{"id":247,"date":"2007-10-02T09:07:55","date_gmt":"2007-10-02T14:07:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=247"},"modified":"2012-08-02T18:42:03","modified_gmt":"2012-08-02T22:42:03","slug":"zoophilia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=247","title":{"rendered":"Zoophilia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zoophilia means the love of animals. This can mean someone who hates animal cruelty or someone who has sex with his horse.<\/p>\n

Let’s talk about that second one.<\/p>\n

I recently read something somewhere about a guy who claims to have a loving, caring, “marital” relationship with a dog. Sounds ridiculous to me, since I think of marriage as being between two equals. One of these partners wears a leash and collar (and doesn’t have a safe-word), so their relationship isn’t equal.<\/p>\n

Not to mention the fact that the husband has the brain-power to recognize bonds like marriage, while the wife doesn’t even know to look where you’re pointing, rather than at your finger.<\/p>\n

But leaving the institution of marriage aside, it’s surprisingly difficult to build an argument against zoophilia as a morally repugnant act. That is, every argument I find forces me to reassess other topics where I thought I was solid. Bear with me.<\/p>\n

1. I’ll leave aside all the gut-reaction and ultra-conservative stuff, like it’s unnatural, or that sex should lead to babies. I don’t really believe in unnatural behavior. If humans do it (and they apparently have been doing it for a damn long time<\/a>), then it’s natural.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean that it’s common, or that it’s ok. But “unnatural” isn’t good enough to say that it’s wrong. After all, humans have been having sex with animals a lot longer than we’ve been driving cars. (And cars kill a lot more people than sex with animals does.) So we need another reason to say it’s wrong.<\/p>\n

And I never believed that sex should only be to produce babies. If you believe that masturbation, condoms, or oral sex is ok, then we have to leave aside the babies thing.<\/p>\n

2. The animals aren’t consenting. So it’s rape. Or cruel. Or both.<\/p>\n

Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. I think there are a couple of responses for this, including that animals don’t carry the shame and emotional pain that humans do from rape. For animals, as far as we can tell, rape isn’t a big deal. Anyone who’s watched the Discovery Channel has probably seen a thousand animal rapes without batting an eye.<\/p>\n

But the big response here is that surely even rape is better than how humans treat most non-pet animals. Every animal in the zoo is kidnapped. The chickens, pigs, and most cows are kidnapped as well. They’re kept in extremely small places, they’re routinely subjected to what we’d call “torture-lite” if it happened to humans, they’re often forcibly taken from their mothers while young, and then they’re killed. Some are killed while still babies. Others have to live in those conditions longer before being killed.<\/p>\n

Their lives are almost uniformly bad. They’re unloved and unhappy. (And this is leaving out the really bad stuff that happens to some animals, like burning off the beaks of chickens.) Compared to that life, a little uncomfortable sex now and then would probably be heaven. In other words, imagine if an animal had a choice between being raised for food, and being treated like a pet except for sex now and then. Which would it choose?<\/p>\n

So if you, like I, eat meat. Then how can we claim that sex with animals is wrong because it’s cruel?<\/p>\n

And while we’re on the subject, even pets are slaves, really. They can’t leave when they want, or eat when they want, or do practically anything else they want. These animals are living lives of non-consent. I mean, it’s ok to castrate them, but not to have sex with them.<\/p>\n

Is this just another facet of our species being hung up on sex and trying to rationalize a different reason for outlawing something?<\/p>\n

3. Disease. It seems to me that having sex with animals is a really good way to encourage animal-borne viruses to adapt to humans. In other words, if just handling chickens and pigs can create worldwide epidemics of swine or bird flu, imagine what having sex with them can do. I don’t have a response to this, except again, we do handle birds and swine without being arrested. Blood gets everywhere, and viruses evolve.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure whether there are other arguments against zoophilia, but I’d like to hear them if there are. To be clear to friends and family: I’m not attracted to animals (other than humans). There’s no need to hide your pets when I visit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zoophilia means the love of animals. This can mean someone who hates animal cruelty or someone who has sex with his horse. Let’s talk about that second one. I recently read something somewhere about a guy who claims to have a loving, caring, “marital” relationship with a dog. Sounds ridiculous to me, since I think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}