Women — and sometimes men — often stay in abusive relationships because they know they can’t take their pets with them to a shelter. Ahimsa House (from the Sanskrit word for “non-violence”) outside Atlanta in Decatur, Ga., serves people desperate to get away from violent spouses or partners by arranging care for their pets when they enter a safe house.
In 2004, as a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Georgia in Athens, Maya Gupta was doing research on the connection between cruelty to animals and domestic violence. When she learned about Ahimsa House, a new organization an hour and a half away in Atlanta that maintained a central animal shelter for pets of abuse victims, she wanted to be involved. She connected with an Athens shelter for battered women and began transporting their pets to the Atlanta facility.
In 2007, after completing her Ph.D., she moved to Atlanta and joined the board of Ahimsa House. It was a crucial time for the organization, which was changing its business model from a central animal shelter to a statewide network of volunteer foster homes, veterinarians and boarding facilities. As an undergraduate planning to do research in domestic violence prevention, Gupta herself had fostered animals in her one-room apartment in New York City for an adoption group. She’s also rescued thoroughbred horses whose racing careers are over.
Gupta served as president of the board of Ahimsa House from 2007 to 2010, when the volunteer organization, founded in 2004 by Emily Christie, was finally able to hire its first employee. Gupta became the first executive director, and Christie stepped aside and remains active on the advisory council.
In her last year of college, Gupta had seen a poster about warning signs of domestic violence that asked the question, “has your partner ever threatened or harmed your pet?” Until then, she had never made the connection between animal cruelty and domestic abuse.
She made some calls to national domestic violence organizations as well as national animal protection groups. “They told me, we know there’s a very strong connection between these two forms of violence, but we need more research on some of the predictive value and some of the prototyping and subtyping of different forms of abuse and violence. Then I had a dissertation topic, and I was glad I could merge my love of animals with the work I had intended to do in psychology,” says Gupta.
“My heart really went toward the non-profit angle in doing this work. I wanted to be involved in some kind of program that provides an answer to all of the hard questions we’re asking in the research. It’s depressing sometimes to do the research on all the awful things that happen to animals and their owners, and here was a program that directly addressed this and provided a solution. ”
The research in this area is still in its infancy. “We’ve just started to get the attention of some federal government funders as to why research on human and animal interactions generally could be an important topic — even including the positive aspect of the human-animal bond, such as the effects of animals on human health or the use of animals in therapy.”
Ahimsa House runs a 24-hour hotline for victims of abuse who want to save their pets. In addition to arranging care for dogs and cats, Ahimsa House has sheltered birds, guinea pigs, hamsters, other pocket pets and horses. This year, they saw their first ferret, rat, snake and tortoise. They also intervened on behalf of 18 chickens whose owner relied on selling eggs to save up some money for her escape.
In a recent case, “the abuser was doing very passive-aggressive things to the horses to intimidate the victim so she wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving the house to go to work. He would open the pasture gate in the middle of the day so the horses could wander onto the highway.”
Animals are offered a 60-day stay in a home or boarding facility, though with their owners staying longer in shelters before they can find a job and afford an apartment, Ahimsa House is flexible. Although the number of animals they served this year went down, calls to the hotline doubled.
“If the abuser can get hold of the pet, it can be a very powerful leverage tool to say, ‘you better come back, because otherwise, I’m going to _____.’ Fill in the blank. We see many cases where the victim returns to the abuser because of fear that the pet will be harmed or killed. It’s also a very powerful way to abuse someone emotionally and intimidate them,” says Gupta.
Most states have some way of connecting services to victims of domestic violence and care for their pets, but only informally, at the local level. “There may be a partnership between one shelter and one animal local animal rescue,” Gupta explains. “But if you have one program like that in a giant state like Wyoming, you may be out of luck.” She believes Ahimsa House is the only statewide program to help victims of domestic violence and their pets.
Gupta leads 150 volunteers who have completed an orientation program to help with everything from administrative chores to staffing the information booth at community festivals. Another group of volunteers has had additional screening and training to foster pets, transport them and run the crisis line. Foster pet parents agree to a home inspection by Ahimsa House or the Department of Agriculture as part of the process to approve them. There are about 60 drivers who cover 159 counties.
Though Ahimsa House tries to keep the pet in the same community as its owner, sometimes an abuser’s aggressive attempts to locate it make it necessary to move the animal several counties away for its safety.
As a member of the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Ahimsa House works to educate other organizations about the importance of pets in the lives of abuse victims. They provide in-service training, stressing best practices, such as something as simple as asking a hotline caller if she has any pets she needs to get to safety.
Because some safe houses cover as many as 15 counties, Ahimsa House also takes their message directly to the communities. Gupta and her volunteers speak at women’s clubs and civic organizations such as Kiwanis and Lions Clubs. They also talk to veterinarians, law enforcement, animal control, social workers and other professionals who may not be aware of the connection between people in crisis and the animals they love. “We speak at their conferences and do whatever we can to get our foot in the door and have our voice be heard,” says Gupta.
In addition to finding a safe place for a pet to stay, Ahimsa House helps hotline callers with legal advocacy, helping them prove that they actually own the animals at risk. “Abusers will try to go through the legal system to get the pets away from their victims,” Gupta explains. Ahimsa House makes sure a pet is included on a restraining order.
They also provide forensic veterinary exams so that they can document patterns of non-accidental injury to an animal. “Sort of like Animal CSI,” says Gupta. “That evidence can hopefully be used in court, since it’s notoriously difficult to prosecute domestic violence successfully. Perhaps the animal cruelty charges will stick. Or perhaps the judge will consider the animal cruelty and the domestic violence simultaneously and allow us to present testimony that says this is a pattern of dangerous behavior, and we know that animal cruelty is a red flag for other forms of violence.”
In many of the cases, the animals require basic vaccines, because the abuser has not allowed the victim to take the animal to the vet. “We see a lot of basic health needs that have been neglected for that reason,” adds Gupta. “In other cases, we have animals that have been injured by the abuser. So we’ve repaired broken bones and dealt with eye injuries and some pretty gruesome things. Sometimes the abuser hasn’t even allowed the purchase of nutritious pet food.”
In the metro Atlanta area, and to some extent, across Georgia, as the population becomes more diverse, Ahimsa House sees different patterns of how domestic violence is viewed and treated within other cultures. “There may be a huge amount of shame in reaching out,” says Gupta.
Ahimsa House wants to be an emergency resource that takes immediate action to protect pets. Later, social services organizations working with their owners will make more long-term arrangements. “In a way, we’re trying to work our way out of the need for our own existence,” says Gupta. Her hope is that eventually, the role of providing services for animals is no longer external to the domestic violence services system, but is instead an integral part of their work.
Comments