Where have you been? Animal cruelty by children is a HUGE red flag for future abuse. Of humans.
“Where have you been? Animal cruelty by children is a HUGE red flag for future abuse. Of humans.”
Well, that is only partially true. Zoosadism is part of the Macdonald triad, which was proposed many years ago as a set of behavioral characterics which were more common in sociopaths than the general population. However, it isn’t a generally accepted standard for any kind of preventative diagnosis, because the link is tenuous and many studies contradict it.
Now, a few important things to note are:
1) Animal cruelty alone wasn’t even proposed as being particularly meaningful, it was a specific combination of behaviors which included animal cruelty.
2) It was only proposed that this particular combination was more common in people who later were diagnosed as sociopaths, than in the general population. This means that there were plenty of people in the general population who exhibited zoosadism, and even the entire triad, who never turned out to be sociopaths.
Now, anecdotally, I can attest that this kind of behavior is extremely common in children, especially in young boys of a certain age. Of children I knew growing up, the majority of boys engaged in some form of this behavior, easily outnumbering those who did not. If my sampling is at all representative of the general population, then there are millions and millions of people who did similar things who didn’t grow up to abuse humans. A “red flag” that fails to predict behavior, and in fact statisically predicts the opposite, is really just a red herring.