Animal crushing outlawed under Buchanan bill signed by Trump Monday
The torture of animals through a practice known as “animal crushing” is now a felony and punishable by up to seven years in prison after President Donald Trump on Monday signed legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan.
Animal welfare groups pushed for the legislation to help curb the proliferation of sexual fetish videos that depict small animals being crushed to death.
“Hopefully it will cut down on a lot of torture and cruelty,” Buchanan, R-Longboat Key, said of the legislation Monday.
Buchanan joined Trump at the White House for a bill-signing in the Oval Office.
The bill — known as the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act — defines animal crushing as “conduct in which one or more living nonhuman mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians is purposely crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury.”
Congress passed the Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act in 2010. That bill made the creation and distribution of so-called animal “crush videos” a federal crime. But the actual act of animal crushing was not outlawed.
Buchanan’s office said the PACT Act “will close this loophole by prohibiting the underlying acts of torture themselves, regardless of whether or not a video is created.”
“This is a day to celebrate,” said Humane Society Legislative Fund president Sara Amundson in a press release. “After decades of work to protect animals and bearing witness to some of the worst cruelty, it’s so gratifying the Congress and president unanimously agreed that it was time to close the gap in the law and make malicious animal cruelty within federal jurisdiction a felony. We cannot change the horrors of what animals have endured in the past, but we can crack down on these crimes moving forward.”
The bill does not apply to conduct such as slaughtering animals for food, activities related to medical and scientific research, the practices of hunting, trapping and fishing, “customary and normal veterinary, agricultural husbandry, or other animal management practice,” conduct related to animals being euthanized and conduct “necessary to protect the life or property of a person.”
The PACT Act is the latest in a series of animal welfare issues Buchanan has worked on. He co-chairs the Animal Protection Caucus in Congress and is a past recipient of the Humane Society’s “Legislator of the Year” award.
Buchanan currently does not have any pets because of his congressional travel schedule, but he was a dog owner for many years and said protecting animals is something he long has “had a passion for.”
The congressman already is working on his next animal rights issue, ending the testing of cosmetic products on animals. He filed the Humane Cosmetics Act earlier this month.
“There’s a lot of animals that die as a result of that, and if they don’t die, they kill them,” Buchanan said.