They also suffer. Crimes against animals

Abstract

Criminology must deal with the harm done to sentient beings, so animal mistreatment may have citizenship among the topics covered by our discipline. The religious and philosophical debate on the nature of animals is traced, which is linked to that of how to treat animals since the more we consider them similar to us, the less we should be inclined to mistreat
them. The issues of actual cruelty and its connections to crime in general, up to the socalled zoomafia, are addressed, but also the issues of scientific experimentation and vegetarianism. Criminal code regulations on the mistreatment of animals are discussed. The expansion thesis is illustrated, the contemporary recurrence of animal abuse and violence in
general and domestic violence in particular. Given the importance of knowing citizens' opinions for scientific interest and to promote possible new policies, a number of questions were asked of a representative sample of Italians, 1012 as the number. The questions concerned how Italians perceive themselves in relation to animals, what feelings this relationship creates in them, what is the attitude towards them and the relationship between humans and animals. The responses regarding attitudes toward animals were then correlated with those obtained from a question investigating the greater or lesser propensity for violence toward humans (HV) to assess the validity of the escalation thesis, that is, the transit from violence against animals and violence against humans and the simultaneous propensity for violence against the two species.