Animal Cruelty and Domestic Abuse

Most American homes have a pet, and in a violent home the pet is rarely spared. Sometimes the dog is the first victim; sometimes it is the hostage — "tell anyone and something will happen to your cat" — and nearly half of domestic violence victims in one study delayed leaving or went back out of fear for an animal left behind. What can the law, and a lawyer, do about it?

In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with Christine Mott, an animal-law attorney, former chair of the New York City Bar's Animal Law Committee, and a founder of Empire State Humane Voters, to trace the link between cruelty to animals and violence against people — and the tools, many of them unused, that the law already provides.

Henry Bergh's Two Societies

Mott begins with New York's animal cruelty statute, the first in the nation to reach any person's cruelty rather than only a stranger's damage to another man's horse — drafted in the 1860s by Henry Bergh, who founded the ASPCA and, a decade later, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The link was there from the start. She explains the two tiers of modern law: the misdemeanor catchall for "unjustifiable" harm to any animal, and the 1990s felony of aggravated cruelty, "Buster's Law," enacted after a cat was doused in gasoline and set alight, whose legislative history expressly cites the connection to violence against people. She flags the gaps: the felony covers only companion animals, so the teenagers who blew up a wild turtle with firecrackers faced a misdemeanor; it is an unclassified felony whose sentence merges with others; and "companion animal" is defined by how the animal is kept, which is how a parent who killed his son's goldfish in front of him came to be prosecuted for a felony.

The First Victim

The heart of the conversation is the pattern: the FBI now tracks animal cruelty as a serious crime because so many serial killers and school shooters began with animals, and in a household, an abused pet is either a warning that a person is next or an instrument for controlling one. Mott describes the packages — a dog's ears, a dog's tongue — sent to women in shelters by the men they fled. For lawyers, she argues, this is a matter of competence and communication under the ethics rules: a family lawyer who does not know that New York's orders of protection can cover a companion animal, whoever owns it and whether or not it has yet been harmed, is failing the client. Her practical advice is to write "and all pets" rather than naming them, to use the family-court order that requires no arrest, and to seek restitution for veterinary bills, which prosecutors are bound to request and judges to order.

Co-Sheltering and Child Neglect

Mott describes the Urban Resource Institute's pet-friendly shelters in New York City, then the only ones in the state, and the foster who brought a family's dog to the park every week until they could reclaim it. She then makes a doctrinal argument from Nicholson v. Scoppetta, the Court of Appeals decision holding that exposing a child to domestic violence is neglect: the same logic, she contends, should apply to forcing a child to witness the abuse of a beloved animal. The conversation closes on cross-reporting — Illinois's model, under which child-protective and animal-control workers must alert each other — and on New York's failure to adopt it, which Mott attributes to a field that has not yet grasped that where there is cruelty to animals, there is usually cruelty to someone else.

What to Know Now

The law has moved toward Mott's positions on nearly every front. In 2018 Congress enacted the Pet and Women Safety (PAWS) Act as part of the Farm Bill, amending the federal interstate stalking and protective-order statutes to cover threats against a victim's pet, authorizing restitution for veterinary costs, and funding grants for shelters that house victims with their animals; the Department of Justice has since awarded tens of millions of dollars under the program, and pet-friendly domestic violence shelters, once nearly unique to the Urban Resource Institute, now operate in most states. The PACT Act of 2019 made intentional animal crushing, burning, drowning, or impaling a federal felony, filling the gap left when federal law reached only videos of such acts. The FBI's tracking she mentions began in 2016, with animal cruelty reported as a distinct offense in the National Incident-Based Reporting System. New York has continued to expand protection: every state now has a felony cruelty provision; New York's orders of protection continue to cover companion animals; and in 2021 the state amended its Domestic Relations Law to require courts dividing property in divorce to consider the best interest of a companion animal, moving pets further from the status of a mug. Cross-reporting has spread more slowly — roughly a dozen states require or permit it, and New York still does not — and the argument she draws from Nicholson remains to be made in a reported case. The link she describes is now mainstream in law enforcement training and in the National Sheriffs' Association's National Law Enforcement Center on Animal Abuse. Mott has since left corporate practice to advise animal-protection and food-technology organizations.