In 2022 the New South Wales arts minister intervened to try to cancel a talk at the Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas called “The Last Taboo”, in which English historian Joanna Bourke discussed – though did not condone – bestiality. It seemed the topic was too dangerous even for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, something that I found both ironic and amusing.
Since then I have had many discussions with people about human-animal sexual relations, as I find it fascinating how reactive people are to the concept. We are, as a society, happy to kill animals, eat animals, tie up animals, subjugate animals, kiss animals, cuddle animals, refer to them as our “fur babies” or children, sleep in a bed alongside them but somehow having sex with them is the line in the sand.
It is so contentious a topic that when Gary Larson implied Jane Goodall had engaged sexually with a chimpanzee in his 1987 The Far Side comic strip, the Jane Goodall Foundation sent him a legal cease and desist letter, though as it turned out Goodall herself loved the cartoon and felt it showed that humans “are just one species among many, just one small part of the wondrous animal kingdom”.
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When I raise bestiality with people, often their response is that it’s sickening and wrong, but they are unable to define why it is wrong beyond saying it’s either unnatural or animals can’t consent.
In regards to the former we know that inter-species sex occurs in nature occasionally (between deer and monkeys for example) and whilst it is tempting for us to infantalise even mature animals as perpetual innocent juveniles, we do know animals have sex drives too as uncomfortable as that may be for us to think about. And to the latter I don’t believe that explicit verbal consent is the only consent that can be given in life, I have many clients with a language barrier who consent to me in other ways.
Regardless though, both of those are moot points when we don’t consider whether it is natural or whether animals have given consent when we farm them for food. I personally have no interest in sleeping with animals but fail to see how it’s worse than eating them.
I admit that that logic changes for me depending on whether the animal or human is being penetrated, whether the animal is bigger than the human or not and whether the animal is tied up or not – shifting dynamics that are bound up with ideas around power, strength and freedom of choice.
For me it is obviously wrong when it is combined with violence or assertion of power, forcing something within your control to submit and be at your mercy. A friend and I flippantly agreed that it was “fine to bottom for an animal but not to top”, a simplification that makes it easier to decipher the above.
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In Washington state there were no bestiality-specific laws till after the year 2005, after an infamous case between a man and a stallion that resulted in the death of the man and one of the internet’s first viral videos “Mr Hands”. In the wake of the incident the police and prosecutors reviewed hundreds of hours of footage of men being anally fucked by horses and could find no evidence of the horses being treated cruelly, neglected or abused and could only charge them with trespassing, and so bestiality laws were passed to outlaw it in future.
I thought this was quite funny, especially considering that in the horse world it is perfectly acceptable to wank off a stallion to either collect sperm for breeding or to relieve excess tension yet get pleasure from it yourself and then it’s suddenly not okay.
In the 1970s there was a Danish girl named Bodil Joensen who was known for both having and filming herself having sex with dogs, bulls, boars and horses. I haven’t watched her videos but from what I’ve read they are all male animals and she was always the one being penetrated, and I did watch an interesting interview with her on YouTube, in which she says she prefers having sex with animals to men because she trusts them – just as much a compliment to animals as it is an indictment on men.
She was a farm girl who lived in close proximity to animals, which is often the same with cases that occasionally enter the news of people arrested for bestiality, though plenty of people in urban environments live in just as close if not closer proximity with their pets.
A gay guy friend of mine always says “I don’t trust any man that lives alone with a dog” and perhaps he has reason to say that, given a mutual friend of ours has spoken about being fucked in the arse by a great dane when he was a teen boy (the great dane initiated by knocking him over and humping him, he simply pulled down his pants.)
Was it healthy? Probably not. Was it morally wrong? I can’t say that.
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