What Happened To Adolf Hitler’s Alligator?

In a landmark article printed in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1963, forensic psychiatrist John Macdonald first proposed the existence of three factors that would come to be known as the triad of sociopathy, or the homicidal triad. The presence of two out of three of these factors in childhood being considered to be predictive of the development of homicidal, sociopathic, or psychopathic tendencies later in life.

Macdonald’s article, titled ‘The Threat To Kill’, theorised that a youthful fascination with starting fires, persistent bedwetting beyond a certain age, and cruelty towards animals are all precursors to potential violence towards humans and psychopathic behaviour.

The understanding that one factor in particular, intentional animal torture and cruelty (IATC) – as it is currently commonly referred to in psychological literature – is a stepping stone to inflicting harm to humans is popular knowledge.

Macdonald’s theory of the homicidal triad remains an influential and widely taught hypothesis. But this particular aspect understandably receives more focus than the two other factors, as it is infinitely more shocking.

In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) profiling unit has, since behavioural profiling began to emerge in the 1970s, consistently highlighted that animal cruelty is common behaviour among serial murderers and rapists.

Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer… In the UK, Jamie Bulger’s murderer, Robert Thompson, abused household pets; Moors murderer, Ian Brady, killed animals in his youth; and child killer, Mary Bell – the subject of two books by Austrian-British author Gitta Sereny – was known to torture pigeons to death.

Sereny spent her entire professional career contending with the question of why people are motivated to commit acts of cruelty and examining the phenomenon of the immoral act. Many of her works could be summarised as an exploration of the eternal moral dilemma as expressed by St. Paul in the Bible: “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.