Development of the Partner’s Treatment of Animals Scale

Although studies of the relationship between animal abuse and intimate partner violence have proliferated in recent years, building upon previous work and making cross-study comparisons have been rendered difficult by the utilization of differing operationalizations of animal maltreatment within this literature. This paper aims to mitigate this problem by introducing and detailing a scale of animal maltreatment by romantic partners, developed and tested with a sample of 55 women in domestic violence shelters who self-identified as victims of intimate partner violence. The Partner’s Treatment of Animals Scale (PTAS) is comprised of five scales (emotional animal abuse, threats to harm animals, animal neglect, physical animal abuse, and severe physical animal abuse) that have strong demonstrated reliability. The construction of the scales is presented in this paper, and recommendations are made for employing the PTAS in subsequent studies.