Experts warn of ties between domestic, animal abuse

Experts say that people who engage in domestic abuse against a spouse or children often will use the family pet to control the rest of the family through fear.

Brenda Heredia, executive director of the Family Crisis Center in Harlingen, has seen cases in which people fleeing domestic violence are preoccupied with the safety of their pets because emergency shelters don’t allow in animals.

"People don’t think that’s all that important," Heredia said. "They think, ‘Food, clothes,’ all that kind of stuff."

However, the welfare of the family pet is crucial, because an abusive relative often uses the animal as leverage.

"They always threaten beforehand," she said. "Most of the time it’s only threats, I will tell you that. But that’s because they know how psychologically effective it is."

Catherine Faver, a professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Texas–Pan American in Edinburg, has conducted extensive studies on the link between domestic violence and animal abuse.

"It was some years ago that people discovered, realized, that intimate partner violence and child maltreatment often coexisted in the same family," Faver said. "Often, there’s definitely more than one perpetrator and more than one victim. And so a father may abuse a child, and the child may in turn abuse the pet. But not all children who are abused turn around and abuse their pets. Some try to protect the pets."

The connection between domestic and animal abuse is pervasive across the country, and it is no different in the Rio Grande Valley. Between 2003 and 2005, Faver spoke to 151 pet owners in the Brownsville and Harlingen areas who were victims of domestic violence. Some, but not all, of the women in the study were at local crisis centers.

The study found that:

>> 36 percent of the women reported that their partners had threatened, harmed or killed their pets.

>> 35 percent said they worried about the safety of their pets while they were in their abusive relationship.

>> And 20.5 percent said concern for the safety of their pets in some way affected their decision to seek shelter.

Some of the women in Faver’s study between 2003 and 2005 were at the Family Crisis Center in Harlingen. In the course of that two-year period, Heredia said, she realized the predicament in which pet owners find themselves when they are fleeing an abusive situation.

"I thought, ‘Well, wait a minute,’" she recalled. "‘If I’d been abused and I needed shelter, and I were told that you can’t bring your cat with you because we don’t take pets, I would sleep in my car, or go home, or sleep in a park because I wouldn’t leave my cat.’

"And that’s when we started saying, ‘OK, if the family has a pet, we’ll find a foster parent for it.’ We got a group together where we find foster parents for the pet while they’re in our shelter."

Heredia recalled one incident in which a woman and her young daughters came to the shelter with a pet dachshund.

"Of course, just coming to the shelter and not being at home, that was hard on them, but they were so worried about their dog," she said. "And so it was great that we found a foster person, and when the little girls got out, they got their animal back."

Heredia recalls one horrific incident about four or five years ago in which a family pet was being hideously tortured in a domestic incident. She was called for jury duty in Cameron County and she really wanted to be chosen for the case: A man had been abusing his children, and he showed them what he would do to them if they told anyone. He put their puppy on a barbecue grill that had a live fire going, closed the lid and roasted the animal alive, right in front of the children.

"I wanted to be on that jury, but when they found out that I’m the ED of Family Crisis Center, they said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t be on there,’" she said.

Recent state legislation now addresses the problem of pets caught in the violent wrangling of domestic abuse. The website www.capital.state.tx.us says a new law went into effect Sept. 1 that extends protective orders to include family pets.

In other words, it is now illegal for a defendant in a domestic violence dispute to remove pets owned by a person protected by an order, or "by a member of the family or household of a person protected by an order." It is illegal harm them, threaten them, or interfere with their care, custody, or control.