This week, Ashley Richards, a 24-year old woman pleaded guilty at a court in Texas to making and distributing ‘animal crush’ films that included the torture and death of chickens, kittens, and puppies. One of the films made by Richards was ‘Ebony Kill Cat’ which was sent to the police in Houston by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). These films are made for the seemingly growing number of ‘crush fetishists’.
This is by no means an isolated case, as there have been a number of high profile cases where individuals have been charged with making animal crush films. For instance, in August 2011, police in the Philippines arrested Vicente Ridon and Dorma Ridon, a married couple that had filmed dozens of ‘crush fetish’ videos. Their films showed six female teenagers (aged between 12 and 18 years) torturing and killing animals before being posted onto online ‘crush fetish’ websites all over the world.
In 2014, 28-year old Sara Zamora, a woman from Florida was arrested following her appearance in a zoosadistic fetish video entitled ‘SOS Barn’. In this film, Zamora is seen engaged in various sexual acts while crushing and killing rabbits (including ‘karate’ chopping their legs) and decapitating chickens. This was shortly followed by the case of Stephanie Hird, a 29-year old woman from Arkansas (performing under her stage name ‘Megan Jones’) who was also arrested for her role in the ‘SOS Barn’ video. She was described in the media as an “animal snuff film starlet” as she shot animals with an air rifle while the animals were tied down or being crushed.
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Crush fetishism is a sexual fetish in which individuals derive sexual pleasure and arousal from watching or fantasizing about someone crushing items (e.g., toys, cigarettes, mobile phones, laptops), food, insects, and, in extreme cases, small animals. Crush fetishes involving living organisms comprise two types – hard crush and soft crush.
Soft crush fetishes appear to be more common and typically refer to the crushing of invertebrates (e.g., spiders, beetles, worms, etc). Hard crush fetishes typically refer to the crushing of larger vertebrate animals (e.g., reptiles, birds, mammals). Some crush fetishists are very specific about how they like to see the insects and/or animals crushed.
Some prefer the person doing the crushing to be wearing particular types of footwear such as high heels, flip-flops, or alternatively no footwear at all. Many women participating in crush videos are scantily clad and sexually provocative while torturing or killing the animals.
The legality of erotic crush films and the actual practice of crushing animals varies by region and country. For instance, China does not have any animal cruelty laws, and therefore no criminal acts are being violated there. In the UK and US, the creation and distribution of animal crush videos is illegal. The Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act was enacted in the US in 2010 and signed by Barack Obama. The US federal law defines animal crush films as obscene images that depict “actual conduct in which one or more living non-human mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians is intentionally crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled, or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury”.
Despite the apparent rise in cases of crush fetishism there has been almost no psychological or clinical research on the topic. In 2013, I published a case study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior on a man who was sexually aroused by flatulence (known as eproctophilia) but who also had a co-occuring crush fetish. When I tried to get to the root of where his sexual fascination in crushing began, he told me that when he first discovered ejaculation as a teenager, he made the connection that ejaculating was somewhat like when an insect was stepped on. He told me “I thought about a bug squirting under pressure and then I would do the same. May or may not be relevant, but it was a connection I made as a kid”.
Fetishes develop in childhood or adolescence through maladaptive learning, with teenage sexual arousal being coupled with something not usually viewed as a typical sexual stimulus (for example, a non-sexual body part such as the foot or an inanimate object such as a car). There may also be biological factors such as genetic or brain abnormalities, or social factors such as dysfunctional family life.
When it comes to crush fetishism, it could be any or a combination of these factors. It is also likely that crush fetishes co-occur with other non-normative sexual behaviours such as podophilia (sexual arousal from feet), macrophilia (sexual arousal from giants and giantesses), and zoosadism (sexual arousal from inflicting cruelty to animals). Until scientific research is carried out into crush fetishism, we can only speculate about the psychology and causes.
Dr Mark Griffiths, Chartered Psychologist, Psychology Division, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
