‘Battered pets’: sexual abuse

This is the third in a series of papers describing a study of physical abuse in dogs and cats that is, abuse by deliberate physical injury (so-called non-accidental injury [NAI] or ‘battered pets’ by analogy with the well documented ‘battered-child syndrome’ [Kempe and others 19621). The study was based on the experiences of a sample of small animal practitioners in the UK. The first paper published in this series addressed the features that raised suspicion, or allowed recognition, of such abuse (Munro and Thrusfield 2001a), while the second detailed the injuries involved (Munro and Thrusfield 2001b). The study focused primarily on physical abuse (NAI), but also identified cases of a sexual nature. Vermeulen and OdendaaJ (1993) included one aspect of sexual abuse, ‘bestiality’, as a form of physical abuse (NAI) in their proposed typology of companion animal abuse (without documenting details of cases), but, conventionally, cases of sexual abuse are classified separately from NAI (Meadow 1997, Munro and Thrusfield 200 1 a). However, it was considered desirable to present a detailed account of sexual abuse cases in this series, albeit under the general series heading ‘battered pets’, because, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first published report of such cases, and therefore complements the study in what is probably its most sensitive area.