Animal abuse and intimate partner violence: researching the link and its significance in Ireland - a veterinary perspective

Research on domestic violence has established a substantial association between intimate partner abuse and the abuse of children within the home. It is only recently however, that researchers have demonstrated the correlation between non-accidental injury in animals, and abuse of women by their intimate male partners. A growing body of evidence suggests that animal abuse can be an early indicator for other forms of violent behaviour. This research includes the responses of a sample of 23 women using refuge services in the Republic of Ireland. It investigates the connection between domestic violence and animal abuse, and ascertains if there is sufficient support service for animals and people relevant to domestic abuse. In the survey population, 57% of women reported witnessing one or more forms of abuse, or threats of abuse, of their pets. Five of which were reported to have resulted in the death of the pet. Eighty seven per cent of women felt a facility to accommodate pets would have made their decision to leave the family home easier. Four women disclosed that lack of such a service and concern for the welfare of their companion animals caused them to remain in their abusive relationships for longer than they felt appropriate. Nine families placed pets in the care of family or friends, one woman is unaware of the fate of her pet, while the pets of six families remained with the abusive male after his partner entered a refuge. The majority of women felt unable to talk to anyone about their fears for their pets' welfare. Many felt that there is no service which can provide temporary accommodation for womens' pets while they are in refuge. The results obtained support those found elsewhere in larger studies in the USA and UK, and demonstrate an association of animal abuse in households where there is reported domestic violence

The Energy Computation Paradox and ab initio Protein Folding

The routine prediction of three-dimensional protein structure from sequence remains a challenge in computational biochemistry. It has been intuited that calculated energies from physics-based scoring functions are able to distinguish native from nonnative folds based on previous performance with small proteins and that conformational sampling is the fundamental bottleneck to successful folding. We demonstrate that as protein size increases, errors in the computed energies become a significant problem. We show, by using error probability density functions, that physics-based scores contain significant systematic and random errors relative to accurate reference energies. These errors propagate throughout an entire protein and distort its energy landscape to such an extent that modern scoring functions should have little chance of success in finding the free energy minima of large proteins. Nonetheless, by understanding errors in physics-based score functions, they can be reduced in a post-hoc manner, improving accuracy in energy computation and fold discrimination