It began with three women kicking a black-and-white puppy around a room. The dog whimpered but they kept on kicking. Soon they crushed the puppy to death.
The video that caught the puppy’s gruesome death made rounds online Wednesday, drawing the ire of netizens and eventually of animal rights groups.“I condemn this! I really love cats and dogs! It tears my heart seeing this video…” Facebook user weary heart said in the comments section of a repost of the video.
John Paul Andaya also said on Facebook, “I feel sorry for the puppy who got killed and tortured by this three b***es. If you guys think doing those kinds of stupidities makes you cool? Hell no…”
“Kung ano ang ginawan ninyo sa tuta ganyan din ang mangayayari sa inyo (What you did to the puppy will also happen to you),” Tina Vergara meanwhile commented.
“Kasumpa sumapa kayong tatlo. Diyos na ang bahala sa inyo. Mga walang puso (You are deplorable. God will punish you. You are heartless),” she added.
The filmed torture and killing is a pornographic material called a “crush video,” the Philippine Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) said in a statement released Thursday.
The advocacy group lamented how some Filipinos seemed to have resorted to the production of such videos, which it presumed to have been for a “moneymaking scheme.”
“We are, as with everybody who has seen the post, enraged that this is happening in our own country—and that it is happening at all,” PAWS noted.
The women in the video remain unidentified, however, with some netizens claiming they are Thais and not Filipinas.
PAWS and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are also determining whether the video is old or new.
PETA has earlier filed criminal cases against producers of crush videos in the Philippines, PAWS noted.
In 2011, a couple was arrested over charges violation of child abuse and animal welfare laws for producing videos that show kids as young as 12 stomping on live animals.
Others included dogs burned with a clothes iron, a monkey hit in the eye with a stiletto heel and puppies “crushed until they vomited their own internal organs.”
The new crush video involving three women and a puppy, PAWS said, may have been the subject of earlier PETA complaints and “may have just resurfaced in social media.”
PAWS nonetheless urged the person who first posed the video to step forward and provide an affidavit needed to file criminal charges against the women in the video.
Absent an affidavit, PAWS said “this will be another horrifying instance of animal cruelty which will not see its day in court--and this is not something that anyone wants forgotten.”