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Our History

  • Healing Species was founded in Orangeburg, SC in 1999 when attorney Cheri Brown Thompson created the Violence Prevention/Intervention through Compassion Education™ curriculum, the first ever animal-assisted Violence-Prevention curriculum to be endorsed by a state board of education, in response to the discoveries she made during her legal studies in criminal law.

  • Focusing her studies on “depraved heart” criminals, Cheri became greatly troubled by the link between violence toward animals and violent crime in society – finding that 99% of convicted violent offenders were abused as children and, in turn, inflicted abuse on animals before committing violence against humans.

  • The relationship between previous abuse, animal cruelty, and perpetuated human violence led to a founding principle of Healing Species, which is to touch and help heal the heart of a child, invoking empathy – the missing emotion in many violent offenders.     

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