Animal Cruelty Database - Search Help

The Pet-Abuse.Com animal abuse database search is designed to allow your search to be as broad - or as detailed - as you wish. If you use several search criteria and find no results, you may wish to select fewer search criteria for more results.

If you are simply looking to browse animal cruelty cases, you may wish to go directly to the browse page and bypass the search fields.

When searching on multiple fields, the search returns results that match all of your criteria. For example, if you were to search on the animal type of cat and the cruelty type of shooting, and you check off the "animal was offleash or unconfined" checkbox, the search will return all cases that match the following:

Cases where the animal was a cat AND the cruelty type was shooting AND the animal was offleash or unconfined.

Selecting multiple fields

If you wish to search on multiple selections, such as animal type or cruelty type, simply hold down the control key on your PC (or the option key on your Macintosh), and click on the selections you wish to search for.

Multiple search terms work on an inclusionary basis, meaning if you select multiple types of animal cruelty, it will return results that match the first type OR the second OR the third, and so on. When used in conjunction with additional search fields, it will match all of the additional criteria with cases that match any of the multiple selections you have chosen. For example, if you were to select "cat" and "dog" from the animal type listbox, and "shooting" and "beating" from the abuse type list, the query would look like this:

Cases where the animal is a cat OR a dog AND where the abuse type is shooting OR beating.

Keyword Search

The keyword search supports multiple words, however it will search for cases containing ANY of the words you enter. For example, searching for "felony burning" will return results for cases containing "felony" OR "burning". For this reason, you should use the pre-defined search fields when possible to return the most accurate results. For example, searching for the word "felony" with the animal type criteria of "burning" will return much more accurate results.