Animals in Criminal Justice

Throughout history, animals have participated in the criminal justice system as victims, perpetrators, executioners, evidence, weapons, and crime detectors. While their participation has usually been involuntary, they have participated nonetheless for many centuries. Considerable research now indicates that children's cruelty to animals is an important predictor of their violent behavior in adolescence and adulthood. Nonetheless, the role of animals in criminal justice has not been a major interest of either historians or criminologists. Although the protection of animals and animal rights draws much attention in American and other societies, there is no national database in the United States that provides information about the number of animal cruelty cases prosecuted each year.

Animals as Weapons

In Roald Dahl's fictional short story Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), a housewife hits her husband over the back of his head with a large frozen leg of lamb, killing him, after he tells her that he is leaving her. While this tale is fiction, there is much evidence that animals are used as weapons, and some criminals have been creative in their use of animals as the “perfect weapon.” Drug dealers and gang members have turned to pit bulls and other “vicious” dogs to protect their illicit interests. It has been reported that in domestic violence situations, the abused partners who have pets have had their pets [Page 36]harmed or threatened to be harmed. Animals have even been used by child molesters to “bait” their victims, as was the case in the July 1994 crime that inspired Megan's Law (requiring community notification of sex offenders living in the neighborhood). Jesse Timmendequas, the convicted pedophile who raped and killed seven-year-old Megan Kanka, lured the young girl to his house by telling her that she could see his puppy.

In this woodcut, pigs and goats on the loose in rural Europe attack children and infants.

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