According to news sources, such as People magazine and KLFY news, the FBI has announced it will start tracking animal abuse cases in the state of Ohio and then the rest of the country. Animal rights activists have declared this a major victory as they hope to better track and punish those convicted of committing acts of animal cruelty.
In the past, according to MTV.com, these cases were not tracked, lumped into a nebulous “other” category that made tracking the abusers more difficult and putting the crime in a less serious category.
Now there will be a database where animal cruelty cases will be uploaded. The database will categorize each case into one of four categories: animal neglect, torture, animal sex abuse or organized abuse. Organized abuse would include dog-fighting rings.
The FBI said it hopes the database will help find trends and draw some conclusions about the crimes, similar to how it uses the sexual abuse and violent crimes databases.
Local authorities will be responsible for loading the animal abuse cases into the database. It is also theorized that patterns for offenders can be tracked as those who abuse animals often abuse humans later on.
According to the People article, Mark Kumpf of the Montgomery County Animal Resource Center, “This is the biggest change out of the FBI. This is a giant leap forward and people in law enforcement are hitting the ground running.”
Often, local authorities do not have enough resources to investigate or work with animal abuse cases. It’s hoped the database will help with this and that when solid statistics are gathered in a few years, government funding to fight animal abuse can be distributed.
