An Introduction To Murder

When Kip Kinkel allegedly opened fire on his Springfield, Oregon classmates last year, it was not the first time he had been linked to killings, reports CBS News Correspondent Sandra Hughes. The 15-year old was known for cutting off the heads of cats and mounting them on sticks.

Six months before Luke Woodham stabbed his mother and gunned down two high school classmates in Pearl, Mississippi, he tortured his own dog, then set it on fire.

"Gaining a sense of power and control through the suffering of another living thing is a very dangerous lesson that children learn often with animals as their first victim," said the Humane Society's Randall Lockwood, publisher of a study on the link between human and animal abuse.

In fact many of the nation's most notorious killers learned that lesson early on. Serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer cut the heads off neighborhood pets. Before Richard Allen Davis kidnapped and murdered 12 year old Polly Klaas, he was known to have burned cats to death.

With the connection between animal and human abuse documented by many researchers and the FBI, legislators in California just passed a bill to mandate counseling for anyone convicted of animal cruelty.

The idea is to stop the violence before it escalates.

Animal right's activist Beverlee McGrath pushed for the bill after doing her own research into a number of animal torture crimes.

The humane society -- which recently launched a nationwide campaign to generate awareness of the link between crimes committed against animals and people -- hopes more states consider similar legislation.

"In the past, the courts treated animal cruelty as just another property crime-damaging someone else's possessions," said Randall Lockwood. "I think that's definitely changing."

Two Iowa teenagers who bludgeoned sixteen cats in an animal shelter didn't get the prison time the prosecutor wanted. However, their sentence did include three years of counseling. The hope is by treating this crime more seriously now, it will prevent worse crimes from being committed in the future.

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