I'm so glad you asked me that. You all have a handout before you of research on the violence link.
Violence towards animals has a link to every violent crime that any police organization investigates, and on this handout, you'll see partner abuse, gangs and youth. General investigations are what we call “district investigations”. They can be assaults or minor offences, major crime, forensic identification and sexual assaults. SACA here stands for sexual assaults and child assaults. In each one of those, you will see research quoted.
This is just a sample of research. I have a research review. I interchange these ovals here depending on who I speak to, because there is so much research out there on the violence link. There are decades of it.
If you want me to, I can go over any individual thing. You can see that for partner abuse it's 89%. We have new Canadian research that talks about how 93% of partner assault cases involve animal abuse. As Monique St. Germain and Lianna McDonald said, animals are used to control the victims. We see that in every crime. We see it in gangs with younger members. We see it in partner abuse and child abuse cases. They're used to control victims. Even if the dogs are not being assaulted or used to penetrate children or whatever, they're used to control the victims.
In terms of major crime and school shootings, it shows up in 43% of school shootings. On the Parkdale shooting, two weeks before that he was found in his backyard taking pellet practice at wild animals. I think it was gophers or groundhogs or whatever. A neighbour reported it. Nobody went to investigate it. Had they gone to investigate and held him for a psych assessment or whatever, 17 children would still be alive today.
I can speak to any of the individual cases, but I do have a literature review of all the research we've looked at. I'd be happy to leave it with you.