Having said that, I agree that torturing animals or people is wrong. I own pets, and have cared for animals my whole life. I never harmed or allowed anyone else to harm them. I’ve never paid anyone or otherwise arranged for animals to be harmed (with the exception that I do hunt small game for sport and consume what i kill). And yet despite that, I still have a crush fetish. Strange, don’t you think?

People have been abusing and torturing animals since people walked on the earth. In the United States, we legally torture and slaughter animals every day. Society accepts this torture because its serves in the interests of society (food, product testing, medical research, etc). Society decides torture for these reasons is within the societal “norm”. Selling crush videos on the other hand serves no greater good. I think thats the funadmental difference. No one sells videos of cows being slaughtered for future delivery to Burger King. Why? because theres no market for it. Trust me though, if there were enough cliental of people willing to buy cow slaughter videos, you’d see web sites selling it.

Crush videos make us uncomfortable because its sexual based and the internet put it right in the face of society. Consider the tens of millions of cows, chickens, turkeys, etc that are slaughtered every year for human consumption. Think of how many hamburgers you have ate in the course of your life time. How many cows have you actually seen slaughtered, or chickens killed? The answer for most of us is none. It’s done out of the way. We don’t want to see it. Would you feel differently about the killing of cows for food if you saw it up close? Would you still eat meat or would you be lobbying congress to bad the consumption of animals.

I am in no way trying to justify that the torture and killing of animals for crush fetishism is acceptable. Its not. I just ask you consider if the torture and slaughter of animals for “normal” reasons is ok? And if its not, why do we accept it, especially since the ratio of animals killed for consuption and research astronomically exceeds the numer killed for the fetish market.

As for the constitutional issue of banning depictions of animal cruelty vice the actual act, I’m sure the judges will happily argue the legal nuances of that for years to come. Semantics to me. Somethings just need to be outlawed.

And yet still, I have a crush fetish. People are not one dimentional. And although we like to talk in terms of right and wrong, black and white, most of us live in the gray.

All American large scale meat production relies on torturing animals for maximum profit so, no, the idea that it’s wrong to torture animals for profit is not at all entrenched in society. Yes, the pain isn’t the point of the food production, but it is still present to reduce costs (and therefore maximize profit.)

Yes, we wouldn’t make remotely the same arguments about humans (it doesn’t really matter why you hurt or kill a human, we generally believe you shouldn’t do it… except in war, I guess), but I don’t see why humans and animals have to be absolutely parallel in every way for there to be a valid ethical issue.

This to me is kind of like that slippery slope argument that says torturing animals should be discouraged because people who do it tend to go on to harm people (I just read back over your comment and I think this is the same as the “proxy humans” idea you bring up). Personally I don’t care whether this is true (and I’ve heard its validity is questionable)–I think it’s wrong to torture animals for recreation or pleasure or profit, in and of itself, and I guess I think this idea is much more entrenched by now even in our society than you do.

And ephraim, come on, sex may be a basic human need but nobody truly needs another living being to suffer in order to have sex.

These “blind spots” are not small or scattered. They’re the rule, not the exception.

It is only very recently that we have decided that animals are or should be morally distinct from objects. This idea that it’s wrong to sodomize livestock because you’re raping somebody? The idea that bestiality is similar to molestation? That animals should not be casually harmed, or that people who casually harm them are unfeeling or monstrous, that they are sociopaths? It’s a new thing, and it is still a barely-implemented idea. Categorical animal cruelty might become as quaint in America as scolds’ bridles or compulsory church attendance, but that’s not the present.

The basic understanding is all over this comments thread. Try to imagine our reaction to bloodsports involving gladiators, if they occurred in public stadiums in 21st-century Spain: an unarmed man getting stabbed to death by several other men. Try to imagine a defense of that as an art form, here and now.

And you’re doing it too. If you saw animal death and pain as remotely similar to human death and pain, you would not be handwaving over poisoned families and tortured mothers. And you wouldn’t be able to argue that livestock farming and pest control are minor practices–or even threatened in our country. If our culture really didn’t look like that, what would we call Tom DeLay? Probably not “The Bugman.”

Even our arguments against animal-sadism or animal-brutality are frequently selfish. We don’t only condemn harming animals because animals suffer. We condemn it because we increasingly understand cruelty towards animals as a proxy act, because compartmentalization is not a workable solution. “Practice humans.”

And again, I am not saying this to defend “crushing.” I’m not. Or to argue that sadism can’t be identified as a problem of its own, or that the psychological link between torture and torture does not exist.

But we do not stop there when we are determining moral obligation towards human beings. We do not agree that a relative lack of suffering or a lack of proximity to suffering absolves us. That is not how we organize our understanding of unconscionable harm to people, and not how we define ideas like “torture,” “assault,” “murder,” and “massacre.” (At least, not in comments threads.) So long as that double standard exists, it will be an important part of any animal-rights discussion.

Even one about the moral nuances of kitten stomping.