BY ELFY
I’M WATCHING A NAKED WOMAN ON ALL FOURS. She has her ass backed up facing the camera while a masked woman bound in a corset alternately massages her butt-cheeks and slides fingers into her pussy. The girl’s moans are barely perceptible above the ringing elevator music that’s been bizarrely chosen to soundtrack the video. It looks like your average amateur porno until about three minutes in, when the camera pans out slightly and a furry mass is suddenly visible beside the pair.
It’s a golden retriever. The animal is about to participate in an act so reprehensible that it will make me wretch in front of my computer screen.
The assisting girl begins to stroke the dog’s haunches and leads it over to the exposed ass of the naked girl, encouraging it to lick her vagina. Finally it mounts her, penetrating her with that slippery hyper-red lipstick that we’ve all giggled awkwardly at in friends’ back-gardens.
It fucks her with a rapid-fire movement of its hips.
The dog is besides itself with enthusiasm and obviously isn’t quite sure of the intended operation, it keeps wiggling off the girl’s ass and then running around excitedly like dogs do, only to be coaxed back into penetrating the girl, her forehead now on the ground and her ass propped into the air.
I wonder if “fuck” has entered the animal’s dictionary of commands amongst “sit” and “stay”.
“Doggy style taken somewhat too literally” I think to myself momentarily.
But mostly I just think, “God I really, really wish I wasn’t watching this”. The fervor that this animal is displaying is the kind of enthusiasm that people have generally only witnessed in golden retrievers when you throw bits of mozzarella breadstick on the ground for them to hoover up.
The scene disappears suddenly (the cum shot is neither necessary or recommended by health professionals in beastiality porn) and now I’m watching a young muscular woman propped on a stool in a farmyard court. She is lying on her back and judging by both the scene and the camera quality, this girl has never seen a computer, she’s unaware that the country in which she’s living is no longer communist and she’s agreed to do this in exchange for a slice of bread.
She’s writhing around and making noises like she’s dying slowly from a gunshot wound as she feeds an immense horse’s cock into her vagina. It’s difficult to aptly describe this scene with either artistic finesse or without inducing nausea but the metre-long phallus looks like a roll of salami that’s been left in a jar of vinegar and soil for about 18 months.
I feel like I can smell what’s happening, it’s so visually revolting it starts to infringe on my other senses and I’m suddenly convinced that I can smell rotting meat. I’ve had enough. I feel sick with myself for even witnessing something that abhorrent – I feel like I need to cleanse some existential nausea by calling my mum or something.
In retrospect I probably should have entertained more foresight when I clicked on the link titled “Bestiality Tight Fuck Compilation”.
WHAT I’M EXPERIENCING is a kind of disgust distinct from your garden-variety repulsion. It’s called moral disgust and it’s elicited by a violation of my moral propriety – of which I usually have almost none.
People are evolutionarily attuned to experience disgust when they see something that could have immediate consequences on their health, so that you don’t do something gross like go and muck about with a piece of shit.
But we can also experience moral disgust – like the revulsion we feel when we hear somebody has done something awful like cheat on one of your friends and subsequently say things to your friend like, “Please don’t go and muck about with that piece of shit”.
Moral disgust is the guardian of our social norms.
Watching a girl take a full-blown horse’s cock into her pussy isn’t just hygienically questionable; it’s also rubbing my moral sensibilities up the wrong way.
And then I realize I have no idea why that should be. We’re looking at two consenting parties engaging in an act that both are apparently enjoying – I mean, I can’t exactly speak for the horse but I’ll apply the same rule that I do when it comes to sex with men: any erection is a green light.
Assuming that both parties are A) enjoying this act and B) not being harmed by such behaviour, then I fail to meaningfully justify why my stomach turns in knots at the concept.
IT’S DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE TO CONSIDER, but humans do have a rather long and well-documented history of engaging in sexual acts with animals. The oldest known examples of bestiality in art began appearing between 40,000 to 25,000 years ago and depict both men and women engaging in sexual acts with donkeys, horses, and various other unsuspecting animals that happened to be hanging around.
It was not an unheard-of practice in ancient civilizations, either, which is evidenced largely by the fact that so many societies were forced to outlaw it. It was alleged in Leviticus that the Ancient Near East (modern Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan) was riddled with serial animal schtoopers – to the extent that there is a section in the Talmud (a commentary on the Old Testament) that specifically forbids a widow from owning a dog, lest she be tempted into what we can all know as “peanut butter time”.
It was apparently a commonly-recognised practice in Ancient Egypt as well, with men frequently engaging in sex with cattle, women taking to household dogs and – I’m betting your ancient history teacher never told you this – refining the practice of tipping a crocodile onto its back and penetrating it; an act which was believed to bring prosperity.
Yes, the very same people who erected the Great Pyramids at Giza were also crocodile rapists.
BESTIALITY REALLY HAD ITS HEY-DAY in the middle ages, when people started to literally share roofs with their animals. There was a surge in beliefs that rooting your livestock could fight off disease (any excuse was a good excuse).
Naturally, the Church went mental and theologians wrote about bestiality excessively, trying to rationally discuss the immorality of such an act before deciding to just go ahead and burn everybody who was discovered making sweet, desperate love to their goats.
SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL, human cultures have varied in the perceived acceptability of bestiality and contemporary civilisation is no exception. It is criminalised nationwide in Australia, with maximum penalties varying between states, but the law recognises bestiality as any of the following:
“(a) Buggery committed by a man on an animal of either sex;
(b) Buggery committed by an animal on a man or woman;
(c) Penetration of the vagina of an animal by the penis of a man;
(d) Penetration of the vagina of a woman by the penis of an animal.”
Any one of these crimes can carry a jail sentence but – depending on the severity and violence involved in the crime – you’re more likely to just be handed a fine and a scathing look from a magistrate.
Most recently, 25 year-old Brisbane woman Jenna Louise Driscoll was charged with crimes of bestiality after police discovered videos on her phone of Driscoll engaging in sex with her pit-bull. She was released on bail but didn’t manage to go totally unpunished after The Daily Mail got their hands on the story.
Australia also restricts the selling or ownership of animal pornography – but not the free streaming of it. Which is lucky, because I was halfway concerned that researching for this article would land me in trouble with ASIO.
In the United States there is no federal law that explicitly punishes bestiality and it’s still legal in a surprising amount of states – this is largely because it happened to fall under the banner of ‘sodomy laws’ so that when states repealed those in the late 20th Century, they inadvertently decriminalised bangin’ animals.
Then again, it’d probably just be cruel to make it illegal in a state like Wyoming because what else are you supposed to do there?
Internationally, countries that have failed to legislate against the act include: Cambodia, Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Thailand. But before you start booking your global sex tour, it should be noted that this does not mean bestiality is permissible in these places by any means – more likely it is just such a seldom-mentioned taboo that nobody has bothered to write laws against it.
Hungary is the primary exception, and it boasts a widespread extreme porn industry, the creators of which fight avidly against any legislation banning bestiality.
There is even a site called Zootube.com. I would not recommend it.
AS FOR MODERN PRACTISES OF BESTIALITY, it’s next to impossible to collect any kind of accurate statistics about who is practicing it because – and this may shock you – people aren’t super keen to admit they’re having interspecies sex.
The psychological research on the topic is hard to come by, but various studies have been produced over the past 60 years estimating the true population of people engaging in bestiality, including a ridiculously grandiose assertion in Kinsey’s 1948 comprehensive study of human sexuality that claimed 1 in 13 men and 5% of women have done the deed.
Whatever the true number, you can be assured that the community of people who enjoy bestiality is sizeable. Any quick search on Google will reveal a number of forums like Bestforum.com dedicated to bestiality with various “How To” sections, questions such as “What animals are you most attracted to other than horses and dogs?” and stomach-churning user names like HorseDaddy.
The research into beastiality has shifted in recent years with the emphasis not so much centering around the idea that people who fuck animals are mentally disturbed deviants (shock therapy was commonly used as treatment once upon a time) but rather that it is a legitimate sexuality. It’s called zoophilia and the users on these online forums like to refer to themselves as “zoos”.
Hani Miletski, an American sexologist, states that people who engage in bestiality regularly have “feelings of love and affection for their animals, have sexual fantasies about them and admit they are sexually attracted to animals” – three components that readily compose what we generally think of as human sexuality.
In a 2005 study that investigated the lives of these ‘zoos’, Miletski discovered that for the majority of people engaging in sex with animals, it was not because they were lonely or unable to have sex with humans for the most part, it was because they felt a genuine romantic and sexual bond to animals above anything else.
Furthermore, 19% of the participants had attempted suicide at one point in their lives because of their attraction.
(For those of you who would like some candid insight into the life of a ‘zoo’, I would highly recommend this interview with a man who pursues romantic relationships with horses from New York Magazine).
IF IT’S POSSIBLE TO DEMONSTRATE that some people simply do have sexual and romantic attraction towards animals, it is also necessary to effectively explore the moral issues associated with such an act.
I will start by saying that any kind of penetrative sex with an animal who is not physiologically built to take an object the size of a human dick is unquestionably cruel and disgraceful behavior. Whatever anybody has to say on this matter, it must be emphasized that I would never condone any physical or psychological harm being done to an animal.
With that being said, a woman engaging in sex with a male animal seems relatively harmless compared to the other way around… what I mean to say is that ethically speaking, it is probably not as bad to be fucked by an animal than it is to fuck an animal.
As far as health consequences go, animals and humans do not have compatible STI’s, although certainly parasites and various other diseases can cause issues – but I suppose it’s not anymore risky than having drunk unprotected sex with somebody you pick up on a Saturday night and I know that we have all done that, don’t lie to me.
One of the primary health concerns of bestiality is allergies, which made me laugh: “If you are allergic to dogs, do not have sex with dogs” seems to be a piece of stand-up advice on a par with “Do not touch things that have just come out of the oven: hot things are hot”.
The issue that we unfailingly end up at in this argument is the problem of consent. Moral practices of human sexuality are based upon a foundation of consent – it’s why engaging in sexual practice with children, the mentally disabled or an inebriated individual is so disgusting to us.
Both parties have to display, on a conscious and aware level, consent to the activity that they’re about to partake in. This issue is why animal rights groups commit to removing animals from their human ownership when they discover that bestiality has been occurring (the RSPCA aimed to get Julia Louise Driscoll’s pit-bull out of her care after the charges were laid against her).
The consent argument is stumped, however, when we acknowledge the idea that animals can never develop to a higher cognitive state where they can regret consenting to a sexual act like a child can. In the animal’s point of view, sexual arousal is just sexual arousal. Somehow I highly doubt that the golden retriever that I watched walked away and realised at some profound point in its life that it had been wronged.
Consent also becomes somewhat of a non-issue when we realise that we basically fuck off the consent of every other animal in our meat and dairy industries every single day.
It’s a complex moral issue, at the end of the day, we’re basically just evolutionarily attuned to despise it but it’s impossible to deny that we, as humans, have a long history associated with bestiality.
While I might have an immediate and powerful aversion to the idea of it, like most of us do, I doubt that any of us are truly equipped to definitively say to ‘zoos’ or anybody else that it is not okay to fuck a dog.
