So the Circle Stays Unbroken

Conventional wisdom tells us that violence toward animals and humans is linked. This idea is age-old, says Phil Arkow, a national expert on animal abuse. In stories from all centuries and cultures, a character who beats a horse or kicks a dog reveals his depraved character and warns of violence to come. As anthropologist Margaret Mead famously remarked, “One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.”

Strange, then, that this instinctively understood link has not been translated into law, something Arkow has been advocating since at least the 1980s, currently as head of the National link Coalition. Only since the 1990s, he says, have domestic violence shelters, animal control officers, family counselors, and police and prosecutors begun working together and sharing information.

New Mexicans may be surprised to learn this, since news media in our state regularly reports on animal abuse and its connection to family violence. One reason is that for the last 11 years, New Mexico has hosted the nation’s only annual conference on the link, which is unique in its scope and reach.

We can thank former Gov. Bill Richardson, who set aside money for the conference every year as part of regular police training. But the “Governor’s Conference on the link Between Animal Abuse and Human Violence” would have gone the way of the Democrat himself if not for the superhuman efforts of animal-lover Tammy Fiebelkorn, a volunteer who has persisted in the face of tremendous odds, with nothing to gain from voters.

When funding for the conference dried up with the election of Gov. Susana Martinez (who has shown no interest in the topic), Fiebelkorn took it upon herself to raise money privately, initially from the ASPCA. An environmental consultant who had been volunteering at the conference as a go-fer, Fiebelkorn could not accept that it would simply vanish. “I felt it was important, and it was so interesting to watch prosecutors, animal control officers, and the animal rescue community come together,” she says.

With a background in environmental lobbying and policymaking, Fiebelkorn knew her way around the Roundhouse. But fundraising was never part of her resumé, and it has been an overwhelming task to continue putting on the annual conference at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, complete with presentations in two tracks, meals, program booklets, lodging arrangements, and scholarships for an audience of more than a hundred attendees from around the state.

Add to this a struggle with breast cancer, running her consulting company eSolved, and caring for her three senior dogs and 60-year-old parrot, and it seems incredible that Fiebelkorn herself has been so eclipsed by her accomplishments.

“It’s Tammy and her amazing dedication,” Arkow says of why the land of Enchantment should be a leader in the emerging area of link advocacy. Over the last decade, thousands of police, animal control officers, child and family counselors, and domestic violence workers have come through the daylong training and learned how to recognize, prevent, and prosecute cases of violence. As word has spread, so has the audience, which now includes several Indian tribes (some send their entire staff ), veterinarians, hospital workers, and others who might step in and intervene against abuse.

The comments on the evaluation forms keep Fiebelkorn going. Each year she hears that a shelter will start asking questions about pets at intake, for example, or that this was the first time a social worker had spoken to an animal control offi cer about very similar observations.

High interest in animals these days gets the news media interested in the link. But the real social benefits come from preventing violence against humans, Arkow says, because “animals don’t vote. You cannot convince most legislators on any level that animal issues are important, unless you can show them how it affects people.”

What has not been communicated well is how thoroughly problems of violence in our society connect to the seemingly trivial issue (from a lawmaker’s viewpoint) of violence against animals. “It is very frequently the first link in the chain,” Arkow says, meaning the first to be reported or noticed.

A growing body of research—more than 1,000 studies cited at the National link Coalition website—supports the connection between animal abuse and a range of crimes, some of which are not obviously related. Studies show that men prosecuted for animal abuse are not only five times more likely to commit violent crimes, but four times more likely to commit property crimes, and three times more likely to have a record for drugs or disorderly conduct.

If you want to take a “broken windows” approach to preventing crime, in other words, animal abuse is a good place to start. Seventy percent of animal abusers have criminal records, Arkow says. And contrary to what many people believe, the animal abuse usually comes after violence against humans.

Nonetheless, animal issues remain far down the list of public priorities. Less than 3 percent of charitable donations goes to animal causes, Arkow says, and three-quarters of that is for wildlife. “Animal people are incredibly passionate,” he notes, “but you can’t survive on passion.”

Municipal animal-control departments are so poorly funded in our state that Fiebelkorn has paid conference scholarships out of her own pocket, just so no one has to be turned away. “The value is in getting people from highly funded areas like Albuquerque and Santa Fe to sit next to someone from Shiprock or Jal,” she explains.

Throughout the year, Fiebelkorn also travels to remote corners of the state to give link training to groups that cannot attend the conference. In October she was in Shiprock, giving presentations in the Navajo Nation. Each time, she has to raise money to fund her own travel, since she is already volunteering her time and leaving her paying job.

“In my dream world, I could do this full-time. But I have to pay bills. I can’t give it more time.”

Since late 2013 she has had the help of a committee of volunteers who meet monthly to plan the conference and related activities. The Forming Positive Links committee includes a half dozen workers in the fields of animal welfare and domestic violence. Funding for the conference has come through local business sponsorships, ASPCA, and the state Children Youth and Family Department, all of which helped the group nearly break even this year.

Meanwhile, the conference itself—now called Forming Positive Links—has been expanding its understanding of the link to include presentations on topics such as wildlife killing contests, or violence in tribal communities. It makes sense to connect those dots, Fiebelkorn says, even if there are not yet studies to support it.

“If you’re a violent person, you’re probably going to be violent to everyone. To think it’s only domestic animals is naïve,” she says. She describes a study in which a fake animal was placed by the side of a road to see who would drive by, stop to help, or actually try to hit the animal. “Do I want that kind of person in my neighborhood, or taking care of my kids? Every year it’s worthwhile to get people thinking, violence is violence.”

Gradually an awareness has been dawning, at least in New Mexico. In her presentations in Shiprock, Fiebelkorn was surprised to hear participants bring up the cruelty of cockfighting and of rodeos on their own. “People are thinking more big-picture.”

Link advocacy also has been growing nationwide, as a glance at the National Link Coalition newsletter shows. Coalitions around the country are working to bring agencies together to prevent violence, though none of these efforts is publicly funded, Arkow says. The National Link Coalition itself, which is primarily a clearinghouse for information, has grown from a few dozen groups seven years ago to 2,600 members in all the states and 42 foreign countries—though none with the scope and reach of the Forming Positive Links conference in New Mexico.

Fiebelkorn says her goal is to have every professional involved with violence aware of the link, and she lobbied hard to get a Joint Memorial passed in the state Legislature declaring Feb. 10, 2010, to be New Mexico Link Awareness Day. In all her years of lobbying, it was the hardest thing she ever tried to pass, she said. Legislators intuited that her aim went beyond animal abuse or domestic violence, to seeing the link as a symptom of the violence that pervades everyday life in America.

“In domestic violence situations, even 20 years later women are so afraid,” she said with indignation. “That’s just not acceptable. As a society, we have to start taking care of each other.”