Thursday, August 10, 2017

Robert Pattinson and the Thing with the Dog

So here is what happened.

Robert Pattison, probably best known for playing Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise, is working on a film called Good Time, which is about a man with something of an obsession with dogs and who believes he was a dog in a former life.  In the film, there is a scene in which a drug dealer bursts in on the protagonist who is lying in bed with a dog, apparently giving the dog a hand-job.

The story that's been bouncing around is that Robert was asked by the director to actually stroke off the dog, and that he refused.  He later clarified that it was all a joke, that he wasn't seriously asked to do so, and that a fake dog dong was always what was going to be used.  There's obviously nothing wrong with this; for one thing, as a rule of thumb while filming, you want to expect as little out of your animals as humanly possible.  If anything might even potentially cause harm or discomfort to the animal, you would really rather avoid that.  For another thing, Twilight was pretty darn tame as far as weird kinds of lovin', and I don't imagine Robert himself would be very comfortable if asked to actually bring a dog to erection.  Just a guess.

What makes it honestly silly is that as soon as the story came out, PETA congratulated him on not being a horrible animal abuser by agreeing to this morally bankrupt request.  And every site discussing the story is chock full of people crying the same thing — not because it's good to respect an actor's comfort zone, or even because it's good to avoid employing real animals when possible, but because giving dogs erections is sick and wrong.

Even though the incident was apparently all a joke, it is important after all, because the response is real.  So let's discuss this.  Zoopoint is obviously biased on the whole thing, but I think the best impartial indicator to the morality of such a hypothetical request is best judged by the reaction of the trainer: a very blatant, "I mean, you can. You just gotta massage the inside of his thighs." This is something that is done all the time by caretakers of intact animals for a variety of reasons, whether to stimulate them for breeding, for semen extraction, health checks, or indeed, for the pleasure of the animal, and for only one of these things do people get in an uproar.  PETA had nothing to say about the trainer who clearly was no stranger at all to the red rocket, but when the word 'pleasure' is used, suddenly it's an affront to all that is natural and holy.

Which is awfully ironic.  I imagine this dog would have enjoyed being massaged for pleasure more than for forced breeding any day of the week.  He might have even become a Twilight fan.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Scientists Still Clueless

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/two-animals-species-sex-zoophilia-monkey-deer-japanese-macaque-female-sika-interspecies-sexual-a7519706.html

Just a quick post to let you know I'm still alive. Apparently the first ever "consensual" intercourse between species has been documented, and the researchers looking into it are still clueless about how or why this could possibly happen. Now they're getting down to it being a natural reaction to mate deprivation in combination with estrus.

It makes one wonder when they'll finally decide to just talk to us if they want to understand us, and find that we aren't all oversexed, lonely abusers. Or maybe it's time we started talking to them.