The Warring States of NPF - Animal Abuse and Domestic Violence

The Case of the Battered Pet
Who would suspect that a family�s animals could be pawns in domestic violence? Or that their sad condition might tip off investigators to women in trouble? The terrifying truth about cats and dogs.

By Barry Yeoman

Originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine, June 2008

Quote:

MARCELLA HARB-HAUSER, DVM, WAS DOING HER morning rounds at a San Rafael, California, veterinary hospital when she first met Malibu. The gray tabby was hunched in his cage, his face swollen and right eye bulging. His lungs were bruised. His ribs were broken. He had a fractured tailbone. When Harb-Hauser examined the cat's mouth, she says, "it looked like an eggplant inside."

An experienced emergency vet, Harb-Hauser tried to make sense of the medical evidence. The cat had obviously suffered a trauma, but there was no sign of a car accident or fall from a window. "This didn't just happen," she told her colleagues. "Something is fishy." The cat's owner, she learned, had brought him in at 5 a.m. and for the past three hours had been sitting quietly in an exam room. Maybe, she thought, the young woman could provide some answers.

Malibu's owner had milky skin and dark eyeliner, with tattoos on both arms. She was barely 30, her face youthful, but her gaunt frame and blank expression suggested a hard life. Speaking in a high, thin monotone, she told Harb-Hauser that she had separated from her boyfriend a year earlier, moving three times to escape him, only to have him track her down and break into each successive apartment. This morning she'd come home from a trip and found him waiting. Fresh scratches and bite marks covered his arms. The apartment was wrecked, and Malibu was hiding under a glass table, barely breathing.

"I really don't know how to tell you this, because it breaks my heart," Harb-Hauser said. "But someone tried to strangle your cat." For the first time, emotion registered on the woman's face. She looked up and locked eyes with the vet. "Yeah," she said. "My boyfriend likes to do that to me, too."

The 2006 conversation reinforced for Harb-Hauser what researchers are only now starting to understand: With devastating frequency, animals are the collateral victims of domestic violence. Dogs and cats, lizards and rabbits, horses and other farm animals�abusers torture and kill them, or threaten to do so, in order to maintain control of their spouses. And it works. Because most battered-women's shelters don't accept animals, victims are often forced to weigh their pets' safety against their own. According to various studies, between 18 and 88 percent of shelter residents delayed leaving their tormentors for fear that their animals would be injured, or worse. That doesn't count the many women who never escape.

"Pets have become pawns in the battle of power and control that marks domestic violence," says Phil Arkow, head of human-animal bond programs at the American Humane Association. While any victim of battering may be trapped in a landscape of terror, for women with cats or dogs at risk of abuse, "they not only lose the sense of safety and comfort their animals provide but all too frequently feel unable to leave."

THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN STORIES, SUSPICIONS. Harb-Hauser's first hint that an injured pet could be an SOS for an owner in danger came just after her graduation from vet school in 1992. At the New York animal hospital where she interned, a middle-aged woman with a downcast face brought in a Yorkshire terrier whose eyes had been glued shut with a powerful adhesive. "I have to have this dog back tonight," the woman told one of the doctors. "We're not supposed to leave the house. If my boyfriend catches us gone, this is going to be trouble." The next time the client returned, the Yorkie's eyes were sealed again; so were her ears and sexual organs. Despite the owner's pleas, the hospital confiscated the dog. "I always wondered what happened to that woman," Harb-Hauser says.

It wasn't until 1998 that the research started catching up. The first published study was small but groundbreaking. Frank Ascione, PhD, a psychologist at Utah State University, surveyed 38 women at a domestic violence shelter. Of those who reported having owned pets, 71 percent said that their partners had threatened, tortured�even killed�one or more of their animals during the relationship. Abusers had shot dogs, drowned a cat, and set a kitten on fire. "Many of the descriptions sounded like calculated behavior to terrorize the woman in her home," Ascione says.

Since then, a decade's worth of studies have confirmed, and expanded on, Ascione's initial findings. In Atlanta, for example, researchers surveyed 107 battered women who sought help at a family violence center after being indicted for various crimes. Of those who reported pet abuse, 44 percent said that their partners told them they would hurt the animals unless the women joined in the illegal acts. One 33-year-old said her husband punched and choked her during their five-year marriage and forbade her to see her family without him. Two weeks after he lost his job, he robbed a bank and swore he'd kick her dog to death unless she drove the getaway car. "I was sure he would kill my little Terry Terrier if I didn't do what he said," she explained. "I felt trapped."

Experts say it's no coincidence that a man who bullies his spouse also abuses pets�it's part of a methodical campaign to isolate the woman. He will hide the car keys. He'll rip out the phone. He'll ban her from holding a job or visiting neighbors and family. That leaves her with just one companion, the family dog or cat. "The animal is often the sole source of unconditional love and support for the victim, and that is not lost on the abuser," says Melinda Merck, DVM, senior director of veterinary forensics for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). The batterer knows there's no weapon more effective than severing, or promising to sever, that last remaining bond. "The ultimate goal of the abuser is to strip the victim of everything of value," Merck says.

Often batterers will injure animals as part of a threat to do the same to the people in their lives. "I have heard accounts," says ASPCA senior vice president for anticruelty initiatives Randall Lockwood, PhD, "from victim advocates in all 50 states of a husband or boyfriend who assembles the family and makes them watch as he bludgeons or beats the family dog, cat, horse, cow, bunny, hamster, gerbil�with the message of, 'You could be next.'"

AFTER MALIBU'S OWNER BLURTED OUT that her ex-boyfriend had been abusing her, Marcella Harb-Hauser knew she couldn't just treat and release the strangled gray tabby. So she contacted the Marin Humane Society, up the road in Novato, California. Cindy Machado, the society's animal services director, took firm charge. "Hold this cat as evidence," she recalls telling the vet. "Do not let it go out the door." Then Machado invited the victim, who is called Jane Doe in court documents to protect her safety, into her office for a chat.

Doe showed up exhausted and withdrawn. "In the first five minutes of the discussion, I realized, Oh, my goodness, she's going to have a really hard time telling me what happened," Machado recalls. She asked the young woman, who was craving a cigarette, to sit with her at a picnic table outside. "You can smoke all you want," she said. "I don't care what you do. Just talk to me."

Once Doe started speaking, she didn't stop for hours. She explained that her ex-boyfriend, Danh Phi Huynh, had choked her repeatedly, as he would later do to Malibu. At least six times the woman blacked out from his assaults. Huynh also warned that he would kill Doe and her family, and a month earlier had kidnapped one of her other cats, Monster. No one has seen Monster since.

"I could tell she was a survivor," Machado says. "I felt we had a kindred-spirit connection. Something just said, Don't let this woman down. You've gotta do whatever you have to do to help her." Machado arranged for the Humane Society to pay Malibu's vet bills, which totaled $5,400. She found a pet-friendly hotel where Doe and her cats could live, and instructed the staff to call Machado at any sign of trouble. And she visited Malibu, who was still hospitalized. "I saw a spark in this cat that touched my heart," she says. "It was not just a cat that was sick. It was a cat telling me to help his guardian." Though Doe was wary of the police�declining in the past to follow through on a restraining order against Huynh�Machado convinced her to press charges this time against her ex. At one point she gave Doe an enlarged photo of Malibu, bandaged and on intravenous fluids. If Doe didn't do something, Machado told her, she could wind up the same way.

A warrant was issued for Huynh's arrest. He continued to menace Doe. "I guess Monster's not important to you, is he?" the ex-boyfriend said in one voice-mail message. The following day he warned, "When you least expect it, and you don't even have the slightest clue, everything you know will be destroyed or dead." Though Huynh pleaded guilty to three felonies, his attorney argued that there were no witnesses to the strangling. The lawyer also argued that Huynh would be more likely to seek treatment for his addiction to drugs if he were not behind bars. Nonetheless, in July 2006 a judge sentenced Huynh to five years and eight months at San Quentin State Prison.

As harrowing as Doe's ordeal was, she was lucky to find an escape route. Without shelters that take pets, many women who do flee wind up living with their animals in their cars. "How are you supposed to work or go back to school when you're stuck like that?" says psychologist Lori Kogan, PhD, an assistant professor at Colorado State University's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. "Then they go back to the perpetrators because they don't have good options."

Only in the past decade have many domestic violence professionals recognized the barrier that these no-pet policies create. In Arlington, Virginia, the Doorways for Women and Families Safehouse is developing a plan to house its clients' pets in kennels on-site. Just four other programs nationwide currently offer this service. "My greatest hope is that when a survivor of violence is ready to leave, there will be no barriers," says Doorways domestic violence program director Marielle Filholm.

More often, shelters are teaming up with animal welfare agencies to create foster programs for the pets of women fleeing abuse. Sometimes the animals live with volunteers until they can be reunited with their owners. Other times they stay at veterinary hospitals or animal shelters. The Humane Society of the United States lists about 170 safe-haven programs�a start, but not enough to cover the whole country.

The article goes on from there. Mostly just posting this cause it was the kind of thing that never would have occured to me to think about but once I did it made perfect sense, the kind of person who attacks a spouse is going to be exactly the kind of person who holds a pet hostage to control that spouse, and threatening violence against a pet is probably exactly the kind of thing that would successfully terrorize a spouse into staying with an abuser.
This list from the Humane Society does pretty good at explaining how it works:

Quote:

Why do batterers threaten, abuse, or kill animals?
To demonstrate and confirm power and control over the family.
To isolate the victim and children.
To eliminate competition for attention.
To force the family to keep violence a secret.
To teach submission.
To retaliate for acts of independence and self-determination.
To perpetuate the context of terror.
To prevent the victim from leaving or coerce her/him to return.
To punish the victim for leaving.
To degrade the victim through involvement in the abuse.
Why should we recognize animal abuse as a form of battering?

Animal abuse exposes the deliberateness of battering rather than loss of control.
Animal abuse and child abuse are closely related.
Animal abuse is often a tool used by batterers to emotionally control or coerce victims.
Threatening, injuring, or killing animals can indicate the potential for increased violence or lethality.
Victims may postpone leaving out of fear for their pets' safety.
Identifying animal abusers can help identify other victims of violence within the family.
What can victims of domestic violence do to protect their pets?

Develop an emergency plan for sheltering the pets, themselves, and their children (Review a copy of the First Strike� planning guide, Making the Connection: Protecting Your Pet From Domestic Violence.)
Establish ownership of the pets (obtain an animal license, proof of vaccinations or veterinary receipts in victim's name to help prove they own the pets).
Prepare the pets for departure (collect vaccination and medical records, collar and identification, medication, bowls, bedding, etc.).
Ask for assistance from law enforcement or animal care and control officers to reclaim the pets if left behind.
What are suggested intake questions regarding pets that should be asked by a domestic violence shelter?

Do you now have a pet? If yes, how many and what kinds?
Have you had a pet in the past 12 months? If yes, what kinds?
Has your partner ever hurt or killed a family pet? If yes, describe.
Has your partner ever threatened to hurt or kill a family pet? If yes, describe.
Have you ever hurt or killed a family pet? If yes, describe.
Have any of your children ever hurt or killed a family pet? If yes, describe.
Was the animal considered the child's, yours, your partner's or the family's pet?
Did your concern for a pet's welfare keep you from coming to a shelter sooner than now? If yes, explain.
Did you leave the abusive partner because of the abuse of a pet? If yes, describe.
What can advocates do to raise awareness about the connection between animal cruelty and domestic violence in their communities?

Take animal abuse seriously.
Contact their counterparts in other agencies.
Develop cross-training and cross-reporting among animal welfare, domestic violence, child abuse and other related agencies.
Support strong anticruelty laws.
Develop community anti-violence coalitions.
Develop community based programs to promote empathy and humane education.
Encourage research on the connection.
Work with local animal shelters, veterinarians, veterinary schools and boarding kennels to develop emergency housing programs for pets.
Collect data in their own agencies.
Add questions to intake forms about animal cruelty.
What does The HSUS's First Strike campaign do to help other organizations?

Provide First Strike materials and related information.
Assist with outreach efforts (e.g., workshops, contacts, etc.).
Provide information and contacts for model programs across the country.
Provide advice, support, and technical assistance.
Provide assistance on cases involving animal cruelty.
Assist with legislative efforts.
Help raise awareness of domestic violence, child abuse and other forms of human violence among animal protection organizations and activists.

So anyway, I thought it would be a worthwhile use of a thread to share this with you all.