The title might aggravate some people. Particularly animal abusers 😎😉. I’ll give you my thinking on this. Or perhaps you have guessed it already.
My theory is that animal abuse is passed down from parent to children along the family bloodline. It is a never-ending process and only stops when one set of parents in the family tree do not have children.
Until then young adults who’ve learned from their parents that abusing animals is okay teach their kids the same thing.
They might not do it consciously. They do it by setting an example through their behavior.
Their children learn by observation. At an early age they begin to understand that animal abuse is acceptable and that animals are not sentient beings.
To animal abusers there is a lack of awareness that they are causing pain to a sentient being.
The problem is about teaching the wrong thing to kids. Stopping animal abuse is also about education; educating kids that it is morally wrong and criminal behaviour.
There are two ways to teach kids about animal abuse: through education, to drive out the mistaken beliefs that they have learned from their parents or proactively prevent them learning these things in the first place which can be achieved by removing them from their miscreate parents at the earliest opportunity and place them with foster parents.
This might be an indefinite placement until they are adult and independent or a return to their parents might be conditional on them participating in a retraining course in which they learn about animal sentience and moral behavior.
Although my belief is that it is extremely difficult to train out of an animal abusing person the beliefs that they hold which allows them and drives them to perpetrate acts of violence against animals.
The kids could be placed in foster care as part of a court order when the parent is first convicted of animal abuse. I’d prefer that foste care happened before then as it may be too late.
Perhaps the assessment and evidence of a social worker on unannounced visits to the family on the fact that the parent is abusing animals might lead to foster care proceedings.
The important aspect of this is to remove the child from the abusive parents asap to prevent the child being indoctrinated with distorted beliefs on animal welfare and sentience.
RELATED: Cambodia’s children are being discouraged to regard dogs as meat
Mafia
I have been thinking about this for some time. I was motivated to write about it today because there is a story from Italy which tells us that the children of mafia parents are being placed in foster care in order to break this continuous link from parent to child and from child to their child which perpetuates the mafia clans, criminality and which ends up with the children of mafia members spending a large chunk of their lives in jail.
The idea of taking children from mafia heads and gang members and placing them into foster care comes from Roberto di Bella, a judge, who was exasperated at seeing mob bosses’ offspring follow their fathers into the court room having been soaked in mafia culture at home.
The scheme has proved to be a resounding success so much so that some mafia bosses in jail for their crimes have decided to give evidence against the mafia in order to prevent their children going to jail. They wanted to voluntarily break this chain of events.
Roberto di Bella said that: “Now, with the new protocol, we can expect an important increase in the number of children involved. We can change the destiny of thousands of minors.”
The same I would say applies to families engaged in animal abuse through the generations.
RELATED: The parents of a pre-teen child who abused a four-week-old kitten should be investigated
