All right, so this next guest has been here at the Junction before and is a friend of mine, Laura Koivula. Thank you for being here.

It's my pleasure.

For those people in the audience that don't know who you are, can you let them know what you do?

Yes. So my name's Laura Koivula. I am the director of Animal Crimes and Investigations for Humane World for Animals, for the Animal Rescue Team there. So on the Animal Crimes and Investigations team, we have four case managers and myself, and we assist law enforcement across the country with animal crimes investigations.

And your talk today was about animal cruelty and family violence, correct?

Yes.

Excellent. So can you give our audience a little bit of, let them know what, what your discussion was about?

Yeah, so I talked about what we call the link. So for those that don't know what the link is, It's decades of research now that show the connection between animal abuse or animal violence, crimes towards animals and crimes towards humans. So animal cruelty and human violence.

I think that, um, you know, there are a lot of different ways that animal cruelty and human violence can exist, right? Like it's, everybody thinks about one thing in particular, whether it be, uh, domestic violence or so, but there are a lot of different things that are part of the link, right?

Yeah, for sure. And I think that initially was the most heavily researched was, intimate partner violence and animal cruelty, which there is a well established link now. But we also see violent crimes associated with things like organized animal fighting. And, animal sexual abuse is often linked with child sexual abuse or child pornography. So, yeah, the link exists in, in pretty much all facets of animal crimes.

Yeah, I was mentioning before about how I've had a couple of cases that involved hoarders and it was hoarders that had either an elderly person in the home or a young child. Mm-hmm. So it's kind of like the same, almost like the same neglect or the same violence that they do on animals. They do on people.

Yeah. Yeah. So we've, we've seen the same thing. I saw the same thing in my career as well as pretty much everybody on my team, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners. Um, in the neglect cases for animals, we see children, both biological and adopted or foster children being neglected and abused, similar to the animals in the home, but then also we see vulnerable adults that for one reason or another require a caretaker. And so that defendant or suspect is also neglecting the vulnerable adults in the home as well.

And I think something important that, that you also mentioned is that there is no gender or culture or anything that you know, that the abuser can be anybody, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's something that gets a little lost, 'cause most of the stories we hear about are male perpetrators. But I talked about some case examples today where the perpetrators were in fact, female, and they committed heinous abuse, not just neglect of children, but also sexual abuse of children. So, yeah, it's really important to note that not only does this happen across genders, but also in domestic relationship. Right. So, um, L-G-B-T-Q relationships, heterosexual relationships, parent child relationships, child to elderly parent, like any, any sort of relationship, there's no parameters on this type of crime.

I think that also it is important then, because it, it crosses from humans to animals, right? To involve human health professionals in this.

Absolutely. I think it's really essential that we build relationships with the other agencies in our jurisdictions and across jurisdictions specifically. Those agencies that have resources like child advocacy organizations like Casa and DCPS or whatever your jurisdiction calls their adult protective and Child Protective Services. They have resources that we don't have access to, and we also, as humane law enforcement, we gain access to properties and homes that may not be on their radar. And so, you know, there's an essential cross and vice versa. So building those relationships is really important.

Anybody that's listening that wants to learn more about the link and animal cruelty and for, if there are investigators out there that kind of feel lost because they wanna do more and they don't know how, what resources would you recommend for them?

Yeah. Well, if you have a current investigation where you're looking for help on a specific, uh, case you're working on, they can always reach out to our team through the email animal cruelty@humaneworld.org. The National Link Coalition has got great resources if you're looking to review like the, the research and documentation on the link. And HumanePro also has a lot of webinars, short webinars for humane law enforcement if they're looking to learn more about any of the animal crime topics.

This has been great information. Overall it, it affects everybody and it's really important for not just veterinarians and not just law enforcement and just not humane agents for everybody to know about this. So thank you so much for your presentation and thank you for what you do.

Thank you so much for having me.