Linking Animal Cruelty and Family Violence By Lisa Anne Zilney

societies and human behavior because of a view toward the world that emphasizes social facts. The social facts tradition in sociology emphasizes the role of large-scale social phenomena. Using the emergence principle, social facts arise when individuals collectively invent a social reality that is not reducible to individual parts. Social facts can be material and include visible objects of the social world, like institutions of society. Social facts can also be nonmaterial and include invisible objects of the social world, like morality which circulates in society and is revealed in the minds of individual actors. Sociologists of this tradition, focus on the relationships between material and nonmaterial social facts, and the impact of social facts on the thoughts and behaviors of human beings. Catton and Dunlap (1979) argued that the social facts dictum closed the discipline of sociology to the investigation of biophysical determinants of behavior. The effect of this tradition was so strong that sociologists transformed the term “environment” to mean the socio-cultural world that human beings inhabit, not their physical surroundings, as the term was understood popularly.

Mainstream sociology's exclusive focus on socio-cultural determinants of human behavior, according to Catton and Dunlap, is consistent with philosophies that privilege human life over other life forms. Catton and Dunlap called this orientation the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP). Four major assumptions underwrite this world view: