Intentional Cruelty Versus Neglect: New Insights on Animal Cruelty Crimes and Implications for Policy

Animal cruelty has received growing scholarly attention over the past few decades. One ongoing challenge for researchers has been the lack of readily accessible data. This situation changed in 2014 with the addition of animal cruelty offenses to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program as part of its National Incident-Based Reporting System. In addition to providing a much-needed source of animal cruelty information, these data shed light on two distinct forms of cruelty: intentional animal abuse and neglect. Previous research tended to group both forms of cruelty together, which limited the ability of these findings to inform the development of targeted prevention and intervention policies. The present study is one of the first to examine the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s animal cruelty data and to distinguish between neglect and intentional cruelty. The findings obtained are discussed in terms of application to policy and guidance for future work.