I do not totally believe the mantra of “cruel to ‘animals’ = cruel to humans”.
I’ve seen write-ups that there is no correlation between treating animals cruelly and then humans.
So it’s a toss-up, I think, on evidence. There’s lots of talk that this premise is true, but I’ve never seen data on it, not even in a simple write-up format (”68% of criminals had animal-cruelty background”, e.g.).
1 of my big questions with this premise is, even if they show data, what is the baseline?
To be truly effective, we should gather up all the people who we know were (truly) cruel to animals, and see how they turn out - if they end up being abusive to humans.
It should not simply be from the standpoint of who is locked up for abuse. That is a different stat. Saying 68% of abuse inmates were cruel to animals is not the same as saying 68% of people noted as cruel to animals ended up cruel to humans.
Cruelty to animals as a youth is one marker. There are others.