Supreme Court and animal abuse

Well it seems in the news today that the Supreme Court struck down a federal law yesterday that was aimed at banning videos that show graphic violence against animals, saying it violates the right to free speech. The law was enacted in 1999 to limit Internet sales of so-called crush videos, which appeal to a certain sexual fetish by showing women crushing to death small animals with their bare feet or high-heeled shoes.

The high court, voting 8-1, overturned the conviction of a Virginia man for selling videos of pit bulls fighting each other and attacking other animals.

Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said the language of the law went much further, creating “a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth.” He said the statute as written would have affected hunting videos and magazines.

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, saying the ruling effectively legalized the sale of crush videos and “is thus likely to spur a resumption of their production.” He faulted the majority for striking down a “valuable statute.”

The law reads as this:

18 USC 48 / PUBLIC LAW 106-152

Sec. 48. - Depiction of animal cruelty
(a) Creation, Sale, or Possession.
Whoever knowingly creates, sells, or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty with the intention of placing that depiction in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

(b) Exception.
Subsection (a) does not apply to any depiction that has serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.

(c) Definitions.
In this section
(1) the term ”depiction of animal cruelty” means any visual or auditory depiction, including any photograph, motion-picture film, video recording, electronic image, or sound recording of conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed, if such conduct is illegal under Federal law or the law of the State in which the creation, sale, or possession takes place, regardless of whether the maiming, mutilation, torture, wounding, or killing took place in the State; and

(2) the term ”State” means each of the several States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and any other commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States

The federal law extends state and federal laws to make possession, creation, or selling of crush videos a felony, regardless of where the video was originally created.

Personally I find this all sad, sad that we can as a society even permit this sort of act and torture to happen and to have it endorsed or allowed by the courts now is even worse. There are so many times where I feel that the same acts should be done to the perpetrators as they have done to their victims. I feel our legal systems are too lax, and too many people get away with so much that is harmful.

Pet-Abuse.com offers these tips on crush videos and what happens if you find one or come across one online:

1. Once you realize that it is a crush video, stop watching it. These videos can be quite grisly, and are extremely traumatic to watch.

2. If possible, download the video file to your computer, and send it (along with the url of the page and any user information that may be included) to info@pet-abuse.com and info@peta.org. Do NOT complain to the site owner until this has been done, otherwise they may remove the video, and then animal protection agencies have no evidence to work from.

3. If the video is posted on a community website such as MySpace, e-mail the website’s support team, reporting it as inappropriate and offensive.
If a video has made it to MySpace, however, there is a good chance it is already posted on one of the gore sites. On sites that are clearly geared towards displaying offensive content, sending an angry letter to the webmaster will typically not help. Those sites make money on advertising, so the more offensive their content is, the more website hits it usually gets. In short, their most disturbing videos are their bread and butter, and it is unlikely that they will remove a video that is getting such strong reactions.

4. For gore sites, to find out who owns the domain name, and where the website is hosted, use a lookup utility such as samspade.org or dnsstuff.com. You may try e-mailing or calling the website hosting company, however gore sites have been known to host videos such as unedited human beheadings, so the chances are good that the website host is already aware of the content and simply does not care.

I imagine too that complaining to your state lawmakers perhaps can bring about change. And if you have or suspect someone or a group of intentionally abusing animals, report it to your local law enforcement and animal welfare/control.