Animal Cruelty, Abuse, and Neglect Webinar Series

This video was recorded from the live webinar on March 20, 2025.

Expert Webinar: Investigating Cases of Animal Abuse, Cruelty, and Neglect

The veterinary experts at Robson Forensic are frequently retained to investigate cases of alleged animal cruelty, abuse, and neglect. Such cases may involve companion animals like cats and dogs, exotic pets, or large animals like horses and livestock.

In this 30-min webinar, Dr. Kenyon Conklin and Dr. McGee Leonard provide an overview of the species-specific approach to their forensic investigations of whether an animal or animals were given appropriate, humane care.

Transcript Excerpt

ML: Animal hoarding is a a particular category of of animal cruelty. It is the most common type of animal abuse investigated in the in the United States. And, essentially, hoarding refers to an individual or or a household or a facility that has far more animals than they can properly care for. These animals in hoarding situations are often, you know, stacked on top of each other in cages or or somehow packed into just too small of a space.

They are usually not able to move around normally. Hoarding environments can become very unsanitary very quickly, with fecal and urine matter and hair and parasites and and all sorts of of gross things. Some hoarding situations have kind beginnings, have started with good intentions.

I've seen it many times in my clinical practice that an individual or a group of individuals starts off as a rescue group, meaning to help animals that are not getting help elsewhere, and then things sort of spiral out of control, things outgrow their margins, and they can't be properly cared for.

Aside from the the typical sanitary issues and crowding issues, there is a certain number, you you pass a certain threshold of pets, and whoever's in charge of them may just not have enough time in a day to to see all of them and and to notice when problems start.

They may also not be able to financially care for so many pets even even if they would like to. Animal hoarding in its more extreme cases is also concurrently seen with other severe mental health challenges to people and is often associated with other maladaptive, injurious, and sometimes criminal behaviors. So their intense to go through and and they can lead to a lot of different places beyond just the conditions of the animals.

KC: So why do you specifically need a veterinarian for these types of investigations? Because you hear about all sorts of different animal professionals, everything from behaviorists to trainers to your animal control officers.

It's really important to remember that a veterinarian is truly the only professional that is qualified to opine based on our education, training, and experience to see what all facets of an animal's health, veterinary care, training, behavior, and containment are as opposed to what we would expect for a reasonable and prudent person or group. So we are uniquely qualified to review and opine on some things that unless you do a lot of these cases are going to be really unfamiliar to you.

Things like necropsy reports and necropsy findings, and a necropsy is basically an animal autopsy. Also, there are a lot of things that we can distill down for you very quickly from veterinary records that would be otherwise, kind of dense material to go through. And also to look and see, you know, the thoroughness of animal control investigations. Was a necropsy appropriately done, was animal evidence appropriately preserved. So those are all things that a veterinarian is typically the best and most cost effective expert that you can retain to assist you on these matters.

Featuring

Kenyon Conklin, VMD

Veterinary Expert

Dr. Kenyon Conklin is a licensed veterinarian with over 20 years of experience in the private practice, corporate, military, and research sectors. She provides technical investigations, analysis,… read more.

McGee Leonard, DVM, DACVECC

Veterinary Expert

Dr. McGee Leonard is a board-certified specialist in veterinary emergency and critical care medicine with a decade of professional experience in veterinary science and practice. Dr. Leonard applies… read more.