Introduction: The approach to the topic of Animal Abuse and Cruelty (AAC) in everyday life has not really been taken into account in previous research. This article describes the collection of Animal Abuse and Cruelty and the evolution of the AAC-Scale. Existing instruments record (only) extreme forms of AAC (see Boat-Inventory, 1995; Dadds, 2004; Alleyne, 2015).
Methodology: Angew`s definition for animal cruelty was used in this work. In a first study, 453 Pb of the general population were asked which ways of dealing with animals are classified as bad or not bad. In three further studies (N=126; 736; 770) people of the general population aged between 18-82 years were surveyed online about their actual ways of dealing with animals. There was a total of 57 questions on every day, abusive and cruel ways of dealing with animals. Participants also answered a questionnaire on empathy (IRI, Davis, 1980) and attitudes towards animals (AAS, Herzog, 2015). It was found that empathy and/or a positive attitude towards animals did not have a real inhibitory effect on AAC.
Main Results: Based on the results of Study 1, the items could be divided into "not serious", "medium" and "serious". The results from Study 2 and Study 3 show that especially those behaviors that were classified as "not serious" in Study 1 are reported particularly frequently, and that women and men do not differ in frequency.
Principal conclusions and Implications for Field: These results show that violence against animals is an everyday phenomenon, which has been underestimated so far. Empathy and/or and positive attitude to animals does not inhibit abuse and cruelty. This results supports the daily behavior of humans to animals: Animals are protected only when this does not leads to conflicts with humans need/whises.