IAR is part of a coalition of 11 animal protection groups which has today released a new report, the first in a series of exposés of the horrific world of online animal cruelty content, showing a disturbing trend in ‘teasing as torture’ animal cruelty videos. The Asia for Animals Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition (SMACC) says these videos are shared across social media, and that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are not doing enough to remove them, thus essentially giving offenders a free rein to promote and perpetuate animal cruelty.
The report ‘Teasing as Torture’ documents how between February and May 2022 alone, SMACC recorded almost 200 individual links to videos containing teasing content on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. 69% of the videos featured macaque monkeys as the most popular victims of teasing abuse.
The videos showed many forms of teasing, some including physical abuse and all causing
psychological distress to the animals. In one shocking video, a rat was attached to a cat’s leg with string as their captors filmed, showing both animals in extreme distress followed by the rat being killed.
In others, starving animals could be seen being taunted with food that was placed just outside their reach, or given food they could not physically lift to their mouths. Crying baby monkeys were filmed being ignored, laughed at, pushed around, or otherwise taunted. Vulnerable infant wild animals were teased with comforting teddies or blankets as they were left screaming in open spaces. There are videos of people spraying lemon juice or scaring animals by setting off firecrackers by them while they’re sleeping or by wearing terrifying masks.
In a series of disturbing videos, baby macaques were dressed in restrictive clothing similar to a straitjacket, making them unable to walk on all four legs and forcing them to walk on their back legs, jump or crawl, causing them to fall on their faces. Their captors teased them repeatedly by offering food or comforts that the monkeys could not grasp or reach without the use of all of their limbs.
These types of acts fall under the definition of psychological torture - which is not prohibited explicitly or implicitly by any of the social media platforms’ policies.
The videos appear to be filmed in a number of different countries and due to the open nature of social media, are consumed globally. SMACC states that this is why it is so important that social media platforms take action, by removing these videos directly.
IAR President Alan Knight said:
“Social media giants can’t keep turning a blind eye to posts of the sadistic abuse of animals being shown on their platforms. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, a vast global audience is perpetuating the cruelty by viewing, liking and sharing these videos and it has to stop!
“Using teasing as a form of torture as described in this report is absolutely sickening and most people would find the videos unbearable to watch. It is unacceptable for the likes of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to abdicate their responsibility on this issue. Animals are being deliberately tortured and even killed for human entertainment and those who can do something to stop it have a moral duty to do so, sooner rather than later.”
The findings follow up on a damning report released by SMACC in 2021, which exposed social media platforms for allowing animal cruelty content to flourish on their sites. Since then, the platforms, with billions of budget and plentiful resources - both human and technological - have seemingly taken little action to address this abuse. SMACC has yet to receive any response from all but one company and the coalition states that even securing a dialogue with the platforms has been extremely difficult.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been in conversation with the coalition on how the company can tackle and prevent this type of content appearing on their platforms. SMACC aims to provide advice on how to identify cruelty footage using its expert contacts in animal welfare. SMACC is hopeful that the ongoing negotiation, while its pace is slow at times, will lead to concrete and swift action by Meta, to help animals who are still being used in cruelty content.
SMACC is urging all social media platforms where cruelty content is shared to work with them and their experts to help find solutions to this animal cruelty. This new Teasing as Torture report is the first in a series of Spotlight Reports homing in on the horror of the themes being popularised by social media platforms and to put more pressure on platforms to take action.