Editors’ Introduction Jennifer Maher, Harriet Pierpoint and Piers Beirne This Handbook tries to understand animal abuse and how we humans perceive it and respond to it This is no easy task The history of changing attitudes to animals and to our abuse of them indeed offers a sobering lesson about the limits of human compassion What we give with one hand we take away with the other So much of that history is ambiguous and of the sort ‘on the one hand’ but ‘on the other.’ For example, on the one hand, it has been and still is often claimed about early Judaeo-Christian texts, such as Genesis, that God has placed at our disposal all the animals that walk or crawl on the earth and those that swim in the sea and fly in the air—all animals other than humans, that is, for us to with whatever we like and to so without reservation This was certainly the viewpoint of theologians such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas On the other hand, however, especially as first seen in the writings of sixteenth-century essayists such as John Calvin and Michel de Montaigne and in the pleas for vegetarianism by the occasional eccentric, those very same early Christian texts have also been interpreted as obliging us to care for those (domesticated) animals under our control and to use them fairly and responsibly and without cruelty J Maher (*) Á H Pierpoint Centre for Criminology, University of South Wales, Pontypridd, United Kingdom e-mail: jenny.maher@southwales.ac.uk; harriet.pierpoint@southwales.ac.uk P Beirne Criminology Department, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, USA e-mail: beirne@maine.edu © The Author(s) 2017 J Maher et al (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_1