MINNEAPOLIS, MN — A Carver man who sold online memberships to videos of small animals being fed alive to a large reptile has been convicted of 16 federal counts of animal crushing.
A jury found Bryan Wesley Edison guilty on every count Monday after a trial before U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota announced Tuesday. Edison faces up to seven years in prison on each count and a maximum fine of $250,000. His sentencing is scheduled for March 3, 2027.
A federal grand jury indicted Edison in September 2025. Prosecutors said that from at least July 30, 2022, through Oct. 19, 2023, he deliberately inflicted serious injuries on animals, recorded it and uploaded the footage online.
According to evidence presented at trial, Edison put smaller live animals in with a large, exotic reptile so it would attack them and, in some cases, eat them. Prosecutors said the animals endured drawn-out deaths, including by drowning, crushing and being torn apart while still alive. The video site eventually removed all of Edison's channels for breaking its rules on violent content.
Some of the videos were free to watch, but Edison kept more violent material behind paid channel memberships priced from $0.99 to $99.99. The most expensive tier promised subscribers a "choose your own scenario," prosecutors said. Edison took in at least $1,500 through the platform.
Prosecutors pointed to video titles Edison used to promote his paid content, including "Dog mauls guinea pig on membership page" and "Snapping Turtle Gives Rat a Slow Death." Edison can be heard or seen narrating many of the clips, at one point urging the reptile, "Shredder, do your worst," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The case was brought under the federal animal crushing law, which Congress expanded in 2019 through the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act. The law makes it a crime to intentionally crush, burn, drown, suffocate, impale or otherwise seriously injure living mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians.
The statute exempts activities such as hunting, fishing and trapping, slaughtering animals for food, euthanasia, medical or scientific research, and normal animal husbandry practices. Jurors concluded none of those exceptions covered what Edison did.
"The defendant tried to make a profit and took pleasure in torturing defenseless animals. His actions were inhumane and illegal, and with this guilty verdict, my office is delivering justice," U.S. Attorney Daniel N. Rosen said in a statement.
Christopher D. Dotson, special agent in charge of the FBI's Minneapolis Field Office, called Edison's crimes "the documentation of cruelty for cruelty's sake, made more shocking to society by the fact that he sought to profit from that cruelty."
"The torture of animals, recorded and distributed on the internet, is a federal felony with real-world implications," Dotson said. "The FBI will take all necessary steps to investigate and stop these crimes."
The FBI investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jeanne Semivan and Campbell Warner are prosecuting.
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