Taken from Sun Sentinel
Florida lawmakers behind new federal law banning animal cruelty
By Anthony Man
South Florida Sun Sentinel
Dec 02, 2019 | 4:44 AM
There’s a new federal law that bans acts of animal cruelty, and subjects violators to prison.
The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act represents something unusual in the nation’s capital. It was a bipartisan success, sponsored by a bipartisan Florida duo: U.S. Reps. Ted Deutch, a southeast Florida Democrat, and Vern Buchanan, a southwest Florida Republican.
The PACT Act was signed by President Donald Trump. “With today’s act, we take the critical step toward being more responsible and humane stewards of our planet and all who we want to cherish and take care of, and all of those who live on it,” Trump said Monday at the White House.
It prohibits intentional acts of crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling or otherwise subjecting animals to serious bodily harm. The crime is now a federal felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison.
The law is aimed at “animal crush videos,” in which people kill, mutilate and torture small, defenseless animals and share what they’re doing over the Internet. The new law closes a loophole in a 2010 law, which made creation and distribution of animal crushing videos illegal — but didn’t make the underlying acts of cruelty against animals illegal.
"With President Trump signing the PACT Act, animal cruelty is no longer just unacceptable, it is now illegal. We can now finally say that animal abuse is a federal crime in the United States. Americans have long stood in support of animal welfare protections, and now our national laws reflect these values,” Deutch said in a statement.
Buchanan called the law “an important milestone.” It might seem like a no-brainer. After all, there isn’t a lobby in favor of animal cruelty. But it took years of effort by the lawmakers and animal-rights activists to get the legislation passed, which finally happened this year with unanimous votes in the House and Senate.
“This is a day to celebrate,” Sara Amundson, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, said in a prepared statement. “We cannot change the horrors of what animals have endured in the past, but we can crack down on these crimes moving forward.”
The congressmen are both animal lovers and pet owners like many Americans, for whom “pets are a part of their family,” Buchanan said
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