If you've never heard of animal "crush" videos, you're lucky. They're sick, cruel, and depraved. Yet people watch them -- legally.
"Crush" films are videos of people stepping on animals -- usually larger and arguably more pain-susceptible animals -- until they crush them to death.
Again, we're not card-carrying members of PETA, or anything, but this is just sick.
You might think it would just be implied that such videos would be illegal in a moral society -- like kiddy-porn, for example -- but they're not.
Enter Arizona Senator Jon Kyl.
Kyl is leading the charge to make "crush" videos illegal.
"This is an issue that the Congress wants to deal with as quickly as we can," Kyl said this morning, during a hearing on the issue. The Senate is working with the House to "craft a ban that prohibits this extreme animal cruelty" that will survive judicial scrutiny, he said.
"Crush" videos made headlines earlier this year when the Supreme Court overturned a prohibition on them. The court felt the ban was too broad because it included a ban on things like hunting videos.
The ruling, however, left the door open for Congress to craft a new, more-narrow law banning "crush" videos, which Kyl wants to create.
We'll applaud Kyl's initiative in putting an end to this sort of thing, but the fact remains: if you get off on watching animals stomped to death, you've probably got issues that go beyond the realm of animal cruelty.
