Warning Signals from DISTURBED YOUTH

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 2000 by Nancy B. Miner

Deliberate cruelty to animals has been demonstrated to be a predictive forerunner to violence against humans.

ON OCT. 1, 1997, in Pearl, Miss., 16-year-old Luke Woodham stabbed his mother to death, then took a rifle to school, where he shot nine students, killing two.

On Dec. 1, 1997, in Paducah, Ky., 14-year-old Michael Carneal took a stolen arsenal of four shotguns, two rifles, a pistol, and more than 700 rounds of ammunition to school, where he gunned down eight classmates at a prayer circle, killing three.

On March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Ark., 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson set off a fire alarm in the school they attended, then opened fire on students and teachers pouring out of the building, killing five and wounding 10.

On May 21, 1998, in Springfield, Ore., 15-year-old Kipland Kinkel murdered both his parents, then took a rifle and two handguns to school and fired upon a crowd of students in the cafeteria, wounding 22 and killing two.

On Apr. 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colo., as the culmination of more than a year of planning, 17-year-old Dylan Klebold and 18-year-old Eric Harris used a stockpile of pipe bombs and guns to massacre 12 classmates and a teacher and wound 23 before killing themselves.

Although the incidence of school violence is dropping, its severity is escalating. Following the Jonesboro shooting, Pres. Clinton ordered Attorney General Janet Reno to establish a task force to look for links among the school shootings and explore ways of averting such tragedies in the future. That was a full year prior to the slaughter in Littleton.

Although few people are aware of it, that link already exists. The nexus--and the warning signal that could have saved more than two dozen lives had it been recognized as such--is one which Clinton, Reno, and hundreds of educators, law enforcement officials, and other experts have repeatedly ignored. It is the powerful connection between cruelty to animals and human violence, a well-documented phenomenon researchers call "The Link." In all the shootings, the young gunmen were widely known to have committed--even boasted about--acts of animal cruelty.

In his journal, Woodham gave a chilling description of the way in which he and a friend killed his dog by beating her with baseball bats, dousing her with gasoline, setting her on fire, and then tossing her body into a pond. "I made my first kill today," Woodham wrote. "It was a loved one.... I'll never forget the howl she made. It sounded almost human. We laughed and hit her more.... I'll never forget the sound of her bones breaking under my might. I hit her so hard I knocked the fur off her neck.... It was true beauty."

Carneal told classmates about episodes of animal abuse that included tossing a cat into a bonfire. Golden was an avid hunter who boasted of torturing and killing animals, a proclivity that led one family friend to say that "guns and killing things were his whole life." Moreover, Kinkel had been bragging for years in gruesome detail to his classmates about the ways in which he tortured animals, from cats to cows, using guns, knives, firecrackers, and homemade bombs.

Klebold's family reportedly knew that he kept firearms in the house, but dismissed it, saying that he saved the largest of his guns "just to shoot woodpeckers." Other considerations aside, shooting woodpeckers is illegal, since they are a protected species. Classmates said that Klebold and Harris also talked about mutilating animals.

In 1964, anthropologist Margaret Mead warned that "the most dangerous thing that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it." Yet, more than three decades later, society continues to trivialize what should be regarded as a clear indication of potentially serious trouble in the future. When a child mistreats an animal, all too often the actions are dismissed by adults insisting that "boys will be boys" or "he's just going through a phase" or "children can be cruel, but it doesn't mean anything." To the contrary, deliberate cruelty to animals does mean something. It is a harbinger of further violent, antisocial behavior.

People who hurt animals also hurt people. There are more than two decades of scientific research and anecdotal evidence documenting this connection. In the case of the school shootings, dozens of people, including law enforcement and school officials, were aware of the boys' abusive behavior, but no one took it seriously.

As a result, more than two dozen youngsters were killed and many more wounded. Of those who survived, some are physically disabled permanently. Still others, with less severe physical injuries, will lose years of their lives to the struggle for emotional recovery. So will the families and friends of victims and perpetrators.

In addition to animal abuse, the boys gave numerous verbal warnings of their intentions, telling classmates and friends that "something bad is going to happen" and that they "had a lot of killing to do"; that the other students would soon find out "who was going to live and who was going to die"; and that the boys wanted to "kill them all!" Of course, as one beleaguered school administrator pointed out, if every student who threatened to kill someone were called into the principal's office, the classrooms soon would be empty.