"Am I a Zoophile?"

I get this question more often than one might think.  In this last week, I’ve had a couple people ask me this, and my answer comes down to, basically: what does the word “zoophile” even mean in the first place?

Obviously it means a love of animals, but what is the dividing line here?  If I have a dog, and I love him very much, consider him my best friend, and would rather spend time with him than anyone else, human or otherwise, am I a zoophile?  On the other hand, if someone sneaks into farms in the dead of night to bone random horses, is he a zoophile?  It’s a fact that most people don’t know the definition of a zoophile beyond that it’s someone who likes animals “a lot” – usually “too much”.

I don’t think this is a result of the usual stigma against zoophilia, though; rather, it may be the result of the death of a distinguished emotional relationship.  A zoophile is, quite simply and at the very least, someone who has or desires a romantic relationship with an animal.  Once again, though, we’re left with the question of what this means: we don’t know what romance is these days, beyond things like candlelit dinners and wedding proposals.  We don’t tend to do either of these things with the animals we love, so we must provide a more personal and less situational – and less anthropocentric – definition of romance.

Romance is love beyond that in friendship.  It involves a strong fixation that wants stimulation by all three basic senses, but primarily the haptic.  One wants to not just be close to someone, in terms of the mental and social – like how you and your friend share all secrets you have between each other, and thus you are “close” – but also physically close.  This is in preference to being physically close to any other individual.  It’s also an extreme form of friendship in which one will do anything within their power for the sake of another.  Importantly: this friendship and this desire for closeness are reciprocated.  Feelings of romance do come and go, as they’re feelings that take an awful lot out of us, but two people who often have romantic feelings for each other are said to be a romantic couple.

Given this definition, many people do not believe that it is possible for a human and a non-human animal to be in a romantic relationship.  However, it does happen quite frequently; it simply goes unacknowledged.  We often hear about dogs sacrificing greatly for their human owners.  We know of cats that are with their owners all the time, and are so tuned into their emotions that they seem able to sense them from the other side of the building.  The reality is that it is not the animal aspect that is usually the barrier to a romantic relationship: it’s the human that is unwilling or unable to reciprocate.  Our senses are just no match for theirs, and in a lot of ways because of this, we have troubles understanding them.

Some people do, however, manage this.  And those who are at the same time willing to be literally in a relationship with an animal are what we call zoophiles.  But that’s not all that terrifying, people say: it’s perhaps a little odd to love your cat that much, but nothing outrageous.  When we think of zoophilia, we think less of someone who is mutually cuddling his or her furry companion, and seems happiest only when with them, and more of the guy who’s boning his neighbor's sheep in the dead of night.  This perception is false.

Zoophilia usually does involve sexual interaction with animals.  This is because, as humans, we believe that romance naturally leads to sex.  Animals, as creatures without culture and thus without reverence of sex, think of things the other way around, but that’s for another time.  The point I will make here is that there are people who have sex with animals without that romantic relationship, and who have no inclination to forge such a relationship.  These people are not zoophiles: they are what we tend to call bestialists (although bestiality technically means any intercourse between a human and an animal, regardless of the circumstances, a better term is zooerasty).  The zoophilic community will often show their disdain for such individuals.

One does not need to be a zooerast to be a zoophile, or to be a zoophile to be a zooerast, in the same way that one doesn’t need to be homosexual to have intercourse with members of the same sex, and one does not need to have said intercourse to be homosexual.  However, most people who are or do one thing tend to also fit into the other group.  Is this true about zoophilia and bestiality, though?  I would say that it is.  The people we tend to hear about in the news and other media that have abusive intercourse with animals are not zoophiles, but these people are not representative of the zooerast population: they are the people that have difficulty containing themselves, and are often disordered in one way or another in that fulfilling their sexual urges becomes top priority for them.  They have little interest in the romantic.  Those that do – and are thus zoophilic – tend to be more difficult to spot and less likely to sneak into their neighbor’s barn.  Although this is not an area where reliable statistics are easy to come across, from personal experience I would suggest that the zoophilic population is much higher than that of bestialists and “fence-hoppers”: one study shows that fifteen percent of males have had some sort of intentional sexual contact with an animal at some point in their lives.  As much as three percent have continued to do so.  This is a much higher figure than we would think, given that each time another sheep-shagger is arrested, every news blog in the world has something about it.  It’s on this discrepancy between the bestialists who are detained, and the more covert zoophiles, that I base my claim that the latter group is larger than the former.

What about the other way around?  Are there many people who are in romantic relationships with their animals, but not sexual relationships?  This may also be a higher number than we realize, but these people do not often call themselves zoophilic, due to the word’s sexual connotations.  Indeed, they may not even think themselves particularly abnormal; I know many of these people.  There are those, though, that call themselves asexual zoophiles: people who truly love their animals, but have no interest in becoming sexually active with them.  It is a complex topic, and one that really can’t be resolved at the moment.

But really, it’s just a word: zoophile.  It’s a complicated word that attempts to describe a person, like “Christian”, “democrat”, or “bisexual”; and this means that its definition is deceptively difficult to pin down.  Originally, the word literally did just mean “someone who loves animals” – it was in fact used by animal welfare activists before their mortal enemy, the kitty-diddler, stole it from them.  Its definition changes with how people use it, so if you’re asking yourself right now, “Am I a zoophile?” think about this: would you call yourself a zoophile?  Does it benefit you to do so?  Does acquiring this new label help you understand yourself better?  If not, then don’t even worry about it.  You are you, and, as any real zoophile knows, words are overrated: they can’t express love so easily.  And isn’t love what really matters?