Nikolas Cruz had got into trouble for shooting chickens. He had also boasted about killing animals and posted images of them on social media. There are even stories about him trying to get his dog to attack a neighbour’s potbellied piglets.

In February 2018, Cruz killed 17 staff and students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Florida.

In the UK, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables would often, according to neighbours, shoot pigeons with air rifles and tie rabbits to railway lines to watch them be run over.

In 1993, when they were just 10 years old, they killed toddler James Bulger in Liverpool.

It’s a familiar scenario: a heinous crime has been committed and, afterwards, the background of the perpetrators is analysed and picked over in a bid to try to uncover if there were warning signs that might have been missed or chances to intervene lost. A picture of chaotic childhoods, peppered with abandonment and violence, often emerges - and, in among the flow of shocking stories, we also often hear tales of animal cruelty.

That link between animal cruelty and extreme acts of violence - and psychopathic behaviour traits - has become well established in the public psyche. So much so, in fact, that fears over wrongly outing a child as the next Venables is preventing teachers from reporting incidents, according to Gilly Mendes Ferreira, head of education and policy at the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA). Most teachers recognise there are likely other reasons for the cruelty, but they fear that reporting it will mean only the worst-case conclusion will be considered.

It has become, says Mendes Ferreira, something of a “silent area” as a result. And that silence can be extremely damaging.

Animal cruelty in childhood can be a red flag for psychopathic traits but there are many other things that can also be going on, says Jo Williams, a professor of applied developmental psychology at the University of Edinburgh and the coordinator of Children, Adolescents and Animals Research (Caar).

“It could be a red flag for the situation the child is growing up in, in which case it could be seen as a cry for help that should not be ignored because it’s very much linked with child abuse and domestic violence,” she says.

“And it could also be a red flag for the child in terms of mental health problems that might be developing, or behavioural issues.

“So, there’s a range of different ways that we might see this and, at the moment, there’s often a jumping to the [conclusion] that there’s a problem with the child, and this is a fear that parents also hold.”

In addition, teenagers could be being cruel to an animal because of peer pressure and being egged on by their friends, she suggests.

“In adolescence, a lot of delinquent behaviour is done in groups: smoking is done in groups, drinking is done in groups, drug use is done in groups, and cruelty is done in groups. It’s not within the individual.”

In younger children, what might be perceived as an act of animal cruelty is often simply about curiosity and exploration, says Williams. They play with animals but harm them by accident because they do not know how to handle them.

All of these issues risk being left unresolved if teachers do not report incidents, says Williams. She agrees with Mendes Ferreira that, because of the associations of animal cruelty outlined at the start of the article, incidents are under-reported.

Williams likens the way child animal cruelty is perceived now to the way that bullying used to be perceived in the past. The assumption was that bullies were bad children - there was something inherently wrong with them - but now we have a more nuanced view and, instead of punishing the bullies after the fact, many schools take a preventative approach. They teach pupils about the impact of bullying, establish ground rules about how they want pupils to interact and try to create an environment where bullying is unacceptable.

She would like to see universal programmes about animal handling and welfare delivered in schools and more resources invested in the pupils who need more intensive support. She believes that child animal cruelty happens more often than we realise, but that “the way we frame animal cruelty can reduce [the] seeking [of] help”.

“It’s probably far more common than we realise, but many parents will intervene when something happens because they are so worried about the consequences,” Williams explains. “If we had a less stigmatising approach, we could put education in place to prevent accidental harm and identify children who need extra support so we can give them more intensive resources.”

Skewed impression

One answer to this issue might be more education for teachers on the subject so children can be better identified and the other causes of the behaviour understood. But Williams explains that the research is very sparse. She and her team carried out a recent literature review, looking at all the research into child cruelty to animals written in English, and turned up 39 studies, which she describes as “a tiny corpus of research evidence on which to understand why children might be cruel to animals”.

The literature review suggests that animal cruelty can start as young as six - although Williams says some Scottish research suggests it can take place earlier - and estimates vary widely from 20 to 60 per cent of children engaging in animal cruelty. The research also suggests it is more common among boys and children growing up in urban areas, where they are less connected with animals and nature.

The other issue with the research, besides the fact that there simply is not enough of it, is that it does not tend to be done with the children themselves.

Instead, it might involve parents reporting on their children’s behaviour or else it focuses retrospectively on people like Cruz, Thompson and Venables, who have already committed heinous crimes, and looks at whether they harmed animals as children.

This could be giving us a skewed impression of the connection between animal cruelty in childhood and criminal behaviour later on in life, says Williams, which makes parents, teachers and other professionals reluctant to report it when it comes up. However, the other reason that teachers and others might fail to tackle animal cruelty when they see it is because it can be unclear who to report it to, says Mendes Ferreira.

The SSPCA, though, is trying to begin the process of identifying a solution to the issue. It has started a programme called Animal Guardians, which offers one-to-one support for children referred for concerns over animal cruelty, taking them through a weekly set of lessons around empathy and compassion towards animals.

The idea is that it offers a proportional and supportive intervention that teachers are more likely to refer pupils to if concerns arise.

It began in May last year and so far has received 79 referrals, with around 50 of the young people accepted on to the programme.

The most common reason for referral is “heavy-handedness” - children holding their animals too tightly or never letting the animal have “down time”. But children who have killed animals have also been referred.

In addition, the SSPCA has found that, in a number of cases, a child has harmed the family pet because they see it as being better loved than they are.

The programme usually runs for up to eight weeks but is individualised, so can go on longer. PhD student Laura Wauthier, who is being supervised by Williams, is analysing its impact. It is early days, but she has carried out interviews with 10 of the children who took part in the programme. They had an average age of 8; all but one were boys.

Wauthier identified poor attachment and the normalisation of violence in the home as common to many of the children. Not only could they speak about a number of occasions when they had witnessed animal cruelty but three or four also reported that they had been bitten by animals, with one child talking about being bitten and the dog being “beaten off him by his father”.

“Lots of the time, the children described incidences of cruelty,” says Wauthier. “Sometimes this was their own but it was also witnessed cruelty and there was other exposure to violence…A lot of these children had traumatic events like witnessing domestic violence where the police got involved.”

The 10 children did recognise and were aware that it was bad to hurt animals - so much so that half of the children did not feel able to talk about their own incident of animal cruelty. Wauthier found that they did not “demonise” the animals or say they were “worthless”, and were often attached to their pets. However, they were treating them the way they were used to seeing animals treated - or the way they themselves were used to being treated. One child, for instance, talked about hitting his cat, but also spoke about his mum slapping the cat.

Phil Arkow - who has dedicated his career to highlighting the link between animal cruelty and human violence and is the coordinator of National Link Coalition - believes that the fate of family pets is too often overlooked by the professionals working with children. He says it can offer a window into the lives children are leading at home and “fill in the pieces of the puzzle”.

The SSPCA’s Mendes Ferreira, is crystal clear that, if one of the youth engagement officers delivering Animal Guardians hears anything that causes them concern, they will report it to the headteacher. “They make it clear to the child that the conversation is private but, if they tell them about something that might put them in danger, they have to pass that information on,” she says.

“A pupil support worker also often sits in on the sessions so they are also there to take forward anything that’s concerning.”

Mendes Ferreira urges teachers not to ignore bite or scratch marks on a child.

“Just ask the question,” she says. “Are they not handling the cat right? Are they trying to squash it? Even if you are not an animal lover, this programme is not just about one thing. If you teach about the emotions - about respect empathy and compassion - everyone benefits, not just the animals.”

‘Another way of being’

But how much impact can an intervention that lasts a few weeks actually have in the lives of children, some of whom have become inured to violence because of their own personal experiences? Williams insists it can have value, because the programme is about modelling compassionate behaviour and giving children “another way of being to reflect upon”.

“The materials we used we know, based on previous research, work when it comes to changing attitudes, understanding and knowledge, so it’s a very evidence-based programme and we have every expectation it will work,” she says.

“We don’t just cover animals, we start off with human emotion recognition and go on to animals. For some children, even just the one-on-one attention that they get through a programme like this can be beneficial.”

The programme is also being adapted and, in the future, it will teach children strategies they can use to control their impulses rather than lashing out. “Some cruelty is lash-out cruelty,” Williams explains. “They do something in a split second that causes a lot of harm but it wasn’t necessarily intentional.”

A depute head at a Scottish primary, who has used the programme on four occasions, recalls a parent who worried for years about her child putting his pet in the washing machine but was too frightened to report it. “We had to say to the mum, ‘It’s OK, it doesn’t mean anything. He was young when he did that and he didn’t know any better’.”

The child was put forward for the programme so that he could learn about handling and caring for animals, which proved a huge success.

The depute head - who did not want to be named for fear the referrals would paint her school in a bad light - thinks teachers are unlikely to buy into the view that animal cruelty is a sure sign of a child irretrievably set on the wrong path. Teachers understand better than anyone, she believes, that children often do things out of ignorance and simply need to be taught the right way. She adds, however, that she can understand why some schools might worry about selling a programme such as Animal Guardians to parents because, at the outset, she had those very same worries. “I did worry that, if I approached a parent, their response would be ‘Oh my goodness, what are you implying?’,” she says.

But she sees the programme as being about building up empathy and learning to understand emotions, both animal and human, and that is the way she encourages families to view it. She also believes firmly that children who have harmed animals in the past can be taught to behave differently in the future, and that this will have a positive, knock-on effect on their human interactions - and, potentially, on the families they go home to in the evening.

“If a child lives in a house where there’s lots of shouting, they come to school and learn another way - they are educated to speak to people in gentle voices and respect each other,” says the depute head. “Similarly, if they eat their dinner without washing their hands, they come to school and learn we clean our hands before prepping food.

“We know that our children go home all the time and educate their parents because their parents tell us about it. Children are very impressionable and more than capable of saying ‘But in school we’ve been learning this...’”

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 4 OCTOBER 2019 issue under the headline “Don’t turn a blind eye to animal cruelty”