Adult-perpetrated Animal Abuse: Development of a Proclivity Scale

There is a clear discrepancy in the reporting of animal cruelty complaints, prosecutions and convictions suggesting that any prevalence figures of abuse are significant under-representations. Therefore, it can be inferred that there is a large number of animal abusers who are unapprehended. Currently there is no validated tool that assesses the proclivity or propensity to engage in animal abuse amongst members of the general public. Such a tool would enable researchers to study individuals who may think like animal abusers or may be unapprehended offenders themselves. This paper presents the newly developed Animal Abuse Proclivity Scale (AAPS) and some preliminary findings. The results from our two studies show that: (1) the psychometric properties of the AAPS indicate that the scale is a highly reliable measure; (2) the AAPS relates to measures assessing offence-supportive attitudes and reflects the gender differences seen in the literature; and (3) the AAPS demonstrates cross-national validity. These findings support that the AAPS, similar to other offending proclivity measures, is a tool that can be used to examine the factors most related to animal abuse propensity. We discuss how the AAPS can contribute to future developments in theory and practice in the field

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead