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Animal Cruelty

Decent Essays

Many Americans share their homes with animals such as dogs, cats, and fish. For the most part, the study of sociology focuses only on human interaction. Recent studies, however, have shown that animals play an important role in human interaction. The relationships humans have with animals often reflect human’s life situation. The issue of animal cruelty is a social problem because it is often associated with interpersonal violence. Understanding animal abuse can tell us much about the interactions of humans. Animal abuse is often explained from a psychological perspective. Most importantly, animal abuse should be discussed as a social problem because of the suffering and death it causes animals.
The first issue we face when discussing animal cruelty is defining what activities are considered cruel and abusive. Since animals cannot speak for themselves, humans must guess at their inner thoughts. Because of this, there are many different interpretations of cruelty. The treatment of one species in a certain context can be regarded as cruel, while in another context it can be considered completely acceptable. For example, in the United States it is generally acceptable to kill cows for food, but it is not acceptable to kill dogs for food. In another culture, the reverse might be acceptable. Different and often conflicting opinions result from the ambiguity of the definition of cruelty. For the sake of this paper, cruelty will be defined as “socially unacceptable behavior that

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