The L.A. stories alone are disgusting:

A gangbanger, who found that beating up his girlfriend wasn’t getting through to her, bashed her puppy against the garage door until it died.

A man, who figured that it wasn’t enough to pummel his girlfriend, stole her dog, drove onto a freeway and threw the dog out, where it was run over and killed.

One among our several freeway gunman admitted that, as a kid, he loved taking potshots at dogs and birds. It was target practice, and he just got better and better.

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Bob Ferber already had a reputation. when the deputy city attorney worked at the Bauchet Street jail, processing gangbangers and sundry ne’er-do-wells, everyone got used to his coming in bearing birdlings he’d rescued after they’d fallen from their nests in the concrete girders of the underground garage. His family had long ago grown accustomed to his finding cats and dogs--or, as he argued, their finding him. (His latest dog is a three-legged shepherd mix who chewed off her own foot to escape an animal trap.)

A dozen years ago, someone could have tortured an animal for days and Ferber was lucky to get him sentenced to donate dog food. Animal abuse--c’mon, that’s not real crime.

Times change, and in these times, “I have judges telling defense attorneys, ‘You’d better plead on this case, because a jury will hang ‘em high.’ It’s 180 degrees different.”

Still unpersuaded? A dozen years ago, domestic violence, too, was treated lightly. The cops would walk the guy out to the sidewalk, swap sports talk and tell him not to do it again.

It’s begun to dawn on “the system” that the same guy getting a wrist slap for electrocuting a cat or setting fire to a dog could turn up in handcuffs a few years later for beating his kids or murdering his wife.

It’s what they call a “predictor”--not unlike the way that not every marijuana smoker winds up strung out on heroin, but you can bet every heroin addict started with the small stuff, not a spike in his arm.

Ferber is working toward a unified field-theory approach among city cops and animal control officers and the SPCA and his own attorneys, so that training, investigating and prosecuting can all get on the same frequency, the same page. It will save time, and money, and grief, and a lot of lives--big ones and small ones.

“Even if you don’t care about animals, everybody cares about people, about women and children,” is how Ferber argues it. “The bottom line is, you have someone who’s willing to abuse and be violent to living creatures,” whether they’re named Spot or Susan.

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At my vet’s one day, a group of gangsta look-alikes came in carrying a sweet, solemn-looking puppy of some marginal Doberman parentage. They wanted to have his tail cut off and his ears sliced and taped to stand up and look macho, not flop amiably as they do in their natural state. I stated my conviction that an equitable compromise would be cutting off certain parts of theirs, and I was about to suggest which ones when I saw the receptionist standing behind them shaking her head and drawing her hand unmistakably across her throat.

I got the idea. I left, and they didn’t kill me--which I count as a reasonable trade-off.