Beheading birds often leads to wife bashing

SYDNEY, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Beheading birds is often the forerunner to wife bashing and domestic violence, said an Australian animal welfare expert, after authorities discovered a pelican beheaded and dumped in a park.

"Cruelty to animals as a young person is often a precursor to their later human-to-human behaviour," said Hugh Wirth, president of Australia's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).

"In other words, a lot of wife bashing and that sort of thing relates back to previous cruelty to animals," Hugh told Australian Associated Press news agency on Tuesday.

"That's exactly what all the academics and criminologists say and I've had enough practical evidence through the RSPCA to understand that is correct," he said.

Wirth said the headless pelican, found in a park on Saturday in the country town of Wodonga in Victoria state, was an example of how animal cruelty was becoming more blatant.

He said offenders were often males aged in their teens or early 20s who were never "properly socialised as children" to respect human and animal life.

"This sort of thing is intolerable in our society. This is thrill killing for the sake of killing," he said.