46 A Arluke and L Irvine Explaining Cruelty to Companion Animals The explanations offered for cruelty to companion animals reflect the priorities of the stakeholders in the issue, primarily criminal justice and mental health professionals, and animal welfare advocates Mental health experts have long had a role in criminal justice, providing testimony, determining competence and conducting criminological research This well-established symbiotic relationship, combined with the trend known as medicalisation, has secured the mental health profession’s authority to account for many acts considered ‘deviant’ or criminal (see Conrad 1992; Conrad and Schneider 1992) From this perspective, animal cruelty constitutes an impulsive act indicative of psychopathological problems in the offender Until recently, some psychologists supported the therapeutic value of animal abuse as a ‘healthy’ form of displacement In this paradigm, dogs, in particular, could provide children in need of power with satisfactory victims For example, Bossard and Boll (1966, p 128) write: The child who is commanded all day long may be commander over his dog The child who is full of resentment over what he believes is his bad treatment by adults may kick at his dog Though this use of a dog, if carried to extremes, is not exactly commendable, there is some therapeutic effect for children when indulged in within reason Unlike the ‘displacement’ explanation, which depicts cruel acts as reducing the potential for further aggression, the ‘graduation’ hypothesis or ‘progression thesis’ (Beirne 2004) argues that cruelty represents early stages of a progression of aggressive responses that lead to future violence towards humans Often referred to as the ‘link’, animal welfare organisations use this explanation to arouse public attention for crimes against animals that would otherwise go unpunished Interest in the link increased during the 1960s, when criminologists and psychiatrists sought to predict who would commit murder Forensic psychiatrist John MacDonald famously included animal cruelty among the warning signs of homicidal behaviour, along with firesetting and bed-wetting Although MacDonald later acknowledged that he found no statistical support for the predictive power of his triad of behaviours, and subsequent studies found conflicting results (Felthous and Kellert 1987), the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit nevertheless incorporated the triad into the profile of the serial killer For every study linking animal abuse and subsequent violence (Felthous 1980; Hellman and Blackman 1966; Kellert and Felthous 1985; Verlinden et al 2000;