It's Science! It's Bestiality! It's Science About Bestiality!

Well, this piece by Scientific American’s Jesse Bering went up last week and I don’t know how we missed it til now. (I was alerted to it by Ryan Sager’s Neuroworld page at True/Slant.) If you haven’t yet, you should read it: it’s about bestiality and it’s great!

It starts with Bering, a research psychologist, saying, “I accidentally bit my dog Gulliver’s tongue recently.” And just gets better from there. It’s a serious consideration of whether or not zoophilia, the sexual attraction to animals, might be considered a legitimate sexual preference. (Bering, it should be noted, is not a zoophile; his dog stuck its tongue in his mouth while he was eating a bagel.) It takes a serious, though very funny, look at surveys and case studies of self-identifying zoophiles, people who find animals, very often one type of animal, very often horses, more sexually attractive than they do other human beings. The 47-year-old medical doctor, for example, who had an “unremarkable suburban upbringing with loving parents and no memories of abuse or neglect,” but who gave psychologists Christopher Earls and Martin Lalumière the following account for a 2009 study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior:

As I grew into adolescence my sexual ideation was different from what it was supposed to be. I looked at horses the same as other boys looked at girls. I watched cowboy movies to catch glimpses of horses. I furtively looked at pictures of horses in the library. This was before the Internet and I felt totally isolated. I was a city boy. I had never seen a horse up close, never touched or smelled one. No one in my family had any contact with horses, but for me, they held a powerful, wonderful, and, yes even-well primarily-sexual attraction. I had no idea that there were others like me in the world. I tried to be normal. I tried to get interested in girls, but for me they were always foreign, distasteful and repulsive. A couple of early adolescent sexual explorations … were mechanical, forced and unsuccessful.

He later bought a female horse, took riding lessons, and after a “long courtship”-well, read it for yourself!