You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this essay, the author investigates the much-overlooked subject of “pet murder”, exploring the ways in which forensically inclined fathers and mothers can often kill animals, such as cats and dogs—both literally, through murder, and symbolically, through attacks on toy pets—thus provoking psychotic and other psychopathological reactions among their human children. The author provides shocking encapsulations of no fewer than six clinical cases in which parents perpetrated a displaced form of what the author has termed “infanticidal attachment” by assaulting and, often destroying, the cats and dogs of their sons and daughters. This contribution to the forensic literature underscores, quite heartbreakingly, that one need not be imprisoned or hospitalised as a formal forensic patient in order to perpetrate significant crimes which can damage the lives and minds of young human beings.