Animal Abuse as a Warning Sign of School Massacres

Introduction

Although school massacres are rare events, professionals and the public alike continue to search for reliable warning signs to identify adolescents deemed at risk of committing such mass murder. Academics, organizations, and advocacy groups hoping to prevent future incidents of school massacres have tried to identify the profile of a typical school shooter to preemptively identify students before they commit these devastating acts of mass violence. Groups such as the National School Safety Center (Stephens, 1998), an organization dedicated to reducing school violence, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Band & Harpold, 1999), the American Psychological Association (1999), the International Association of Chiefs of Police (1999), and the U.S. Department of Education (Dwyer, Osher, & Warger, 1998) have all publicized and advocated for the use of “checklists” that includes various characteristics of prior school killers that often contain as many as 20 warning signs of varying specificity.

Since the 1960s, criminologists, psychiatrists, and other investigators have focused on animal cruelty as symptomatic of later violence-proneness in general and of extreme violence in particular, whether focusing on serial (Levin & Fox, 1991; Ressler, Burgess, & Douglas, 1988; Wright & Hensley, 2003) or mass murderers (Hempel, Meloy, & Richards, 1999; Leary, Kowalski, Smith, & Phillips, 2003; Verlinden, Hersen, & Thomas, 2000). It makes sense that so much attention would be focused on animal abuse as a predictor of extreme forms of violence, as it is a widely accepted notion that violence begets violence and that the best predictor of violence directed against humans or animals is previous violence directed against humans or animals.

The contemporary literature on violence risk assessment reveals a rather more complicated picture, however (e.g., see Andrade, 2009), as does prior research on the link between animal cruelty and subsequent violence. Not all research investigating the predictive value of animal abuse has confirmed its connection with human violence, let alone multiple homicide (Goodney Lea, 2007; Patterson-Kane & Piper, 2009; Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002). In one of the most well-publicized accounts dating back to 1963, John Macdonald proposed that assaulting small animals was one of three precursors—along with fire setting and enuresis—of extreme cruelty toward humans. In a controlled study of personal histories, however, Macdonald (1968) himself failed to confirm the hypothesis that violent psychiatric patients would be significantly more likely than non-violent psychiatric patients to have abused animals. Likewise, Patterson-Kane and Piper’s (2009) meta-analysis found that rates of animal abuse among violent offenders and non-violent individuals were surprisingly similar. What’s more, in an extensive examination of school shootings conducted jointly by the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Education (Vossekuil et al., 2002), researchers found that only 5 of the 41 shooters they investigated had a history of abuse, leading the authors to conclude that “very few of the attackers were known to have harmed or killed an animal” (Vossekuil et al., 2002, p. 22).

By contrast, many other studies are fairly supportive of the link between animal abuse and human violence. In 1985, Kellert and Felthous uncovered significantly more animal cruelty in the childhoods of “aggressive criminals” than in the childhoods of “non-aggressive criminals” or “non-criminals.” Estimates of the percentage of extremely violent individuals who have engaged in animal cruelty tend to be substantially higher than in the general population. In their study of serial killers, Wright and Hensley (2003) found that just more than 21% of their sample of 354 cases had a known history of childhood animal cruelty—although the authors failed to examine either the nature or the extent of that animal cruelty. Ressler et al. (1988) similarly determined that a large number of their 36 convicted sexual murderers—many of them serial killers—admitted having engaged in animal cruelty. More than half of these sexual killers had perpetrated animal abuse as either children or adolescents.

Arluke, Levin, Luke, and Ascione (1999), using official reports of animal cruelty and criminal records, determined in a comparative study of 153 animal abusers and 153 of their non-abusive neighbors that the abusers were much more likely to be engaged in anti-social behavior generally—not only in perpetrating interpersonal violence but also in committing property offenses, drug offenses, and public disorder offenses. The finding that animal cruelty may be related to anti-social behavior generally rather than just human violence may help to explain the failure of previous studies to consistently uncover significant differences between violent and non-violent criminals. Moreover, as far as animal abuse being a precursor to human violence is concerned, the animal abuse episodes in the Arluke et al. study did not always precede human violence. In some cases, children started by abusing people and then later graduated to animals. The authors suggested that their findings support a deviance generalization model in which animal cruelty may precede, coincide with, or follow a broad range of anti-social behaviors—rather than the graduation or escalation hypothesis which argues that animal cruelty precedes subsequent acts of human violence.

Some researchers suggest further refinement of the link to improve its reliability as a predictor of violence. Beirne (2004) and Piper (2003) questioned the graduation or progression thesis, in part, because it is premised on a very vague notion of what constitutes animal cruelty. Every year, for example, organizations like the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals receive more than 5,000 cruelty complaints, with hundreds allegedly being committed by children and adolescents (Arluke & Luke, 1997). The kinds of cruelty incidents reported to these organizations vary enormously in terms of the species of victims, the methods used to harm and/or kill animals, and the number of animals abused by an individual. Many, if not most, of these incidents do not lead to subsequent acts of violence, even in its less extreme forms, let alone the extreme torture and killing of multiple human victims. The weak or inconsistent evidence connecting animal abuse with human violence reflects the use of a very broad operationalization of animal cruelty that neglects contextual motivation and differing perceptions of species. Shooting birds from a distance may result from boredom, fear of rejection and pressure from friends or family members, or the desire for food or a recreational challenge as in hunting. Killing rodents, insects, or snakes may be widely regarded as culturally acceptable and even beneficial, not necessarily indicating severe psychopathology in the perpetrator.

Despite the call to conceptually clarify cruelty, only one study has done so. According to Levin and Arluke’s (2009) study of sadistic serial killers, a certain type of animal cruelty likely foreshadows this kind of violence. The authors found that torturing animals in an up-close and personal way, especially animals like dogs and cats that have been heavily anthropomorphized in our culture, is a more apt red flag of this form of extreme violence than is everyday animal abuse.

Given these critiques and refinements of the link, there is a need for researchers to examine whether there is a relationship between a specific kind of animal cruelty and subsequent school massacres, as Levin and Arluke did with serial killers. On the surface, we cannot assume that mass and serial killers will derive the same psychological gratification from abusing animals, and therefore commit the same kinds of cruelty, let alone commit it as frequently. For example, compared with serial killers, mass murderers are considerably less likely to demonstrate sociopathic or psychopathic personalities (Fox, Levin, & Quinet, 2011). ¹

What’s more, unlike serial homicides that typically involve sexual assault, sadistic torture, and excessive pre- or post-mortem dismemberment and mutilation, mass murderers, including school rampage shooters, rarely engage in these heinous acts (Fox & Levin, 1998, 2012; Levin & Fox, 1999). Therefore, as school mass killers do not typically torture or mutilate their human victims, it would logically follow that the same could apply to how they treat animals.

As a useful warning sign, then, it would be vital to know whether school shooters who have committed animal abuse tend to commit a particular kind of cruelty in terms of victims, methods, or frequency, thereby distinguishing the hundreds or thousands of everyday cruelty cases that do not foreshadow extreme violence from other cases that do. In other words, when might instances of animal abuse serve as a warning sign of a possible school massacre, while other instances are merely false positives?

However little is known, much is assumed about the connection between animal abuse and school killers. There is a widely accepted perception among professionals and the public alike that many, if not most school shooters, have a prior history of animal cruelty. For example, a publication distributed by the Humane Society of the United States (2008) plainly stated, “At the extreme end of the violence spectrum, serial killers and school shooters almost invariably have histories of abusing animals” (p. 3). Likewise, a number of scholarly books and articles about animal cruelty characterize school shooters as often having tortured or killed animals as a key warning sign of their human massacres (see, for example, Muscari, 2004). Even a documentary film about the link, Beyond Violence: The Human Animal Connection, perpetuates the perception that animal abuse is a reliable and common warning sign of future school massacres by citing a few such cases without asking whether these cases are typical or exceptional among school shooters. Examining the latter question, of course, could produce findings that challenge the idea that the link commonly occurs.

This perception has been perpetuated as fact without much, if any, scientific evidence to support it. Indeed, in some publications, there are no references to back up this generalization ² or, if there are references, they often refer to other publications that repeat this belief, making the “evidence” sheer hearsay and ideology. Much like the generally held belief that animal abuse often leads to future violence of any sort, let alone mass murderers, the belief that school shooters frequently abused animals prior to their massacres is often perpetuated in part by journalists and others who simplify available research that appears to lend support to their belief. As Piper (2003) insightfully observed, such an oversimplified version can develop an energy of its own or a quasi-autonomous status (Foucault, 1969) that permeates public consciousness and professional practice, such that the belief is taken as a given.

The actual number of empirical studies exploring the relationship between animal abuse and school massacres is, in fact, quite small. Leary et al. (2003) found that, of the 15 school shootings they studied between 1995 and 2001, only 3 cases (Luke Woodham, Mitchell Johnson, and Kipland Kinkel) demonstrated any evidence of animal abuse on the part of the juvenile mass killers. Using a far more expansive variety of sources, however, one research study (Verlinden et al., 2000) has emerged as the standard empirical validation linking animal cruelty to school massacres. Examining 8 school massacres that occurred between 1996 and 1999, the Verlinden et al. (2000) study investigated the prevalence of various warning signs, including but not limited to prior animal cruelty, among the 10 perpetrators. Although they report that half of their sample of 10 shooters (Evan Ramsey, Luke Woodham, Kipland Kinkel, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold) allegedly had some history of animal abuse, this proportion, while substantial and worthy of attention by researchers, policy makers, and others, seems to fall remarkably below the many hyperbolic reports of its commonness by advocates of the link, as noted above. This is particularly the case when one considers how this 50% threshold compares with the prevalence of other so-called warning signs addressed in the very same study (Verlinden et al., 2000, p. 43), such as experiencing a “stressful event/loss of status” (80%), exhibiting signs of depression (80%), having a “preoccupation with violent media/music” (90%), and feeling “rejected by peers” and being “picked on [and] persecuted” (both 90%), not to mention the characteristics that all of the sample’s school shooters demonstrated that include having a “fascination with weapons and explosives,” “blaming others for problems,” and threatening violence in advance of the attack.

Moreover, Verlinden et al. (2000) did not examine the nature of abuse in these cases, raising the problem that teachers, parents, and school administrators might use reports of any kind of animal cruelty as a potential warning sign of a school massacre. What distinguishes, then, the present study from Verlinden and her colleagues’ research is that we not only investigated the frequency of animal abuse but also its nature when it purportedly occurred, building on Levin and Arluke’s (2009) study that sought to reduce the false positive problem in using animal abuse as a warning sign of extreme violence.

Method

To search for prior history of animal abuse, both authors independently examined 23 cases of school mass shootings from 1988 to 2012 where two or more humans were killed by shooters who were 20 years old or less. The 23 cases were located via the Lexis-Nexis newspaper database, numerous academic and government-sponsored publications (such as Larkin, 2009; Newman & Fox, 2009; Newman, Fox, Roth, Mehta, & Harding, 2004; Virginia Tech Review Panel, 2007), popular press sources (Bower, 2001; Lieberman, 2009), and various Internet sites that compile lists of school violence incidents (Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, n.d.; List of School Shootings in the United States, n.d.; Trump, n.d.) were consulted to gather as comprehensive a list as possible. Search terms included the name of the school shooter along with the following terms: school massacre/killings, animal abuse/cruelty/torture/killing, animal/dog/cat/pet. Searches using these terms were conducted on Google, Google Scholar, and the Lexis-Nexis database.

In addition to recording whether individual school shooters allegedly abused animals, we also noted the features of this abuse when details were given. More specifically, following Levin and Arluke (2009), we noted (a) the closeness of abusers to their victims in terms of species (i.e., “higher” vs. “lower” animals), (b) personal familiarity (i.e., “family/neighbor pet” vs. “stray or wild animal”), and (c) the methods of abuse, whether “up close” (i.e., direct contact with victims, such as beating) or “remote” (i.e., shooting).

Although our method is in keeping with prior studies and discussions of the link that have also relied on available reports in the media, we recognize the limitations of using these data. One problem with relying exclusively on news reports, biographical sketches, and commentary by mental health professionals is that animal abuse frequently goes unreported to authorities and even informally to intimates (Arluke, 2012), because animal victims cannot report their harm to humans and signs of abuse can easily be missed or written off as caused by non-abuse.

Furthermore, when there are reports of animal abuse, their accuracy must be carefully assessed because many if not most are unsubstantiated, not directly witnessed by peers or based on physical evidence of harmed animals. For example, our knowledge regarding the number of adolescent shooters who appear to have some history of animal abuse is based entirely upon their “boasting” about animal cruelty to friends, perhaps as a way of showing their dangerousness. Thus, assertions of animal cruelty in the life histories of school shooters may likewise be exaggerated. ³

Results

We found reports of prior animal cruelty in the histories of 10 of 23 (43%) school shooters, somewhat less than the 50% of the cases reported by Verlinden et al. (2000). This proportion is generally consistent with prior studies of other kinds of extreme killing such as serial murder, where the percentage of serial killers known to have abused animals in their youth ranges from 21% (Wright & Hensley, 2003) to 46% (Ressler et al., 1988). That said, sadistic serial killers appear to commit animal abuse far more commonly, at a rate approaching 90%, if all kinds of animal abuse, not just the sadistic hands-on variety, are considered (Levin & Arluke, 2009).

When examining the nature of these cruelty incidents, our results are consistent with Levin and Arluke’s (2009) finding that extreme killers typically commit a different kind of animal abuse than everyday people. While 28% of Levin and Arluke’s undergraduate student sample admitted having been abusive toward animals, the proportion of students who reported abusing dogs and cats was substantially smaller—specifically, only 5% overall. Just 13% of all respondents admitted employing an up-close and personal method, such as strangulation, bludgeoning, or beating to death. When combined, only 1 in their sample of 260 students admitted to using an up-close and personal method of abuse on a dog or cat.

By comparison, when closely examining the nature of animal abuse committed by the 10 school shooters in our sample, 90% of these animal abusing school shooters apparently committed cruelty in an up-close and personal manner. Thus, this does lend support to prior scholarship (Levin & Arluke, 2009), indicating that the up-close and personal method of abuse is more likely to be an antecedent to extreme violence than more everyday or “typical” kinds of cruelty (as illustrated in Arluke, 2002). Reports alleging animal abuse by school shooters often, but not always, described forms of cruelty that involved coming into direct contact with victims. For example, the Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold boasted about mutilating animals for fun, a type of cruelty that required hands-on control of the victim and tactile cutting. Kipland Kinkel’s attacks on animals also illustrated the up-close and personal variety of animal abuse; he allegedly decapitated cats, dissected live squirrels, blew up cows, set a live cat on fire, and put firecrackers in gophers and cats (Tallichet & Hensley, 2004). Other school shooters burned, drowned, kicked, or smashed their animal victims. Only a minority of school shooters (10%) apparently employed more remote methods to harm or kill animals, such as shooting them, which did not require them to be near, let alone touch, their victims.

In terms of the relationship of school shooters to their non-human victims, 70% of shooters who abused animals targeted dogs and cats, but not usually in their own home or neighborhood. Only 30% of animal abusing shooters chose familiar victims that were either the shooter’s own family or a neighbor’s pet dogs or cats. One notable example of targeting a higher species victim known to the killer is Luke Woodham, a Mississippi school shooter who described in his own journal how he tortured and killed his own dog by beating it in a plastic bag and setting it on fire (Langman, 2009b). In another case, a neighbor of Andrew Golden alleges that he killed her cat by shooting it with a pellet gun and placing it with her garbage (Pescara-Kovach, 2005). Alternatively, 70% of these shooters abused victims that were strange to them—either not owned by their families or neighbors or simply stray or wild animals. This is a proportion almost identical to that reported by Levin and Arluke’s (2009) study of serial killers where 71% of their cases tended to choose victims unknown to them. Similarly, in that study animal abusing serial killers (88%) often targeted dogs and cats as did our animal abusing mass murderers who also (80%) often selected our culture’s two most beloved and anthropomorphized species.

Finally, we found four cases (18%) where school shooters purportedly displayed empathy for and attachment to some animals, and even expressed distress when witnessing animals being harmed. Such paradoxical reports are extremely rare in the link literature with one exception; Arluke et al. (1999) reported the case of the Australian Martin Bryant, who killed 35 people but was also known as an “animal lover” who kept 30 to 40 cats and dogs in his home toward whom he exhibited marked compassion. Of course, evidence in these cases is as limited as it is in positive cases of the link, making it no more convincing, but equally deserving of attention by researchers. For example, Charles Andrew Williams shot and killed two at his California school and wounded 13 others. One source (Blanco, n.d.) claims that Andrew’s best friend Scott liked to tell stories about his concern for various small animals:

It seems he and Andy were walking one day and found a frog in a puddle. Scott hit the frog with a stick and it died. Andy was very upset and made Scott stay there with him to be sure the frog was dead. Andy asked him “How would you feel if a giant frog came by and hit you with a stick and you died?” Scott says that Andy always had a thing about animals. Andy would catch field mice and turn them into pets. Then when they died Andy would make little cardboard coffins for them and he would make Scott attend the funeral he had for his mice. Andy would even make little tombstones for their graves.

Somewhat similarly, the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass killer, Adam Lanza, was reported to be an “ethical vegan” because he did not want to hurt animals (McDonough, 2012; Willis, 2012). Unlike the Williams and Lanza cases, where there was no known prior animal abuse, the case of Eric Harris, one of the two Columbine killers, presents apparent animal empathy alongside animal abuse. According to Harris’s friends, “two weeks before Eric Harris stormed Columbine High School with guns in his hands, bombs in his pockets and payback on his mind, his biggest worry was his seizure-wracked dog. The sick pooch was all he talked about on a recent date” (Briggs & Blevins, 1999). In addition, there is at least one report in the media that Harris “cried when his dog died” (criminalminds.wikia.com). Similarly, Andrew Golden, who along with Mitchell Johnson killed four students and one teacher, shot a dog and cat, but also reportedly “cared deeply for animals and would care for them” (Alter, 1998).

Discussion and Conclusion

Our results support those of Verlinden et al. (2000) regarding the frequency of the link between animal abuse and school massacres; namely, somewhat less than half of the shooters in both studies had some history of prior animal abuse. These findings question the link’s robustness as a warning sign in cases of extreme violence.

The vital question, however, remains—Do these results set the bar too low for animal abuse to be considered a valid and useful warning sign of future school shootings? Many prior scholars (Borum, 2000; Fox & Burstein, 2010; Fox et al., 2011; Sewell & Mendelsohn, 2000; Vossekuil et al., 2002) have criticized the overuse of reductionist profiles and simplistic checklists to identify youth at risk of violence. As Sewell and Mendelsohn (2000) pointed out, many students who fit general profiles never commit school violence of any kind, while numerous students who have planned and completed attacks at their schools did not closely match prior profiles. In fact, a systematic investigation of targeted school shooting incidents revealed that there simply “is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence” whether demographic, psychological, or social (Vossekuil et al., 2002, p. 11). Due to the fact that some checklists have featured general warning signs such as a “minimal interest in academics,” this approach has been soundly criticized for utilizing criteria that are vague and broad enough to apply to the majority of any student body (Fox & Burstein, 2010, p. 69; Fox, Levin, & Quinet, 2011). While standardized psychological tests and instruments used by mental health professionals have been found to be somewhat accurate in certain contexts with violence in general (Reddy et al., 2001), there is no empirical evidence which suggests that they are successful in predicting targeted school violence with pre-selected victims (Borum, 2000).

Our findings lend support to the myriad extant critiques regarding the use of checklists and profiles to identify youth at risk of violence in two significant respects. First, in many cases of violence, there may be no known evidence of animal abuse of any sort, as our results indicate. In addition, when there is prior animal abuse, only a relatively small subset of abuse cases—acts of up-close and personal cruelty in particular—may point to future extreme violence.

By raising the bar for establishing animal abuse as a warning sign of potential school massacres, our results enhance animal abuse’s utility in this regard by detailing the kind of abuse that likely occurs when school shooters have such a history, details that are missing in prior discussions of animal abuse’s link to school massacres. The description of animal abuse in these cases—a tendency to harm dogs and cats, use up-close and personal methods of abuse, and pick unfamiliar victims—is similar to the kind of animal abuse committed by the sadistic serial killers studied by Levin and Arluke (2009). Why is it the case, then, that school shooters and sadistic serial killers who abuse animals do so in such a similar manner?

Despite the different personality profiles and motivations of school shooters and serial killers noted earlier (see Fox & Levin, 1998, or Fox & Levin, 2012, for a further review of these distinctions), many do share some common denominators that might account for the similarity in their methods of abuse and choice of victims. Our results suggest at least one such commonality underlying extreme violence against humans and animals in these cases. Goldberg (1996) has suggested that the kind of sadistic violence committed by serial killers results from the humiliation and internalized shame certain individuals experience during their childhood. To compensate, they develop a generalized malevolence whereby they inflict pain and suffering onto others. School shooters, too, often experience humiliation and shame because they have been severely bullied for prolonged periods (Levin & Madfis, 2009; Madfis & Levin, 2013). Whether for mass or serial killers, the drive to harm animals may be a quest to exert power and dominance over another being, albeit a non-human animal.

The desire to exercise power and control over the lives of others may be shared by sadistic serial killers and school shooters; both decide who lives and who dies. With their own hands, they regulate the degree of pain and suffering experienced by their victims. Certain cases of animal cruelty and human destructiveness are similarly motivated: They serve to compensate for a person’s feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability (Kellert & Felthous, 1985), and they give such an individual a sense of strength and superiority. In this regard, Dadds, Turner, and McAloon (2002) distinguished between developmental immaturity and malice in the motivation for abusing animals. The immature child may never progress to the commission of human violence. But the malicious youngster rehearses his sadistic attacks—perhaps on animals, perhaps on other people, perhaps on both—and continues into his adult years to perpetrate the same sorts of sadistic acts on human beings. His attacks on animals are serious and personal. He chooses “socially valued” or culturally humanized animals—for example, dogs and cats—against which to carry out his sadistic aims, but he is likely to repeat his abusive behavior on a variety of animals (Dadds et al., 2002). If he later finds a socially acceptable means of compensating for his sense of powerlessness, then he might very well escape the grip of violence perpetrated against humans. If not, his early experiences with animal cruelty may become a training ground for later committing assaults, rape, and even murder.

Torture may be the variable that links animal cruelty with serious acts of human violence. Animal abuse may, in certain cases, provide a child or an adolescent with a way of reducing feelings of inferiority, at least temporarily, by displacing the aggression toward a vulnerable animal. In the short term, some psychologists (Bossard & Boll, 1966) have even argued that there may actually be some sort of therapeutic advantage for children desperately in need of feeling a sense of personal power. In the long run, however, animal abuse seems also to teach young people that violence is a satisfactory method for gaining a sense of superiority (Arluke, 2006). It appears then that the torture of animals early on may have served as a rehearsal for the human violence that came later. Inflicting pain and suffering may be indicative of a strong sadistic impulse—a need to feel powerful and strong at the expense of victims. The hands-on approach suggests that these killers seek to control their victims. They may gain pleasure from their victims’ pain; they may feel superior to the extent that they degrade and belittle victims. Certainly, the choice of pets as victims for both kinds of killers makes sense. They are inclined, during their childhood and adolescence, to choose “socially valued” or culturally humanized animals—pet dogs and cats—against which to carry out their brutal aims.

Of course, not all of the school shooters in our sample targeted cats and dogs for abuse. Indeed, we found occasional evidence of the reverse—the presence of purported kindness, concern, and empathy for animals, whether these animals were their own pet dogs or unknown wild lower animals. These paradoxical cases reveal a more complex if not contradictory picture of the role of human–animal relationships in the personal histories of school killers, and one that was not present in Levin and Arluke’s (2009) study of sadistic serial killers. In four cases, or 18% of our sample, these killers also allegedly demonstrated empathy toward and attachment to some animals, making claims for the link far less convincing. How might we understand these paradoxical cases?

It may be that school shooters, and mass killers as a whole, frequently identify as the mistreated underdog (Fox & Levin, 1998), unlike psychopathic and narcissistic serial killers who far more typically see themselves as Nietzschian supermen on a higher plane of existence than the rest of humanity (Gray, 2010; Knight, 2006; Schlesinger, 1998). School shooters are often students who have been bullied, picked on, and marginalized (Burgess et al., 2006; Kimmel & Mahler, 2003; Klein, 2006; Larkin, 2007; Leary et al., 2003; Levin & Madfis, 2009; Madfis & Levin, 2013; Meloy et al., 2001; Newman et al., 2004). In fact, many of them have made explicit statements that they are killing to make a statement about how “you can only push people so far” and explicitly frame their attacks as vengeance against people who wronged them. For example, in the “multimedia manifesto” that Cho sent to MSNBC on the day of his attack at Virginia Tech, he wrote that:

You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today, but you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off, you Apostles of Sin. Congratulations. You have succeeded in extinguishing my life. Vandalizing my heart wasn’t enough for you. Raping my soul wasn’t enough for you. Committing emotional sodomy on me wasn’t enough for you. Every single second wasted on your wanton hedonism and menacing sadism could have been used to prevent today. Ask yourselves, What was I doing all this time? All these months, hours, seconds. Only if you could have been the victim of your crimes. Only if you could have been the victim . . . To you sadistic snobs, I may be nothing but a piece of dog shit. You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul, and torched my conscious again and again. You thought it was one pathetic, void life that you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die, like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the Weak and Defenseless people—my Brothers, Sisters, and Children—that you fuck. (Langman, n.d.)

Thus, it is not entirely inconsistent for some school shooters (such as Charles Andrew Williams and Adam Lanza, in particular) to have identified and empathized with animals as less powerful beings. At the same time, finding apparent evidence of a rather specific form of animal abuse in the histories of about half of our school shooter sample suggests that the false positive problem can be substantially reduced by limiting predictive acts of animal abuse to those in which dogs and cats are tortured in a hands-on manner. Animal abuse, as broadly defined, may be pervasive, but not necessarily predictive of subsequent extreme violence against humans. By focusing upon incidents of animal cruelty that rarely occur among the broad population and which resemble the modus operandi of many school killers—that is, targeting dogs and cats and using a hands-on method—vastly reduces the false positive problem. Using a considerably narrower standard will undoubtedly cause some cases of future violence to slip between the cracks, but it will also reduce the tendency to identify and unduly stigmatize those children for whom animal abuse is part of a temporary phase as potential Newtown shooters and Columbine killers.

Future research examining the purported link between animal abuse and subsequent extreme violence should build on and extend the present study by studying the link between cruelty and mass murder, more generally. In particular, as this study solely focused upon school massacre perpetrators below the age of 21, older mass killers may demonstrate different frequencies or forms of animal abuse due to increased developmental maturity. Likewise, it would be worthwhile to explore whether or not other forms of mass murder (such as those perpetrated by workplace avengers, family annihilators, and disgruntled citizens) demonstrate animal abuse at similar rates, with similar victims, and by similar means as Levin and Arluke’s (2009) serial killers and our sample of school mass murderers.

Finally, as our findings demonstrate that school shooters are not a monolithic group, with only 43% having a history of animal abuse, future research should identify and explore identifiable patterns and distinctions between and among these perpetrators. Langman’s (2009a, 2009b) distinction between traumatized, psychotic, and psychopathic school shooters does not delineate abusers from non-abusers (though both of the killers he described as psychopathic, Golden and Harris, harmed animals), but there may be some notable commonalities or characteristics that distinguish school shooters who have abused animals from those who have not. For example, it would be a worthy pursuit for scholars to investigate whether animal abusing school shooters share particular similarities with sadistic and sexual killers but not with other school shooters who have not abused animals and/or who have expressed a concern for animal welfare.