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44 A Arluke and L Irvine eclipse other concerns, including but not limited to animal cruelty Moreover, many cruelty cases never advance to prosecution because of unknown perpetrators (Arluke and Luke 1997) Researchers have also used data from veterinarians to estimate the prevalence of cruelty to companion animals Veterinarians in Massachusetts (78.9 %), Indiana (87 %) and Michigan (88 %) claimed to have treated at least one animal deliberately injured by a client over the course of their careers (Donley et al 1999; Landau 1999; Stolt et al 1997) Nationally, American veterinarians reported a mean of less than one cruelty case per 100 total cases seen in the preceding year (Sharpe and Wittum 1999) In New Zealand, 63 % of veterinarians reported seeing cases of deliberate abuse in the five previous years, with most seeing one case per year (Williams et al 2008) In Australia, 40 % of veterinarians saw between one and three cases of ‘deliberate, physical maltreatment or neglect’ per year (Green and Gullone 2005, p 620) In Scotland, 48 % of veterinarians reported seeing ‘non-accidental injuries’ in their practices; the majority saw between one and three cases per year (Munro and Thrusfield 2008) Although the reports of veterinarians also seem to suggest a low rate of companion animal abuse—about one case per year—Patronek (1997) points out that most ‘victims of deliberate abuse will never be brought to a veterinarian for treatment by the abuser’ (1997, p 273) Moreover, many veterinarians report feeling inadequately prepared to recognise cruelty (Benetato et al 2011; Landau 1999; Miller 2006; Patronek 1997; Sharpe and Wittum 1999) Recently, forensic veterinary pathology has begun establishing guidelines for distinguishing accidental and non-accidental injuries (Cooper and Cooper 2008; Merck 2012; Munro and Munro 2008) Still, some veterinarians said their fear of retaliation by clients would make them reluctant to report animal cruelty (Patronek 1997; Stolt et al 1997) Another source of data, Pet-abuse.com, has catalogued almost 20,000 documented court cases of animal abuse in the USA and several other countries in a searchable database The 2013 annual US summary, the most recent one available, lists 132 cases This represents an unexplained decline from previous years, when totals ranged from 559 in 2012 to 1,740 in 2008, with most attributed to neglect or to abandonment Although many animal advocacy organisations report data from Pet-abuse.com on their websites, Pet-abuse.com itself notes, ‘there is no real way of determining the true accuracy of the number of cases we have in the database for any given year versus the actual number of incidents (reported or unreported)’ Moreover, the data on Pet-abuse.com ‘does not represent a random sample of abuse and cruelty cases It is a form of convenience sample, and the ability to generalize from these data admittedly is suspect’ (Gerbasi 2004, p 362)