Animals Can Consent

Animals do not initiate sexual intercourse with people.

Actually, they do, quite a bit.  Whether it’s a cat in heat rubbing her butt in your face, or a male dog bouncing all around you with an erection, animals make the sexual desires well-known, and often those sexual desires involve people.  All it takes is a quick search on YouTube (here's my personal favourite) to see what this can look like.  It's a heck of a lot more overt than any self-respecting man or woman.

But why?  Evolution says they should only want to ‘do’ their own species, and interspecies sex is very rare in animals/humans.

Perhaps Darwin’s greatest failure was in assuming that people would be able to understand that evolution is not a cut and dry thing, is not a machine, and is actually incredibly complex.  For instance, sex performs many other functions other than just reproduction: bonobos, famously, use sex within their societies to lower stress levels.  Lions will mate with each other within their own sex and outside of heat to strengthen social relations.  And we, of course, rarely have sex with babies in mind.

Furthermore, interspecies sex is not rare in either humans or animals.  A fair chunk of the male population (between 10% and 30% depending on what study you’re looking at) have had some sort of intentional sexual relations with an animal at some point in their lives, and according to Zequi et al. (that study I tore into last year) the majority do so more than once.  This rate is even higher among animals.

In concluding the, “why?”: first of all, unlike humans, animals do not have culturally-embedded difficulties with interspecies relationships; secondly, they do not have the barrier of “us” and “them” as we do, which is primarily motivated by our reliance on language, and the notion that since we have it, we are very separate from and superior to other species.

Our pets, even pets that roam or have other members of their own species to interact with, often love us very much even in comparison to friends of similar species.  Our dogs may be OK when they are separated, but when we leave for an extended period, they become anxious and wait with bated breath for us to return.

You mentioned language.  A cat, dog, horse, etc. cannot say, “no,” or, “yes,” so they most certainly cannot consent!

When was the last time you had sex with your human partner?  Or, if you have not done so yet, perhaps you’ve seen it on a film.  Does either participant ask, “Would you like to have sex?” and does their partner say, “Why yes, that sounds lovely.”?  No: generally, no words are spoken whatsoever.  Words tend to “ruin the mood”.  So what do we tend to look for when wondering about consent?  We look for precisely the same things that zoophiles do: we place a hand somewhere, or do something else that is suggestive but not forceful, and our partner either responds positively and goes with it, maybe kissing us and returning a gesture, or they may move away, shift uncomfortably, vocalize (“Nuh-uh”) or even get violent; for example, the classic face-slap.  The last one, barring some interesting relationships, luckily doesn’t tend to happen unless you’re strangers, in which case, you deserve it.

An animal can’t sign an informed consent contract.

Laugh all you want, but you wouldn’t believe how often I get told this.  The problem is, I can’t find any contract to be signed by two people before they are allowed to have sex, so I’ll have to take your word for this one.  If someone could send me a copy of their own informed consent to sex contract, that would be great.  Thanks in advance.

More seriously: "informed consent" is used for legal contracts, and not for sex.  After all, idiots who have never taken a sex-ed course in their life are allowed to have sex, as are people who are intoxicated, and as I will discuss a little bit further on, we humans have a lot more to worry about than do animals when it comes to sex.

Animals are just like children: they can’t consent because they are too dumb to understand sex.

This is false on several levels.  The first level is the broad: there is no one kind of intelligence, and the idea that there is a single sort of intelligence is very old and outdated.  And before you mention it, no, IQ is only one measure of intelligence.  There are many kinds of intelligence, ie motor intelligence, working memory, spatial awareness, empathetic (your dog is many times better at reading your body language than you will ever be at reading his) and interpretation of and appropriate problem-solving regarding certain environmental cues, especially scent, that humans suck at in comparison to other species.  In fact, it seems that the only thing we have that no other animal has is linguistic ability, which has given rise to culture, complex social interactions, and the spread and preservation of information necessary for technological development.

Secondly, it is false that the law states that children cannot consent because they are intellectually incapable of understanding sex; the reason is that they are physically incapable of understanding sex.  Certain brain structures necessary for producing and regulating sexual behaviour, particularly the hypothalamus, are undeveloped.  Additionally, their hormonal cycles have not yet started; hormones responsible for sex drive and primary sex characteristics do not exist in high levels in their bodies just yet.  Neither of these are the case with animals, as is evidenced by the fact that, unlike children, they very regularly engage in consensual sexual behaviour with each other without any of the ill physical and psychological effects that very frequently occur when children are sexualized prior to puberty.

The retort to this argument tends to be that even post-pubescent children are not legally able to consent, and this is because of the aforementioned cultural and physical ramifications in human-human intercourse: we have STIs, we have social and cultural implications to sex, and as highly social animals in which sex is quite taboo, it can have some very real and tangible problems associated with it, which is the reasoning behind an explicit prohibition of sex between teachers and students.  Animals don’t have to worry about any of these things.  The exception, of course, is if the human, for instance, does not feed the animal if she refuses to have sex with him, but this is of course coercion, and is therefore abusive and does not fall within the realm of zoophilia.

Edit (Dec 2012): Due to this being a very prevalent argument against animals not having the ability to consent, I have further elaborated on it here.

Animals rape each other all the time.  They are used to it and have no idea of consent.

No, they don’t.  I talked about this in an earlier post, but I feel it necessary to reiterate it here.  In almost all animals, a female initiates sexual intercourse, and if a male comes onto a female that is not up for it, she will refuse him and may react with violence.  The reason for this is that most animals have good escape mechanisms, and they have good defence mechanisms: a cat can scratch, a dog can bite, and a horse can kick or run.

The exceptions to this are: firstly animals that have very large litters and an at least relatively high chance of pregnancy per copulation, such as some rodents, where the potential for a male to be mortally wounded for attempting intercourse or afterwards is still an OK tradeoff because he’ll spread his genes greatly even if he only sows his seed a small handful of times.

The second exception is, more simply, animals that do not have good defence mechanisms, and in which females are disadvantaged.  This is quite rare, and the only three real examples of animals in which rape is as common as it is in humans are some primates, like chimpanzees and orangutans, some birds, and in dolphins, which engage in gang rape.  For the sake of this article, I will focus on primates, because, well, we are primates.

This will get a little controversial, so if you are sensitive to this topic you may want to skip this paragraph.  The fact is that it seems female orangs seem to actually have adapted to being raped.  This actually seems to be the case with humans as well: most rapes are not reported, and the feeling that, because she didn’t resist, she is afraid that somewhere deep inside that means she was OK with it, is very commonly described to therapists by rape victims.  This may be a defence mechanism: evolutionarily speaking, the chance of a woman dying because she resisted a potential rapist is quite high, and so it would be prudent for them to be biologically predisposed towards not resisting, of course then leaving the poor girls unaware that their genes were at that point overriding the conscious fear and cognitive resistance they were feeling during the crime.  If this is true, then if anything, human females are more likely to appear to consent when in reality they do not, than are most animals that are more naturally capable of escape or self-defence.

Animals in heat are rabid sex fiends and don’t have any choice.

As any breeder will tell you, it is often very difficult if not impossible to get a female animal to mate with someone that she genuinely, for whatever reason, does not want to.  She may well mate with a preferred individual, or, in the absence of anyone she believes is suitable, may choose to not mate at all.  Additionally, although you would be hard-pressed to find an academic source for this for what should hopefully be an obvious reason, animals that are sexually abused will avoid their abuser in future periods of heat, even hiding and suppressing the behaviours characteristic of a heat.  She will be highly anxious and her physical health will take a heavy hit, as it would with any form of abuse.  This goes for both males and females.

On the other hand, of course, an animal that is in a beneficial and sympathetic sexual relationship, whether with another of the same species or with a different species, they will feel a greater attachment to that individual, have less anxiety, and their health will improve, not only due to the greater level of happiness but also due to the various physical benefits of sex, which you can look up with relative ease at your leisure.

This is all the arguments I can recall at the moment that I have been presented with.  If there are more, I will of course edit them in, and if you have more, please post them in the comments or email me with them.  Thanks!