Will the New Crush Video Ban Successfully Crush the Industry?

Let's all breathe a sigh of relief and pat ourselves on the backs. After nearly eight months without a ban on crush videos, President Obama last week signed a new bill into law.

After the Supreme Court tossed out the old ban on crush videos (depictions of small animals being trampled, impaled, or otherwise tortured in order to appeal to a particular sexual paraphilia), animal advocates, legal scholars, and legislators formed the backbone of a movement to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

Members of Congress, including the original bill's sponsor, had a new bill within three days, with the assistance of Constitutional experts, and helped grease the wheels of government to get the proposal moving through the legislative process. Animal advocates, like the people at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the ASPCA, and the Humane Society of the United States kept up the pressure on Congress.

The community at Change.org had a big say in this victory as well; nearly 4,000 of you signed our petition and lent your voices to this crucial push for social change.

Eight months later (the blink of an eye in a partisan Congress where good legislation often languishes for years) animals are protected again from the crush video industry, which was showing signs of a resurgence in the absence of a law prohibiting their cruel trade. So, what's next?

Well, now that we have a law again, enforcement is the challenge. Law profession Kathleen Bergin calls the new law "symbolic legislation," and points to the disturbingly low number of actual prosecutions in ten years under the old law.

She's right. Congress, spurred on by animal protection activists have anted up and said that animal protection is important. Now the feds have got to get in the game by going after the people who produce and distribute crush videos. Here's hoping Professor Bergin gets proven wrong. (That's a sentiment I suspect she shares, given that she makes sure to point out her personal animal-lover cred.)

There's also the possibility, and we shouldn't ignore it, of yet another court challenge to the law. Even though people who know a lot more about the Constitution than most of us say it should pass muster, there's every chance that we'll be writing the next chapter in the coming months and years.

For now, however, animal advocates got what we wanted — a strong new law banning crush videos. We proved that we can create positive social change, even in a Congress that too often seems deadlocked by political gamesmanship.

Photo credit: The White House