Cycle of cruelty and violence

Animal welfare inspector Lori Davis with an abandoned cat at the SPCA in Mangere. Photo / Sarah Ivey

The woman in West Auckland brought out a plate of dry Weetbix and white bread for the two flop-eared rabbits living in a chilly hutch in her muddy back yard.

They liked the cereal, the woman said; though as she hadn't given them any water they'd better be good at the Weetbix challenge.

The woman had a male and female rabbit and someone had dobbed her in to the SPCA, concerned about their living conditions.

It was mild stuff in the scheme of things.

Still, Inspector Lori Davis from the Auckland SPCA took a lot of time out of her busy day to patiently answer question after question about rabbit care from the woman - who says she loves the rabbits, and maybe she does, though she also wondered if the SPCA might take them on when she had to go away.

The pair had been running free and hopped up the stairs to the back door - which may back up her claim that they're often inside on her knee.

But, on this day of whipping downpours, we suddenly noticed a tiny scrap of fur shivering in the yard, a scrap the owner had apparently not been aware of. Despite knowing she was buying a male and a female rabbit from the pet shop, the possibility of babies seemed to have escaped her.

Weekend Review spent time with Davis to see for ourselves the sort of animal cruelty the SPCA's inspectors have to deal with.

Just this week, 14 bound and distressed sheep were crammed into a car in Flaxmere (two died; a prosecution is pending); and a burglar in Christchurch strangled a pet dog in front of its teenage owner.

Though the rabbit owner we encountered hardly represents this level of cruelty, she does represent another widespread problem, of ignorance and indifference to animal care, which still stuns inspectors and leaves them wondering why some people have animals.

Such ignorance led a prominent Auckland lawyer - one of many top lawyers who have signed up to prosecute cases for free because of the gutsful they have had of animal cruelty and neglect - to seriously suggest people should have a licence to own animals.

The long-standing mentality of "it's just an animal" must change, believes David Jones, QC. However, there are signs the system is toughening up on blatant animal cruelty and neglect.

Last month's Budget allocated an extra $1.2 million for SPCA welfare enforcement work (part of an $8.2 million boost in animal welfare funding), and Tauranga MP Simon Bridges has a bill to extend the maximum prison term for willful cruelty from three years to five.

But if a seachange is under way, it is not something you sense slogging through the horror of the SPCA's annual national lists of shame.

People have bitten the heads and chopped the paws off kittens, attached goats and dogs to towbars and dragged them until they are ripped apart, beaten and strangled family animals, left farm animals uncared for until they are skin and bone, poured petrol over animals and burnt them alive, and punched dogs to death. These lists go on and on.

Yet the experts say that when these cases are brought to court, rarely, if ever, are psychiatric or psychological reports or anger management called for, though short prison terms are slowly becoming more likely and some offenders are banned from owning animals for a time.

Wellington forensic psychiatrist Dr Justin Barry-Walsh says we should be concerned about some of these cases because children and adolescents who indulge in animal cruelty are known to be more at risk of growing into violent or psychopathic adults.

Sometimes these are young people who have been badly neglected and abused themselves and they can have a number of concerning behaviours, including callousness and psychopathic tendencies.

But there are different categories of people who offend by, for instance, biting the head off a kitten or punching a dog to death.

Sometimes these people are angry at adults; the cruelty to the animal is a way of controlling or persecuting the adult, or it's a form of displacement - though they're angry at the adult, they take it out on the animal.

The SPCA's 2008 list of shame includes the case of a couple of Bay of Plenty teenage boys who were given diversion after firing a slingshot at a seagull then setting it on fire.

Should there be investigations into their state of mind?

Barry-Walsh: "Someone should at least take a look at them."

It could be this was a one-off incident. But the behaviour warrants a closer look because it can be a marker for psychological disturbance and sometimes mental illness.

And the young Awhitu man, Kurt Sharp, who hooked goats to his towbar and dragged them for kilometres?

Sharp had been drinking and smoking cannabis when he stopped at the side of a road and saw a tethered goat. He attached it to the towbar and drove off. He tried this on three goats; two died.

"I would be concerned about a child or adolescent, or indeed an adult, doing that," says Barry-Walsh.

"Primarily it speaks of a degree of callousness and lack of empathy, and that's really concerning."

When read other cases plucked at random from the lists of shame, Barry-Walsh responds: "That's just quite extraordinary, isn't it?"

It is well documented that some serial killers began their offending with animals. American cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was one. Barry-Walsh worked for a time with Australian Paul Denyer, known as the Frankston serial killer, who killed three women in the early 1990s. Denyer had graduated from killing kittens.

In New Zealand, says Barry-Walsh, animal cruelty is an under-studied area of offending. He believes the courts should order more psychological evaluations because such behaviour raises questions about what is going on inside the heads of offenders.

He says it would be interesting to see who, if anyone, from the SPCA's lists of shame does end up in prison for murder - but these statistics are not recorded.

"That's the kind of information I would want to know. What is the relationship, or the association between someone doing this and other offending, and is it a real marker for adult violence and criminality?"

Back at the SPCA base, Vicki Border is appalled by the relentless disregard she sees for animals.

The acting chief welfare inspector for Auckland has a bad back from digging up the body of one of 33 dogs shot in massacre in Wellsford, a case now before the courts, but despite the horrors she has seen, her passion has not dimmed.

Animals can't speak; Border and the other five Auckland inspectors are their voice.

They work in an office which has a distinctly doggie smell due to the adopted dogs they all bring to work.

Border doesn't think the hard end of cruelty is getting any better and says this can be such a sad job, but speaks of the thrill when one of their charges is brought back to health and rehomed.

All the inspectors are known to cry sometimes, she says. "You see it all and you do harden to things, but it takes a while to accept when you begin the job that this does happen and that you can't fix everything."

A good part of the job of a welfare inspector is about education and Border often sits down with people, saying things like "would you like to be chained to that tree? It's not nice you know, it's raining and your dog's covered in mud."

"You try to talk to them with respect and try to make them understand [the animal] needs a kennel or a bowl of water, or take that engine hoist chain from around its neck and let's get something else on there, like a collar."

Usually, it's a combination of people just not thinking and not caring, she says.

But often it's worse. Border says she has seen for herself a "huge" correlation between animal violence, child abuse and family violence.

She remembers vividly a call-out to a job in Otara where she heard a woman in the next house beating and punching a child. When she looked out the window she saw a dog in the corner of the same property, painfully skinny and covered in sores. She rang CYFS - the agencies work closely together, and with the police.

Another time, she had been called to a South Auckland property because of a dog cowering and starving in the corner of the section, and heard whacks and a burst of screaming.

She hammered on the door and when a woman opened it, four children crowded behind her, one with a red punch mark on his face.

Another time she was involved in the case of a man who had ripped the head off a kitten in a domestic dispute in front of the mother and children.

"The partner was standing up screaming and going off his head and then just to get at them all, prove a point of some description, picked up the family kitten - which was only eight weeks old - and he stood there and ripped it off, right in front of them and then threw it out the window.

"They were under seven. Two of them, a little boy and a little girl."

The man was jailed for two years, not so much for the kitten, she says, but for the domestic offending.

Still, it was a great result, but often Border is shocked at what seems to her to be very soft sentencing and lack of treatment.

She brings up the goat dragger of Awhitu, who was sentenced to two years - eight months for the goats, the rest for other burglaries - and says while a probation report was prepared, she is not aware of any psychological evaluation.

"No one thought it was necessary, but you could tell ... he got such a kick out of doing what he did. He needs to see a doctor, go through it, see what's happened in his past, why is he like this."

What else is he capable of doing? Border asks.

In court, a family member called her a bitch.

Back out on the road, Lori Davis says she has been sworn at, given the fingers, her SPCA van cut off in traffic, and abused at the supermarket.

She puts up with it because she loves animals and wants the opportunity to represent them and be their voice.

"You know, it's an honour really."

She'll never understand why some people do the things they do and sometimes she wakes at night worrying about decisions she has made.

The plight of an emaciated pitbull woke her recently.

It belongs to a family which professed to love the animal.

Because the SPCA doesn't rehome pitbulls, she gave the family one shot - educated them, gave them a vet voucher and food, and a chance to do the right thing.

The baby rabbit, too young to take from its mother, may wake her tonight, she says.

We arrive at a little yellow house in Manurewa where someone has reported a husky dog with no shelter.

We find him in reasonable condition but with a big choke chain (weighted by a heavy padlock) starting to wear into his neck.

He does have a kennel but he's been chained to a tree so he can't get in.

Davis heaves the kennel into a better position, provides a collar and tells the woman who has answered the door to bring him some water.

From the way he laps up the water, it's clear he hasn't had any for a while. All in all, though, this dog is in much better condition than a dog Davis found as skin and bone tied up in a shed with a chain so short it could hardly move, and living in its own filth with no water and no food.

She took the dog while the owner "was screaming and crying on her hands and knees begging me not to drive away."

POLICING THE PET OWNERS

David Jones, QC, believes some people are just plain nasty and should go to jail for animal abuse, but the rest of us should be required to have a licence to own an animal.

The Auckland lawyer is deadly serious.

He has prosecuted animal neglect cases for the SPCA and knows the horror of what people do to animals through ignorance or indifference - or plain stupidity.

"All [a licence] is saying is you're looking after another living thing, it doesn't matter what it is, and if you can't look after it you shouldn't have that responsibility. It's as simple as that."

Often people have animals they don't care for properly but they can't be prosecuted just for doing something "dumb".

A licence would enable the animal to be taken away until the owners have proved they are competent to provide basic care - "and some people just don't bother, so why should they have animals?"

SPCA national president Bob Kerridge couldn't agree more and has long called for the owners of dogs to be licensed, not the animals.

While the annual SPCA lists of shame contain instances of horrific cruelty, 90 to 95 per cent of the organisation's cases are about neglect which is often born of ignorance, Kerridge says.

This is the main reason for a national push by the SPCA to educate children on the value of animals, but educating adults is harder.

A license system would mean owners would have to learn how to look after their animal and what its needs were.

"And of course in terms of enforcement, if they don't abide then it's a very good way of ensuring they don't have an animal."

SORRY STATISTICS
For the Auckland SPCA, so far this year:

* 323 uplifted animals
* 4550 animals collected (strays, sick and injured)
* 11 ongoing prosecutions
* 229 emergencies attended
* 2243 complaints lodged

Anyone interested in adopting a needy animal can contact their local SPCA
Contact details can be found at: spca.org.nz