Ethics vs. Sadism

After reading about the experiments about sadism I was shocked. I was very surprised to see how easy it was for the participants to show sadistic characteristics. One experiment in particular was the prison experiment. The guards began treating the "prisoners" very poorly and even punishing them. "Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued. Experimenters said that approximately on-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early..." (488). All of these experiments come to the horrible conclusion that humans are more likely to be sadistic, which is "Enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others" (485). If humans are easily persuaded to be sadistic towards humans, I'm sure they are even more likely to be cruel to animals. People are beginning to link animal cruelty to the person's probability of committing other sadistic acts against humans. This is one of the reasons people are beginning to pay more attention to animal cruelty. "Another significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern" (497). This fact was demonstrated in William Hogarth's experiment. He traced the life of the fictional Tom Nero over the "Four Stages of Cruelty". In stage one the boy Tom is torturing a dog, and stage 4 shows Tom's body after he had been hung for murder. Animal cruelty has "long been recognized as a signature pathology of the most serious violent offenders" (497). After doing the reading, I was not surprised to find all of the studies that confirm the link between these two offenses. Cruelty towards animals is not an act that should be ignored, but a serious problem that must be addressed before it goes even further.