Rebutting Anderton

People will remember that ridiculous assertion last week by Jim Anderton that research had shown people you are more likely to abuse animals if you were disciplined as a child?

I’ve been forwarded an e-mail from Dr Robert Larzelere, who will be in NZ next weekend. He has been researching child correction for over 30 years and has over 70 publications in the area. His response:

I have the Flynn (1999b) study that this report cites. College students who said their father spanked them WHEN THEY WERE TEENAGERS were 2.4 times more likely to have been cruel to animals in some way AT ANY TIME DURING THEIR CHILDHOOD. (over 1/3 of boys had been cruel to an animal at least once, 9% of girls). This is an example of the faulty logic that prevails. We train college students that “correlation does not equal causation” in their first two college courses in psychology. This is not only a correlation, the time sequence is mostly in the opposite direction of the implied causal relationship. The first limitation of the study listed by the author (Flynn) was that the study “is correlational in nature, making it difficult to discern causality, as well as the direction of the relationship between violence toward children and animal abuse. . . . Further, these findings may reflect the fact that males are more likely to engage in deviant behavior, including violence toward animals, and thus are more apt to be physically punished.”

It would be like finding out that those who had radiation treatment during the last 7 years are 2.4 times more likely to report having had cancer in the last 15 years. And then concluding that we therefore need to ban radiation treatment.

So Jim Anderton’s proof is based on research showing that getting smacked several years after you mistreated an animal, means that the smack is why you mistreated the animal five years earlier!! So sad and desperate.