Shelter

One thing I haven't talked much about on this blog since its inception is my video game habit, but I am in fact a gamer (PC master race) and every once in a while something pops up that catches my attention.  A bit over a year ago Might & Delight of Stockholm became my new favourite indie developer because they gave me a game that was not only enjoyable but did things that I feel really broke barriers, and some of those barriers are things that might be relevant for this outlet.

Shelter

Three games comprise the Shelter series, but they all have a few things in common.  Shelter puts you in the shovel-esque paws of a mother badger, beginning underground in her set with her newborn young, which you are charged with feeding, protecting, and leading through a world of hazards ranging from flash floods to forest fires to dreaded birds of prey.  Shelter 2, my personal favourite, has you instead as a mother lynx in a huge, open environment, hunting for your kittens and once more shielding them from predators and the everyday (and perhaps not-so-everyday) risks of being a young animal in a big new world.  Paws is a spin-off of Shelter 2 in which you play not as the mother lynx but as a kitten who has lost their way.  It's more exploration-focused and whimsical, but retains the simple but ironically philosophical outlook.

Shelter 2

Each game focuses on the interplay between mother and young, and bonds formed through hardship.  Hardly a word is written in the game and there is no dialogue; no humans exist in the Shelter world, but all the same it's almost impossible not to feel a rather intense affection for these furballs you have been charged with, and the resulting blow to the upper-left of your chest when one of them shrieks their dying cry as they're carted off by a fox that you should have noticed, should have caught — but didn't.  To help along this paradoxically meditative and dire plot, each game has extraordinary simple but beautiful acoustic soundtracks and a papier mâché aesthetic.

Paws: A Shelter 2 Game

To me this visual style immediately struck me as being symbolic of how an animal might view this world that they live in: their sight is not as important to them as their feel of the world, so rather than the game allowing us to focus on each individual detail of each individual leaf, we're instead shown patterns, basic ways of interpreting trees and grass and mountains, even the fur patterns of our character's young.  This, and the lack of UI, and the use of auditory rather than visual cues for many challenges the games present really places the player in the mindset of the animal better than others with quadrupedal protagonists.

Of course the games aren't without their shortcomings, mostly technical, but I didn't want to make this post a full review, simply a recommendation and brief analysis of the feel that the Shelter series invokes as a whole.  I think if there's anyone, gamer or no (because they are very easy games to pick up), has found themselves curious about the simple but brutal world of wild animals, or considered the possibility of seeing existence through the biases of another species, or just wants a game that's simultaneously uncomplicated, challenging, and emotionally trying, do try these out.  They're inexpensive and available on Steam and on GOG.  And next month, a fourth game in the series, Meadow, is in the works and will be released next month.  You can bet I'm looking forward to it.

Security, Photographic Evidence, and Not Being a Loon

Recently I've been having more and more conversations with a wider variety of zoophiles, and of course as we're coming more out of the woodwork, and more of us are caring less and less about our privacy as the internet becomes more ingrained into our lives, the conversation of what is and is not good secure online practice came up frequently.  This especially arose when discussing organizing for things such as help groups or more public interface.  The different risks towards zoophiles who are expressing themselves online are, I would say, twofold, with one of these risks divided into two parts.

The first risk is the most obvious and the most universal: Other people, and our social lives.  The individuals with whom we share our local and global communities can make our lives hell for us.  I have heard of people who have been fired from their jobs on account of a word-of-mouth report from a stranger.  This happens particularly those in certain states of the US that allow such employment practices.  That having been said, there is nothing stopping someone from doing the same to you even if you are not sexually active with animals, or even a zoophile at all; this gossip is given and acted upon without any evidence at all, so the general security rule to avoid this sort of thing is to not be a dick.  If you're going to be talking about your zoophilia outside of zoophilic circles, make sure it's with people that you can likely trust to be mature about it, even if they aren't entirely accepting, and work on your social skills!  I have never had anyone respond negatively to my paraphilia because, if I might say so myself, I am a good speaker, an even better writer, and I know how to put my opinions and facts forward without making people too grouchy with me — or at least, if they are, they don't feel so empowered that they might strive to exercise that power in harming me.

The second risk is, as I said, twofold, but rather because one part is the imagined risk, and one is not.  The imagined risk is in the law of the land, which has always been incredibly stringent by word against zoophiles.  The days are gone when we were hanged along with our lovers, but there are still places in the first world in which the maximum sentence for intercourse with an animal is life.  Simply saying so on the internet would technically be enough for an investigation, but here's the issue: some studies have the rate as high as 30% for people who have sexual interactions with an animal at some point in their lives, and of course the internet is rife with furries saying they'd like to have sex with animals, wish they had the guts to play with the family dog, real zoophiles quietly discussing these things amongst themselves, and naturally trolls acting as if they do it just for the laughs.  It's chaos here and no one has time to go for the small fish.

What are the big fish, then?  Well, in every single news article I've ever seen, there has been visual confirmed evidence of the investigated and tried 'bestialist' having sexual intercourse with an animal — that is, no one has ever been investigated and tried simply for discussing these things on the internet.  Even if someone is already being noticed by law enforcement, they don't make a move until said person of interest posts an image of them spreading their female dog's vagina, or a film with his member in a mare.  In one instance, an individual was only investigated because they were posting (and eventually following through with) Craigslist ads through which they were looking for a horse to have intercourse with.  Of course, the ones who eventually answered and had to deal with their very explicit phone calls, and then meet up with this individual after they drove halfway across the country to see them, were the police.

And it doesn't particularly matter if it's legal in your state.  If you create and publish this media, and then move elsewhere, yes, you did not technically break the law, but you have just given anyone who would like to know visual confirmation that you ought to be watched by anyone who might want to catch them some evil bestialists.

I don't want to go too long on this, but in conclusion, I just want to confirm:

• You are generally fairly safe.  Don't go giving out personal information (ie your name, your exact location, birthday, intimate things like that), which is generally good internet practice no matter what your sexual preference.
• Learn to communicate.  Don't be a weirdo!  If you can't have civil conversation, don't have conversation at all.  Don't 'ragequit' halfway through a chat.  This is far more important in near anyone's eyes than your zoophilia.
• Don't publish evidence of your acts online.  This is so basic, and it astonishes me how many people just publish their naked butts conjoined with those of dogs willy-nilly, but just don't do it.

Just be smart.  Don't be a loon.  The way you present yourself, and the ways in which you don't, are going to mandate your security far better than your use of Tor or the toughness of your online passwords.  Not only will presenting yourself well keep you safer, but in time, as we start to come out of the dark recesses of the internet and into the public eye where, if justice were ever to prevail, we ought to be, you and all of us will be in better shape.  

Attraction vs Kink

Building on the last post, and inspired by a post I saw on the Zoophilia sub-reddit, I'd like to discuss the difference between what people like and what people want.

I have a close friend who is a self-defined masochist.  She loves humiliation, and has frequent fantasies about being cornered in an alleyway by multiple people and gang-raped.  This notion is of course very terrifying, and most people's immediate reaction is to ask why on earth she might think that would be a good thing to happen, but here is the answer: She doesn't.  She would never want that to happen to her in real life.  It's simply a fantasy that arouses her.

Many self-defined zoophiles actually fit into this paradigm.  Young and inexperienced boys, a lot of the time, quite used to masturbating to anything with visible naughty bits, they find themselves getting off to videos of animals having sex, or people having sex with animals, and imagine that this makes them zoophiles.  And sometimes it does, but sometimes they grow up, or they finally get the chance to be around the animal they thought they might like to be with, and it turns out they don't.  It's just a fantasy, more properly defined as faunoiphilia.

Others, as shown in the post that I'm thinking about, are more just voyeuristic.  These people are not zoophiles, but they may want to see their significant other (in my experience, usually a man wanting to see his girlfriend) having sex with an animal.  It's a factor of voyeurism as well as humiliation-focused sadism, given that the attractive aspect of it isn't seeing a beautiful girl with a beautiful animal, but rather a beautiful girl being taken by a base creature.  Unfortunately, it's often (not always, but often) a factor in abusive relationships, and these individuals are not zoophiles.

I think it's important to draw these distinctions and to be aware of them.  Usually the distinctions we draw are between those who love their animals and those who only use them for sexual gratification, but there are also those who claim to be zoophiles to begin with only to discover they are not — they didn't change, they simply never were, only thought they were because they couldn't distinguish between fantasy and desired reality — and there are those who enjoy watching animals having intercourse with people for reasons more connected to sexual sadism (and judging by the porn that exists out there, these people probably make up the large majority of its consumers). 

Sexuality and Psychology

Sexuality is rather prevalent in a lot of what we are and do.  If you look into personality disorders and thus their corresponding personality types, you'll see their specializing researchers listing their sexual tendencies as well.  People with borderline personality disorder/type tend to have very active, multi-partner, intense sex lives.  People with schizoid personality disorder/type tend to have the opposite, but have incredibly active fantasy lives, often right down to pertaining to specific fantastic interests, specifically the idea of returning to the womb. (Guntrip, Harry. Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations, and The Self. New York: International Universities Press, 1969.)

Of course, not all of us have these extreme personality types, but if we consider the research of some psychologists, these personality types seem to correspond to high or low values on scales used in personality inventories that we have today. (Mullins-Sweatt SN, Widiger TA. The five-factor model of personality disorder: A translation across science and practice. In: Krueger R, Tackett J, editors. Personality and psychopathology: Building bridges. New York: Guilford; 2006.)

Although perhaps the best place for this observation would be as the root of a study rather than a blog post, given these two observations together it would make sense to presume that sexuality is quite deeply linked to our personalities, and therefore everything we are and do.

It would also account for the conflicting but consistently present and simultaneously true views that personality is both quite static, by definition, and does not change from day to day (for instance, the fact that you are grouchy one day because your boss yelled at you is not changing your personality for that day, it's changing your mood), personality does seem capable of changing over time, as people's values on even our most up-to-date inventories do fluctuate.  Sexuality is the same: we see sexuality as crystallized by the time we're finished puberty, but I'm sure most adults can attest that they are not interested in the same things sexually they were ten years ago, and are interested in something new these days.

What this link between sexuality and personality means is that our sexualities are, simultaneously, both entirely natural and not under our control, but are also formed by our persistent environments, traumatic events, and other things that happen to us.  It also means sexuality is potentially even more complex than most people realize and should be given more consideration when measuring, using very broad terms, exactly who a person is.

For the Less Well-Adjusted Cats

I've helped quite a few consistently violent or anxious cats, and these two complaints are generally what non-cat-people, and frustrated cat people will cite as the reasons for their frustration.

Violent cats are on one hand easy to deal with because there is a single method that I've found works very well and doesn't need much adaptation.  Cats are violent for two reasons: first, because they feel they're playing.  Consider when a violent cat scratches, or grabs your arm to claw at it, what is your immediate reaction?  We're creatures of instinct, too, so naturally we pull away, try to get kitty off of us.  Think about the similarities between that action and the action of, say, a cat toy being tugged about in her claws.  To them, it's just another game, and being violent by nature with their non-lethal weapons, it's a fun one.  In order to curb this behaviour, you need to make it less fun.

The process is painful, but hear me out.  If kitty is clawing at you, regrab them — not hard, just essentially to fixate them on what they're doing, and also give them the very real sensation that you are definitely bigger than they are.  An interesting thing about the cat psyche is that they don't seem to register size when considering whom they can beat up.  That having been accomplished, you're going to let them continue clawing your arm.  This doesn't mean you shouldn't vocalize your discontent; enough "ow!" and "hey!", coupled with the grabbing, will have your cat stop.  She may look up to you, confused and embarrassed, or she may just get miffed that her tactics aren't working as they usually do, but at this point you'll be able to get her claws out of your skin and you'll keep her with you for a pet and cuddle, so long as she'll tolerate it.  This is simple operant conditioning, pairing the fun they usually have with something humiliating or uncomfortable, and then rewarding them for ceasing the humiliating and uncomfortable thing while simultaneously showing them another activity to enjoy with you.  The change will not happen overnight, and may take weeks, even months of this depending on the stubbornness of your cat, past trauma, intelligence, and your own skill, but I've seen it succeed many times.

The other reason cats are violent, though, is because they're afraid.  Generally, this takes a very different form, and rather than grabbing and clawing for long periods it's a quick grab and kick, usually with some angry vocalizations, or else just lashing out.  Acutely angry or afraid cats will often jump at faces.  While some cats that are playing may employ hit and run tactics, smacking or scratching you, and running away, only to come back and try the same thing again, angry or afraid cats will avoid you if they can.  If this is the reason for your cat's violence, you need to get them into a comfortable situation in which they won't have a choice but to be with you.

This is also the treatment for anxious cats that I've found works well: Live intensely with your cat for a period of time.  That is, keep her in your room with good food, water, litter pan, cushions, catnip, and anything else that might help them feel comfortable, except for hiding places.  The reasoning behind anxiety in both cats and humans is ultimately the same: we have a stimulus that gives us anxiety and our escape from that stimulus exacerbates it, because we are conditioning ourselves to fear it more.  Cats are very, very good at escape, so they are very good at being anxious.  In this treatment, you are preventing your cat from escaping you.  It may be extremely traumatic for them; depending on their level of anxiety, usually past abuse, she may hiss and spit every time you move, search desperately for an escape route, even urinate on the floor, but you need to be consistent and give your cat as much attention as you can while still attending your basic human needs likely for several days on end.  Over time, and the key term here is graduated exposure, try to pet and cuddle her; like with the violence-for-play method, when she lashes out at you, however much you may bleed, just let her until you can scritch her ears, hold her, or find some other way of making her feel physically good, which will calm her down.  Ideally, only let her go when she seems calm, and wants to get to a different spot for her own comfort rather than because she's afraid, although you may have to try a few times to get to this level.  If you are not able to, ensure your cat is not getting away from you because she escaped; rather, be sure it's on equal terms.  For instance, you may reach out to pet her and she may jump at your hand and slash it immediately, backing away and snarling.  You want to continue advancing in this case, and just get to the point where you can gently scritch her cheek, and then move away, having succeeded in your goal.  There's a lot of sacrifice to be made here in terms of your own physical pain and scarring, but you retreating from her self-defence is just another form of letting her escape and build her anxiety further.  Throughout the entire process you want to be very verbal with your cat, using a sweet, soft tone.  This ultimately may sound borderline psychologically abusive, and you definitely need to have the heart for it, but this exposure is crucial.  Ideally, you want to keep this up until kitty can lie contentedly on your bed as you get into it, and visibly appreciate petting without any violent preamble.

Cats are an enigmatic species; we've lived with them for thousands of years and we still don't quite understand them.  And they like it that way, being the shy kid in the back of the room that no one quite gets and fewer people still will even try.  But as people who love our cats it's our duty to understand them whether they help us along or not, to develop that relationship between cat and human, and make their lives as happy as they can be.  Best of luck.

Cat Communication

In general, people don't bother with their cats too much.  It sounds very distasteful to say, but it's true: We think of our cats as rather asocial animals, who can generally take or leave us, and when they take us they may well just leave us three minutes later, until the next time we're busy enough that we're worth bothering.  Cats are assholes, we say.

I, obviously, feel very strongly against this.  Cats can be very sociable, loving, even needy as any dog you might find if they're given the attention and the respect, and their communicative needs are met.  Dogs, though they aren't anymore, originally came from pack animals, and are still naturally more gregarious than cats are.  We, as humans, can sympathize with this, and so we have an easier time communicating with them.  Cats, on the other hand, are nocturnal, less interested in consistent, close proximity, and prefer the one on one.  This doesn't mean they have fewer social needs, only that their social needs are different.  They're the introverts of the animal world, and a common misconception about introversion is that it means you simply don't like people.  Introverts don't like crowds, don't like strangers, but the few people that they do like they become very attached to, and require them in their lives more than extroverts might rely on their own friends.  Cats are like this.

So no, don't assume kitty is fine if you leave home for a week and they have no one to interact with.  You may come home and they seem to ignore you, but this is because cats have a more complex social mind in some ways in comparison to dogs: they have the capability to quietly resent, they are vengeful, they can be embarrassed.  Have you ever seen kitty do something stupid, like slip across a kitchen floor chasing a bug only to collide with a counter, and you laugh, and they stalk off to face away from you, licking themselves?  Their humiliation looks a lot like ours, and so do their feelings of being abandoned.  They haven't forgotten you when you get home after that long trip, they just aren't very happy that you left them alone in the first place.  Cats isolating themselves, whether in humiliation or sickness or other upset, is a survival mechanism.

Cats also listen very attentively to verbal communication.  Like the other forms of concealment or deceit listed above, they often know very well what we want them to do or are telling them, but ignore us intentionally.  If one develops a strong relationship with a cat, they may well tear this barrier down, as my own has, and react to your wants and needs almost implicitly.  In return, cats also have a huge range of their own verbal expressions, highlighting how important verbalization is to them.  The more you talk to your cat, the more they'll talk back!

Cats have somewhere between thirty and upwards of one hundred distinct vocalizations, depending on one's source.  This is actually far more than dogs have, which is somewhere in the teens.  For comparison, the greatest number of distinct sounds in a human language is 141 at most.  Coupled with body language, this means a cat can express an awful lot with little effort.

• A content cat will have her ears forward, her eyes almond-shaped, and her whiskers down and forward in what I like to call a 'cat smile', since like a human smile it uses muscles in the cheeks.  The tail will be relatively still, perhaps just flicking at the tip, back and forth like a pendulum.  Content cats obviously will purr, but if you're talking to them and petting them, especially if they're pacing about while you do so so that you can get to their favourite places, they may give short little chirping noises or bubbling sounds from their throat.  A very good way to see a content cat though, apart from all this, is the slow-blink.  A lot of people see this as them being snobby, and in humans this is a rather self-important expression, but in cats they're telling you that they're happy where they are and they appreciate your presence.  Cats will also rub against things when they're happy, and contrary to popular belief, this isn't them declaring your desk or your leg as their property, it's just communication like everything else.
• An excited cat will have a more rapidly flicking tail.  People usually note that an active tail in a cat generally means they're annoyed or angry, but an excited cat's tail may be all over the place as well.  She'll be moving around a lot more, and may even look agitated, but the facial expression will mirror their content state, especially in the ears and the whiskers.  She may vocalize much more, especially if you're vocalizing back to her, with loud purring and meowing.
• An annoyed cat will be making very few vocalizations at all.  She'll have her back to you, perhaps her ears back so that she can hear what you're doing.  Her whiskers will be pushed back as well, and her tail will be flicking.  In this state, it's best to just leave them alone; as humans, our natural response is to try to cheer them up, but they just want time to themselves.
• An angry cat is easy to spot.  Ears back, whiskers back, hackles raised.  They'll snarl and hiss, and generally be very unpleasant.
• A frightened cat is also easy noticed.  The facial expression will be similar to an angry one in that the ears and whiskers will be back, but the tail will be still, and the eyes will be wide.  A cat under consistent stress may actually purr, just as they do when they're injured.  Some have asked me before how one can tell between a purring happy cat or a purring, and it's all in their facial expression and their reaction to stimuli.  We all know what a cat looks like when she's enjoying being pet, curling her body against your hand; a frightened cat won't appreciate attention as overtly, although unless she bristles or moves away from you, comforting her is very advisable.

In general, the way you interact with a cat will be very different from how you interact with a dog or a person.  People often lament that they dislike cats but cats in houses always seem to like them; this is because cats enjoy being ignored.  Most cats don't enjoy intense physical attention, but even the most casual pet or ear-scritch can make them very happy; if she decides she wants to go somewhere else, do something else, don't follow her.  She'll come back on her own.  The petting may get more intense, and some cats love being brushed roughly, or having themselves underneath your body, making them feel loved and protected, but one way to almost always engage with your cat is just through verbalization.  If you observe cats in the wild, big or small, most of their interactions are very brief physical contact, along with quite a few more vocalizations, often at long distances apart.  Tell your cat her name in the right tone and you're guaranteed a cat-smile and a slow-blink.

Canada: Bestiality and What It Entails

So, a bit of an early update because there's been some news recently: A man accused (and certainly guilty) of molesting his two stepdaughters on 13 counts over the last 10 years was also therein accused of bestiality, as he had reportedly smeared a substance on the girls' genitals to encourage the family dog to lick them there.  The court ruled that according to the law, the man was not guilty of bestiality as bestiality specifically requires penetration to take place.

This issue is rather hard to stomach for me, as I imagine it is for anyone reading, and of course, it has caused an uproar.  People seem to have generally forgotten that this man was abusing his daughters for ten years and the highlight of the issue has been the poor dog who was compelled by tastiness to lick someone's private parts.  Nowhere do you see anyone discussing the issue of how this could have gone on for ten years, how the wife could not have known about it, how children need to be protected, as the girls were just in their teens (and that's at the time of conviction, I do believe).  It's all about the dogs.

And of course appealing to their sense of reason is useless.  Ask people how on earth having a dog lick a body part smothered in peanut butter or what have you, without any force used or any form of coercion beyond the reward, could be exploitative and abusive, and there is no response, only that it's criminal because it involves animals and sex, when in all honesty even the most stalwart anthropomorphizer must admit that the dogs probably in this case don't care a lick (pun fully intended) whether they're lapping at someone's hand or their crotch, beyond the slight difference in flavour.  To assume otherwise would be to assume that dogs have some complex sexual culture in the way that human beings living in worlds developed under Abrahamic religions do.  It would put them higher in their sexual finickiness than many human cultures all over the world.  It's absurd.

But the public verdict is almost unanimous and everyone hates this man not for being a child molester but for utilizing a dog's taste buds in being such.  But there's good news at least for Canadian zoos: Those blowjobs you give your dog, the cute little rubbings and lickings you might give a cat in heat are entirely legal where you live.  So despite the idiocy of the public, the intelligence of lawmakers can sometimes win through, and maybe this is a tiny step forward for the rest of us in the western world.

Article from Vice here.

Zoophilia and Veganism

It's been some time since I've really involved myself in any sort of zoophilic community, the only good one I've ever found still being at knotty.me, but one thing I recall people discussing in places is whether it's moral or not, especially as people who prefer the company of animals over people in matters that go beyond mere introversion, to eat meat and consume other animal products.

The argument has been made that we as zoos don't just love certain animals, but all animals, and we understand them better than the general population due to both our interest and our proximity to them that we try to maintain, both physically and emotionally.  It's been said that anyone who can do that and still feel that they are not morally in the wrong for consuming animals cannot be doing it right.

I would argue, however, that if we understand our animals the way we say we do, we also understand our own animal nature, which historically has included eating meat as a crucial part of our lifestyle and our development as a species.  It may be today that we can exist on certain proteins, synthesized supplements, all from non-animal products, but to me doing this denies some of my basic nature, the same as just giving my cat beef-flavoured supplements would deny hers.

Morality goes beyond floaty pieces of philosophy, though, and it would come down to whether or not I feel a sort of sympathy for the animals I consume.  And I do.  Ideally, we would live in a world in which animals and humans are free to live their own lives without interfering with one another without consent.  Wild horses would never have gone extinct everywhere outside Mongolia.  Bears would leave alone campers.  Birds wouldn't get sucked into jet intakes.  Unfortunately, that isn't a world we live in, and isn't a world we can live in; humans are taking over and I don't believe it will even be a possibility without a literal apocalypse for us to stop it.  So to me, there are two options: The first is that we press the philosophy that animals need to be protected, away from humans, and be allowed to live free lives without our meddling.  And this has merit, morally; freedom is good, but unfortunately it often is juxtaposed against safety.  If animals as a whole were allowed, and made, to live without human interference, that would also necessitate that they're living without our protection.  We already of course see this when we compare the lives of animals within human society versus without; despite our consumption of them, cows, pigs, chickens are not in danger of going extinct, because we measure our consumption.  Meanwhile, even though consumption of them has been made completely illegal, many endangered species are only dwindling in number, and continue to dwindle apart from within reservations specifically set aside for them.  Imagine, for a moment, if rather than insisting they are wild animals, we managed to domesticate the Amur tiger.  They're bred, selected for docile behaviour, and sold as pets.  Suddenly they're a business, and now the tiger is nowhere near the brink of extinction.

But we're talking about slaughtering animals here, not simply keeping them as pets.  Let's disregard for a moment the fact that most of the animals consumed in the United States are kept in pretty horrible conditions, and this, I agree needs to change.  And it can change, it has changed in other parts of the world, with greater regulation of animal welfare in farming and a decrease in the immense amount of waste that requires the United States to slaughter so many more animals than they should.  Let's pretend that we have done that, because it will happen, and that every hamburger is raised free-range, hormone free, and so on.  We're still slaughtering these animals, but in the wild, these animals are naturally prey animals as well.  Yes, they may perhaps live longer lives out there, but they more often will actually live shorter ones, riddled not only with the promise of eventually being eaten by a predator but also sickness, injury, accident.  It's arguable that the ideal possible artificial habitat for cattle is more humane than the wild that would be the only alternative.

To me, the PETA-style notion of animal liberation is silly.  If all animals were free of human influence, we would also be free of theirs, which would be an absolute tragedy, I say not just as a zoophile but as someone who benefits from the fact that dogs were domesticated for hunting, that cats were first used in agriculture, that horses were first bred and raised for not only riding but meat and milk.  Cows don't make the best pets in my opinion, having raised them before, but I'm happy nevertheless that they're in it with us, guaranteed survival (at least as their modern, selectively bred incarnation), rather than being bulldozed by the relentless tide of industrialism like the rest of the wilderness.  I'd like to see every animal included in human society, humanely, alongside us, and I think if we manage this, we ourselves will become more human in the process, more understanding rather than neglectful or fearful of our nonhuman fellows on this planet.

So as a member of a historically rather carnivorous species, I will continue to eat meat, but I will also be conscious of where that meat comes from, and how I, as a carnivore, might impact the humanity in the raising of that meat.  Am I getting chicken from a factory farm, or is it local, free range?  Just how far can the dairy cows who produce my milk move?  Do you know the answers to these questions?  Eat meat or do not, but if you do, be responsible about it.

Equus

Equus is a play that was composed, like many strange and controversial pieces of media, in 1973.  It follows a troubled teenage boy, repressed by his overly dogmatic upbringing, with his feelings for (or about) horses being central to the story and what it represents.

Like most fiction that deals with individuals with zoosexual proclivities, it primarily uses the attraction as fuel for metaphor.  In this case, it's not so much about the perversion, as Alan, the protagonist, never does interact in a sexually explicit way with any horses, but as a representation of something that he has been prevented from, and ultimately an object of worship (as these two things are consistently linked in the play).

I don't want to discuss the literary elements of the play, although they are definitely here, because I feel it's very dishonest in a lot of ways.  It's dishonest scientifically, being one more piece to add to the heap of ones that depict hypnosis for enhanced recall as a valid practice.  And it's dishonest in its message, as it opens with the psychiatrist, Dysart, giving the audience the very 70s notion that we perhaps should not be treating troubled teens for fear of giving them "boring" lives in place of their disordered ones, and Dysart remaining a positive and moral figure throughout the play, even to the mutilation in the end.  The message is clearly throughout the play meant to be about how Alan has it right, and is just the victim of the tug of war between militant atheism and fear-based evangelism while trying, and being prevented from, finding his own spirituality and worship, naturally tied into sexuality.  But it ends with the real-life inspiration for the play, in which he mutilates the object of his worship, and still our benevolent psychiatrist laments that he may yet cure the boy, as if his insanity may still be preferable to a healthy life.

It's dishonest, of course, about zoophilia as well.  Although it is a play meant for a then-modern audience, and its depicted zoosexuality is meant only as a literary element, it still insists upon depicting those with similar feelings about horses as troubled monsters just beneath the skin.  The constant shouts and whooping of Alan whenever he comes into contact with them, be it during the nude moonlit ride or the actual blinding of the stabled horses, gives us the impression that while the human side of his sexuality is troubled, and he's socially inept, and he has a horrible, mentally abusive relationship with his parents, the most salient disturbance about him is how he feels about these animals.

I don't believe anyone who knows how the play ends would see this play as a good one to suggest to a zoophile anyway, but as it was quite successful and even has a modern film adaptation, to me its dishonesty is worth noting here.  And we as the zoo community can use this dishonesty to open up a window into the minds of those who don't quite understand us, perhaps don't even realize we exist.  That's important when we're looking into acceptance.

It's Now!

Lots of interesting human rights things surrounding sexuality and gender have been going on in the western world, particularly its high seat in the United States.  In the last two years, more gender options have appeared on many official documents, same-sex marriage has been legalized, bills passed to protect transgender people from discrimination, and of course the issue with bathroom rights in the US is ongoing.  Now more than ever we have a large liberal community, a global community, who are united behind these issues and the liberation of the people they affect.

My question is, why not us?  Perhaps it is a huge leap to go from saying people with penises should be allowed to use the women's washroom, or that mothers should be able to breastfeed their children in restaurants, to the suggestion that perhaps those who have intercourse with animals may not be sick or abusive.  But the wonderful thing about this day and age is that we have the internet, and people read what they see on the internet.  And if there is vocal support in their camp — if other Bernie Sanders liberals are giving things their Like and sharing on Facebook with a captioned #damnright — people follow.  It's what people do.

But the issues are flowing like cheap beer on campus, and if we want to ride this train of social libertarianism in the most conservative country in the English-speaking world, we need to start acting now.  Communities of people who want their rights acknowledged, who don't want to be worried about blackmail or arrest for the love they share with their animals, need to start popping up and going public on the internet.  I'm not talking about names; we can use handles, just as we have done for decades now, and we can continue using our security so that if someone creates #zoogate we needn't worry about being leaked.  What we need isn't organization, although that's part of it; what we need is numbers, and to get the word out to one another so that people can see what those numbers are.  That, and reasonable dialogue, using phrases like "safe space" and "government out of my bedroom" will draw the positive attention we need.

And there will be negative attention.  A lot of it.  What needs to be done is to simply ignore it, and acknowledge any allies we might receive very strongly.  It's the allies that will make the difference here, and as soon as we start alienating them, we cripple any movement that might be started here.

Think about it.  Talk about it.  Our timing is right, and it's time to organize.

Bear

Time for another review!  And finally, it's a good one: This is an excellent book I have for some reason never been aware of until now.  It's a Canadian piece written in the 70s by second-wave feminist Marian Engel about a Toronto women made to live out in the boondocks, where she meets and eventually falls in love with — you guessed it — a tame bear.

First of all, let me get the not-so-zoo stuff out of the way: It's a really well-written book.  At first it may come across as a bit purple; it starts with the same tired and frustrated young city woman undergoing major changes in her life.  The author does this on purpose, saying that she originally just wanted to write pornography, and then a bear came into the picture so she went with it, in typical style of writers.  But it picks up, and a nice array of literary tools are used throughout the story to deliver a strong message just beneath the surface of the plot regarding the liberation of women's sexuality, and outside the sphere of feminism (or is it?) the rediscovery of what is natural and wild, beyond the scope of the niches society fits us into.

Some critics have toted it as a very spiritual book, but to me it's quite the opposite: with its length and its style, it reads like a significantly less chaste Paulo Coelho, but it actually paints a rather believable and down to earth story.  If anything it's about pulling the wool away from one's eyes and just embracing the simple, almost a sort of nihilism, rather than a spiritual feeling or doctrine.

That realism extends to the zoophilic aspect, too: the bear's actions are in my experience very believable, right up to the ending, if not tragic then simultaneously disappointing and liberating in all the best ways.  It doesn't ever disparage or abuse, and indeed even glorifies the zoophilic actions and feelings at hand, and really, I think some of us zoos could learn a thing or two about our relationships with animals from this book, and help bring us into a more moderate state of mind.

I really can't recommend this book strongly enough, not only to zoophiles but also to feminists, real libertarians, and anyone who enjoys good literature.  It's erotic, but doesn't revel in it, and instead uses that eroticism to teach us things about our own existence and personal liberation in measure.

Hello!

It's been over two years since I've updated this thing.  My life has been quite hectic during that time, and I've just had more things to do in developing myself than paying attention to the side of me that's wont to fall in love with quadrupeds.  But I'm going to stockpile some posts, so stay tuned, tell your friends, as at least some of them should be quite interesting.

This one, however, will have no content at all but to let you all know that I'm alive, and tell you what being me has been like for the last little while.  I'm going through something of a career change; anyone in mental health who's making less than six figures will tell you that it gets very draining when done for years, not necessarily because of the clients but because of your fellow professionals.  Nothing is remotely set in stone yet but I may have to take out the "mental health professional" bit on that sidebar!  Perhaps a little academic credit lost when it comes to the nature of the blog, but to me, certainly worth it if I can find something that won't see me losing so much hair.

Something has occurred that has helped me keep that hair in, however, and that is this: I've gotten married.  To a human, even.  In fact, my beautiful genius of a wife's interests swing very much in the same way as mine, so you may be hearing a little about her end of things in the future.

So the next few posts will be about entertainment and media, as although I've been on a blogging hiatus I certainly haven't been on a reading one.  After that, who knows?  See you soon.

JD