Single in the city Children who abuse animals can become beasts

Rym Ghazal

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 6:54PM UAE / November 4. 2009 2:54PM GMT

Forever imprinted in my uncle’s mind, who hadn’t seen me since I was five years old until that moment, is the scene of me threatening a group of boys in the street with a long metallic chain. A few moments before, the chain was being used by the boys to beat up a golden retriever puppy.

Before I am attacked for my tactics, if you had seen just how violent these eight and nine-year old boys were to a helpless puppy, tied with a rope and bleeding from being hit with the chain, I don’t think you would have a problem. And perhaps standing up to them helped to prevent them from becoming abusive men.

“Why are you doing this? Do you know how it feels to be beaten with this?,” I recall saying to them after I had snatched the chain from them.

My uncle, whose knee-jerk reaction was to shout at me for threatening the children with the same chain, soon turned his anger towards the children’s parents who happened to be sipping coffee and chatting at a nearby shop, not paying much attention to the drama unfolding just outside.

“You have to pay attention to your children before they grow up to be murderers,” said my uncle, which didn’t go down well with the parents. Of course, this was answered with: “There are bigger problems in the world than animal abuse.”

That is true. But there should be nothing wrong with trying to remedy it when you come across it.

The poor puppy fled for his life after I removed the ropes and tried to comfort it. But I don’t blame it for running away.

Just in case you are wondering, the children turned their aggression towards me and started to hit me for letting the puppy go. Sure, you can blame violent video games and the internet all you want, but seriously, it is the lack of discipline and having little fear of a parent’s punishment that allowed them to be so abusive to the animal in the first place.

While this was in Lebanon, I have seen instances of animal abuse everywhere. There have been recent media reports of pets being kidnapped here from homes and later being found by the owner tortured and killed in a nearby bin. How awful. But unless you have a pet, you can’t understand just how distressful and painful it is for the caretaker. Especially if you live alone and away from family, your pets are your family.

People poke fun of animal cops and animal rights groups that go around and try to rescue animals of all sizes and shapes from abuse. But having worked at an animal shelter back in Canada, and then helping out at shelters in various places in the Middle East, I do see a major difference in having at least the presence of an authority that can punish animal abusers. Whom do you call if you find someone beating their pet here?

I came across three nationals who admitted to me that when they were younger, they once threw cats from their speeding cars along the Sheikh Zayed motorway to “see how it looks” when thrown out of a window. They stopped doing it out of fear that the police would catch them.

“But why did you find that amusing?,” I asked. They didn’t know how to answer that. I know people do stupid things when they are young, but then, there is stupid and harmless and there is stupid and downright cruel. Needless to say, they promised to educate their own children better than they had been and to emphasise the importance of kindness to weaker beings.

It is part of our religion to show mercy to animals. We have no right to kill them unless they are being used as food. Even this is allowed only under certain strict conditions.

Many studies have shown a correlation between abusive behaviour towards animals and abusive tendencies in adulthood towards people. It comes as no surprise to hear how many criminals at some point admit to hurting their pet in their childhood. Two researchers in the 1980s compared a group of men imprisoned for a violent crime with a group of nonviolent, non-incarcerated men. They found that 25 per cent of the violent criminals reported “substantial cruelty” towards animals when they were children. None of the non-incarcerated men reported animal abuse as part of their history. Famous serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic murderer of boys and young men, admitted to experiments on small animals, whose skeletons he collected in his childhood.

You shouldn’t need a psychologist or a scientific report to know that a lack of empathy for animals or their abuse by children should raise a red flag.



rghazal@thenational.ae