The PACT Act Explained: Animal Cruelty as a Federal Crime

On November 25, 2019, something rare happened in Washington. A bill making the most extreme forms of animal cruelty a federal crime passed the Senate without a single objection, one month after clearing the House by voice vote. President Trump signed it the same day. For the first time in American history, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling or crushing an animal could put someone in a federal prison for up to seven years. The law is called the PACT Act — the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act — and nearly everything written about it since has been slightly wrong about what it does.

What the law actually does

The PACT Act rewrote a single section of the federal criminal code, 18 U.S.C. § 48. It created a new federal offense called animal crushing: purposely crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling, or otherwise causing serious bodily injury to a living mammal, bird, reptile or amphibian. It also kept, and strengthened, the older ban on crush videos — the torture recordings traded in the darkest corners of the internet — and extended that ban beyond U.S. borders when a video is meant for an American audience. Each count carries a fine and up to seven years in federal prison.

The thirty-year gap it closed

The hole the law closed was one Congress had known about for decades. The first crush-video ban, passed in 1999, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2010 (United States v. Stevens) as unconstitutionally broad. Congress rewrote it within months, narrowly, to cover obscene crush videos. But that fix punished the recording, not the act. For nearly a decade afterwards, federal agents could watch a torture video, identify the person in it, and still be unable to charge the cruelty itself — because only the tape was illegal. Earlier versions of the PACT Act were introduced and left to die in successive Congresses, until, in late 2019, it passed without a single recorded vote against it.

Why federal crime is narrower than it sounds

The headline — animal cruelty is now a federal crime — was not quite accurate, and the difference matters. Federal jurisdiction reaches a case only if it touches interstate commerce (the animal, the tools or the video crossed state lines, or the act was filmed for online distribution) or happens on federal property. There is still no general federal cruelty statute. Ordinary neglect, abandonment and most everyday abuse remain entirely a state matter — which is what Congress intended, since the act explicitly does not preempt state law. It is also why all fifty states already had their own felony cruelty provisions before 2019; South Dakota, the last holdout, adopted one in 2014.

What enforcement has looked like

The first widely reported PACT Act case arrived in July 2020. A 19-year-old woman in Kokomo, Indiana, was accused of posting videos of herself torturing and killing cats and dogs — animals she had allegedly obtained by answering online rehoming ads. Online animal lovers spotted the videos and reported them to police; the FBI searched her home and brought federal charges carrying up to seven years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Under Indiana state law, the maximum would have been roughly two and a half years. Since then, federal prosecutors have used the law against crush-video networks and a small number of extreme individual cases. The case count stays deliberately low: prosecutors tend to reserve the statute for organized rings, interstate conduct, and cases where state law is clearly too weak to respond.

The loophole almost nobody mentions

Here is the strange part. The federal sentencing guidelines — the scoring system judges use to calculate recommended prison terms — have never been updated for the new offense. An analysis in the Virginia Law Review identifies what it calls the animal crushing offense loophole: with no dedicated guideline, courts can end up with a lower recommended range for torturing an animal than for distributing the video of that same torture. The U.S. Sentencing Commission, which spent years without enough members to hold a vote, still has not closed the gap. The crime exists; the arithmetic behind the punishment was never finished.

How it fits the bigger picture

The PACT Act is one layer of a federal system assembled piece by piece. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 covers research, exhibition and transport. Animal fighting became a federal crime, and in 2014 even attending a fight did. In 2016 the FBI began counting animal cruelty in its national crime database — the data stream we covered in our piece on FBI statistics. The PAWS Act of 2018 made it a federal offense to cross state lines to violate a protection order that covers a pet. In 2026, Florida's Dexter's Law added a public registry of convicted abusers, and the proposed federal LEASH Act would make cruelty convictions visible across state lines. The sequence is always the same: define the crime, then build the data, then make the data visible.

What this means for readers following Wangwang

The American path is worth studying because it was slow and unglamorous. From the first crush-video law in 1999 to a federal crime against the underlying act took twenty years — through a Supreme Court defeat, a narrow rewrite, and several failed attempts before the one that passed unanimously. What moved each step was documentation: footage that could not be unseen, and a public that refused to let the subject drop. In the Wangwang case, the perpetrators filmed themselves, and that footage is the entire reason the world knows her name. The law in China today stands roughly where American law stood in 2010: the recordings are everywhere, and the act itself still has no name in the criminal code. The U.S. experience suggests the order of operations — documentation first, public pressure second, statute last — and it also suggests the uncomfortable timescale: decades, not months.

Seven years in federal prison is the number that made the headlines. The quieter truth is that the PACT Act only works as part of a system: a definition, a database, a registry, a reporting pipeline. None of the pieces is sufficient on its own. That is as true in Washington as it is in Jieyang.