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.

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.

Cambridge: Animals as Conscious as Humans

I'm about a month late to the show; summer is the season of the slowest transmission of academic information for reasons that are probably obvious, but:

"...the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates."

Link.

What else is there really to say but, "It's about damn time"?  This is less of a scientific breakthrough and more of a political one: the stuff brought up in this conference has been basic knowledge for quite a long time.  That's a good thing: it means that it's actually going to get around to public knowledge rather than get holed up in some journal somewhere that no layman will ever hear of let alone read - especially since Stephen Hawking attended the signing, and it was also featured on 60 Minutes.

So, it's a little early now, but what can we expect to get from this?  First of all, probably a slower rate of advancement in neuroscience and medicine in general.  This sounds like a bad thing, and it may be, but it will be as a result of more stringent regulations on animal testing.

Then again, it may also more strongly suggest that animal testing is more valid, meaning you will get the same level of advancement for fewer tests.  Wherever you go there are always people saying that you can't go off of just a few animal trials because animals aren't the same as humans.  This is obviously still true, but when it comes to psych and some areas of neurosci that don't explicitly involve the neocortex, we may start being able to get more for less.

Most importantly, we'll get public acknowledgment of the worth of animals as individuals.  It's unfortunate how many people you can come across today who don't believe animals really have thoughts and feelings; these tend to be people who either were never close at all to their pets or didn't have pets at all, in my experience, which is a growing percentage of the population with continued urbanization.

As I noted before, this conference is geared primarily as a social and philosophical change rather than a scientific one, so this, I think, is where we'll start to see the most change.  It will come slowly, and perhaps I'm jumping the gun just a little here, but I would hazard that the global and inevitably successful anti-anthrocentrist movement has already begun.  As it progresses, we'll see not only changes in the way people see animals, but the way we see the natural world at large: suddenly our non-human neighbors become far more important, and conservation becomes an issue.  Environmental decline could slow as a result.  Social things too, of course: with the acknowledgment of animal consciousness, animal intelligence is only a couple steps away, and with that the rights of zoophiles.

All this from one conference?  No.  But it's a start.  I like to be optimistic, because in my experience if you publicly assume that something is going to happen, people around you believe so as well and change their behaviour accordingly, so as far as I'm concerned this is just a big step towards all of these big transformations of society and academia.  Spread the word; save the world.

I don't know when my next post will be, but the moral of the story is that if you have some news or something otherwise fascinating for me to write about, I will drop everything to do so.  Good work, "lovingpegasister".

Fixing Your Pets

This is a sticky topic with me, and one I have had to deal with recently, so I’m going to rant on it.  First of all, I do not believe in neutering your male or your female cats and dogs.  To a lot of people (see: just about everyone), this is a ludicrous thing to believe, partially because, like so many things, everyone does it, so it must be right.  However, there are arguments out there for neutering your animals.  In this article, I plan on addressing them, debunking them, and raising my own against them.

“It’s cruel to let your pet go through sex cycles.”

I find this patently silly simply because letting a universal and natural thing occur cannot by definition be cruel.  Even things that are, unlike sexual arousal, most certainly unpleasant, such as sadness, should be a part of an animal’s life.  At face value, we might say life would be better without sadness, but sadness fills a very important role in our lives as do all emotions – in this case, encouraging the strengthening of social relationships.

Most people who give this argument are talking about female cats.  They hear them yowling and see them rolling around the floor whilst in heat and think the poor kitty is in some sort of pain.  This is not so; they are merely trying to attract attention in the most overt way they can.  I know it’s a logical fallacy, but in this case it does ring true that if it’s natural, it’s probably good for you.  We believe ‘natural’ to be good when it comes to multivitamins and hair products, and even our pet food; why do we believe that ‘natural’ is bad for our animal’s body?

“It’s annoying!”

Once again, typically talking about females in heat.  This argument truly is cruel, as it implies that we should gladly subject an animal to a life-altering surgery simply because we find them obnoxious as they are now.  We had the same mentality when we used to give difficult mental in-patients frontal lobotomies.  While neutering is not as extreme, it is stressful for the animal and does alter them significantly both physically and psychologically, and to me, “I hate how much noise she makes” is not a good enough excuse for that.

There are ways to relieve your female animal, and I don’t just mean icky bedroom-type stuff that people like me do.  There are tutorials out there for cleanly doing so and also to control without the use of surgery or medications the frequency of heats.  And for those of you who are looking to get on your grumpy queen’s good side, this sort of relief is for them a lot like your giving them food: it’s a very quick way to get them to like you even more than they already do – which dropping them off at the veterinarian certainly will not.

“They pee where they shouldn’t.”

This can be trained out of an animal with relative ease, and neutering does not guarantee that it will cease.  I know that both male cats I have had that were neutered still squirted everywhere whenever they got a whiff of a newcomer, until I scared the tar out of them while they were in the act enough times that they got the picture.  Animals aren’t stupid, and like us and our inwardly driven habits, they can change much of their behaviour through… well, I’m not sure if stomping and yelling can be called therapy, but something like that.

“Isn’t it healthier to neuter my pet?”

Not really.  There are certain advantages, the obvious one being that your pet will not get cancer of the gonads and need to have them… uh… removed.  They will also be less susceptible to some diseases, poisoning, and fights with other animals, because they will be less active and roam less – and people who neuter their pets also tend to have indoor animals; there has yet to be a study that I have read that does not account for this fact.  The obvious solution is to keep an eye on your pet, and keep them indoors or to a restricted area, which you should be doing anyway since this is the law in many areas.  There is a significantly lower chance for a spayed female to develop breast cancer, and even then only if she is spayed before her first heat, but that is the only health benefit directly related to neutering that I have read.

On the other hand, pets who are neutered are at greater risk for obesity, and all the associated complications, even if they are allowed outdoors, simply because of that lack of activity.  They are also prone to bone problems, because sex hormones (both testosterone and estrogen) are crucial to bone development and upkeep.  Neutered animals are more prone to urinary problems, and although generalizable statements are difficult to make, they will also be more susceptible to certain infections and diseases due to the effect sex hormones, particularly estrogen, have on the immune system.  Neutered animals of both sexes, particularly dogs, are also more susceptible to cardiac tumours, cognitive decline, and hair loss.  Spayed females are at greater risk for hypothyroidism.  Castrated males are at greater risk for prostate cancer.

This would also be a good time to talk about your animal’s personality.  They lose a lot of that idiomatic flair that made them special, and that lovable energy.  People often neuter their pets and, as the last vestiges of their natural hormonal balance fade off, erroneously think their pet is ‘growing out of it’.  The fact that everyone neuters their animals nowadays makes this a difficult assumption to overcome.  Cats can be kittens, and dogs can be puppies if you leave them to be who they naturally are.

“The cat/dog population is already out of control; I don’t want to accidentally increase it.”

This is probably the best argument for neutering your pet.  If this is your only, or at least your chief motive to neuter your pet, there is an alternative option, and that is tubal ligation for females, or a vasectomy for males.  This does not impact the benefits of sex hormones on the animal, but it does prevent them from contributing to the gene pool.  It is also less dangerous; although neutering is quite easy and is the one operation that all vets are damn good at because they do it so often, there is still risk of infection or complication, especially when it comes to spaying (females).  This procedure involves the complete removal of the entire reproductive system.  It is not a minor surgery.

These are the main arguments that I can recall that I have heard for neutering.  If you find any more (or have any more), please put them in the comments or else email me them, and I will attempt to address them.  Hopefully, though, I have gone at least some way in convincing you with this short article.

War Horse

Out from the world of holidays and back in to the world of real life and, of course, blogging.  I apologize for the copypaste filler, but that song always cracks me up, and I couldn't resist.  But you want to hear about my holidays!  Of course you do.  Well, beyond spending time with family, and wishing I wasn’t spending time with family, and spending altogether not enough time with love, I got around to watching a film.  The film was War Horse, and because of its heartfelt content and philosophical merit that is relevant to this blog, I am going to do a second film review.

Actually, it’s not really a review, but an analysis, so for those who haven’t seen the film, plan on seeing the film, and look forward to seeing the film without having me tell you everything that happens in the film, skip this post for your sake.  Don’t worry, there will be a new one next week.

For those who enjoyed the film just fine without imagining the extent to which its iconic relationship might go… don’t you worry either; I won’t make it creepy.  For me, the relationship between Joey the horse and Albert the boy and young man was only a small part of the film: the initial development and the goal, giving it a beautiful circularity.  I’m not much of a horse fan – they always made me nervous as a child and I never learned to ride beyond the basics – but nevertheless I found the one-to-one relationship portrayed in the beginning of the film between the titular character and his first owner to have gorgeosity in equality that isn’t often portrayed in film.  Albert leads the way, figuratively, but unlike any other horse master he waits for Joey to follow.  He doesn’t command, he suggests, and what’s more he provides an example, bringing himself completely to the level of the horse even to the point of wearing a yoke.  It’s interesting to note that this ultimate action of leveling saves Joey’s life later in the film.  In short, this relationship, the film’s place of growth and eventually its paradise, is also what I feel to be the ideal in the real world: equality in day-to-day life between humans and animals, and genuine caring between the two.

Far from being some New Age notion, though, or a PETA-esque proclamation that animals are no different from humans, the film goes on to show that it is possible to have this love and equality, or at least to understand and value it, even in the inherently negative context of war, which Joey is thrown into as the steed of one Captain Nicholls.  The man dies; the horse lives on to be found in the clutches of other men who, unlike the two he has been close with, regard him as without value.  Only two German boys – boys that, although being in the forces, value the war as little as their superiors value Joey – save him by suggesting he may be put to work behind the lines, before escaping with him and a second steed.  Once again, men die, but Joey survives.  It isn’t that they died for him, but that he was rescued by them but was unable to protect them, both in the case of the captain and that of the traitors.  It sets a depressing tone for the future.

This future is realized in a sickly French girl, who takes a great shine to both the horses.  On her birthday, against the preference of her grandfather, she is allowed to ride Joey – and unfortunately in doing so winds up in the middle of a German camp.  This time, the horses are taken, and as though in determination to prevent what had happened to their last two riders, they go without a struggle as the girl returns to her grandfather. 

The message of caring human-animal relationships, though, wouldn’t be as strong without its inverse: a challenge brought about as the horses are set to haul artillery, without care for their health beyond that they continue to pull, and that their corpses don’t impede the others after they are shot once they’re no longer useful.  It is here that Joey’s life is most perilous, and it is also here in the film where Albert is reintroduced as a nervous combatant – for both, the farm at which they had grown together has become a lost heaven.  This peril is also amplified at roughly the same time for both: Joey’s equine companion up until this point is killed upon collapsing in pulling the artillery, while Albert is temporarily blinded by a gas attack.  The general image is of fear, and a desire to return, embodied in Joey’s fleeing through no-man’s land, only to be caught in the barbed wire littering it.

This is the climax, and is highly symbolic: the horse is caught in a divide, an intentional divide between two sides that fight and believe themselves intrinsically different despite the similarities we have been shown in the film, having been privy to the lives of both the English and the Germans.  We have been shown another pointless and terrible divide, however: the divide between animals and humans, and we have been shown that the ideal for this as well is for the divide to be removed.  And, lo and behold, at this very time in the film, both divides are removed at once, in more than one way: the wires are cut, weakening the divide between both sides of the war, and they are cut by the combined activity of an Englishman and a German.  Naturally, Joey is then free and is soon reunited with his likewise-injured friend.  Oh, and if you didn't quite catch it the first time, the war ends.

This is a very powerful metaphor, I feel, that can be interpreted in many different fashions depending on whether your focus is upon the morality of war or upon animal-human relations, but it always leads to the same: the divisions in question are foolish and destructive, and only in the interest of a happy ending is the destruction reversed, albeit doubtless not without scars.  It’s this, and its believability on the parts of all characters, whether good or antagonistic, that I feel makes the film such a phenomenal one, and though it was released some time ago and I’m sure its time in the theatres is nearly done, I hope that it does well, because these messages are clear even without a great deal of thought on the part of the audience.  Media changes minds.

Animals Over History, and a Human Imperative

We love our animals.  I don’t just mean we - love our animals, I mean we as humans often enjoy caring for them and taking their company.  But what do we actually think of our furrier companions?  When we say we “have a pet”, is that more like how one has a child, or a lawn mower, or an iPod?  And has it always been that way?  Most importantly: should it?

The answers to these sorts of questions will change depending on the person giving them, of course.  Some people view their animals as tools, some as sources of entertainment.  Others fawn over them, and a few write blogs about them.  But the ways in which we understand them, and thus the ways in which we treat them, has had a marked trend through history.

I believe it’s safe to say that today, we as a species view animals as inferior devices.  Fewer and fewer people are living with animals as we become more urban, and perhaps as animals (perhaps humans included) become less and less important or interesting in our day to day life.  The ratio is a little higher than the answers to a casual question at a lecture I mentioned last article – about 63% of Americans have pets – but this figure is steadily decreasing, and by and large we are becoming more detached from other species.

More importantly, the length to which we consider the thoughts and feelings of non-humans is a pale figure.  Many individuals – otherwise very bright individuals – believe that animals have a stunted or even nonexistent emotional capacity.  There are individuals who believe (somehow?) that animals are incapable of learning, and operate nearly entirely on instinct.  And I don’t think it’s stretching it to say that majority opinion is that humans are the only creatures capable of love.

What is the reason behind this?  Why do we think this way?  Perhaps it is from personal experience, or more specifically a lack thereof, with the dwindling number of people who have pets, and the even smaller number of individuals who care enough to closely observe their behaviour.  But one would think that a lack of experience would create ambivalence, or at least just as many individuals believing in their inexperience in an emotional and thoughtful animal.

This trend towards belief in a more mechanical animal, one might argue, began with the Scientific Revolution – more specifically, perhaps, with one René Descartes, who believed, as he formulated his ideas on mind, and body-soul dualism, that animals lack a soul, and thus lacked a mind.  He quite literally viewed them as machines, going so far as to say that they are incapable of feeling pain, and exercised this belief in various horrific ways.

But where did this frightful concept come from?  Descartes was, along with being a scientist, a Roman Catholic, and his idea of the soul that he is so famous for considering is from Christianity – which, among other things, states plainly that humanity is the only species in possession of a soul.  Prior to Descartes, this simply meant that all dogs do not in fact go to heaven, but as René began to equate the mind with the soul, the step towards complete anthropocentrism became obvious.  This thinking, I believe, is the origin of our modern devaluing of other creatures, and starting in the mid-twentieth century, the majority of experimentation leading to medical or pharmaceutical breakthroughs is on animals.

Before Descartes, and most certainly prior to the later Victorian Age (in which Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty was published: a highly successful piece of animal fiction that, as animal fiction generally did up until and including that time, targeted adults), animals were viewed differently.  While individuals still owned such creatures as cattle, animals who can generally be ascribed a greater life expectancy, such as dogs, cats, and horses, were not owned in the same sense as one owns a cow – the sense of a tool, or a piece of currency (the word for “wealth” was the same word as the one for “cattle” in Old Norse, an ancestor of English).  Instead, they were more commonly viewed as companions or partners, and fiction commonly utilized them as having minds equivalent to most humans (and superior to some).  Horses and dogs were indeed bought and sold, but so were humans, and it was considered improper to mistreat either one.  Wild animals were ascribed a great deal of respect; it wasn’t until after our friend Descartes that such practices as recreational fox hunts were established.

In short, there was a great deal of what we would today call anthropomorphization, which today we feel is a bad thing.  But is it?  Certainly, it is detrimental to ascribe all humanness to other animals: For instance, it’s foolish now to think, as people of the tenth century AD did, that animals have their own languages equivalent to our own, and moreover we should not pretend that they see and hear the same way we do, and that they miss the same smells; this ascription remains today perhaps the biggest crime against animal intellect.  However, does the fact that they sense the world and interact with it in ways different from our own, that cannot be immediately noticed by us without a great deal of experience and sometimes even extrapolation, that they have a comparatively stunted set of thoughts and feelings, or even none at all?

For those reading, and perhaps wondering now about just what (and how much) is going on inside the head of your household cat or dog, consider something of a happy medium: animals cannot be said to have language, so we might infer that their thought is of a different breed than what we are used to, and may follow a different logical set, like that in a dream: not necessarily inferior (I would off-handedly suggest that it is capable of less complex interactions, but may formulate them more efficiently; I won’t get into it here), but sometimes difficult to understand from a humanistic perspective.  More importantly, the majority of animals don’t care a whole lot about their eyesight, and rely much more greatly on their senses of smell, touch (whiskers) and hearing; this means that, while they miss some things that we think are obvious, they also sense a lot of things that we would never be able to.  This is also the reason that, when you are feeling sad or ill, an animal you are close to will often seem to sense it, even from a distance; and additionally, the reason your animal does “stupid” things, or appears unpredictable.

So, for the sake not only of the animals you live with, but also that of your own enlightenment and understanding, consider that there are ways of thinking, perceiving and feeling that are radically different from your own, and that their exemplification in an individual does not equate to a lack of thought, perception and emotion.  Take time to observe your animals.  When your dog goes “apeshit”, consider things from her perspective as best you can.  Make connections from recent circumstances to her actions.  When your cat attacks you for apparently no reason, don’t immediately jump to the solution that he is simply a moron.  I’ve lived with animals all my life and I can say that there is always a reason, just like there is with us, only different.  When you begin to unravel the behaviours of certain species you become familiar with, you can start to discover how they think – and then, how they feel.  And that’s something that I, as a psychologist and an animal lover, believe is not merely worthwhile, but rather a human imperative.

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Why NOT Zoophilia?

There has never, in history, been a civilization that has normatively or officially approved of overtly romantic or sexual interactions between humans and animals.  There have been times where it simply wasn’t punished, or was practiced for less-than-everyday reasons, such as ritual – certain practices involving kings and horses in certain European cultures during the Bronze Age come to mind – but it was never normal, and never considered a viable romantic orientation; in above example, the horse was afterwards devoured.  Why is this?  Extending this question, why today do we have, if anything, only an even more negative attitude towards zoophilia?

This seems like a silly question to most: when asked to rationalize an attitude towards this question, the first reaction tends to come from the gut, along with their breakfast.  Although we’re more tolerant today of that woman who just likes her cats a lot, bestiality at least is still simply gross.  But grossness, in a serious discussion, is not enough to warrant arresting or even killing someone; at least it’s not today.  Nor, for most – at least in the developed world – is religion. (And besides, the Bible only condemns bestiality twice: once in Exodus, once in Leviticus, which are two books often hummed and hawed over, and not once is it called a sin.)

People will cite health reasons too: that one can catch all manner of illnesses and infections from animals.  However, this is provably false: as I discuss briefly in my last post, the number of zoonoses – diseases that can be transferred from animal to human – are extremely small in comparison to the number of STIs that can be transmitted between humans.  As for infection, so long as an animal is well-cared-for, there is little risk.  Most infections you read about on the “lol” section of your favourite news site arise when someone sneaks onto farmland to bang X ungulate, which obviously isn’t going to be as sanitary from an anthropocentric viewpoint as an animal kept with people.  And of course, the same individuals support freedom for practices that are inherently self-destructive, such as drinking, smoking, or the use of light drugs such as cannabis.

The debate about bestiality typically boils down to animal rights: the idea that animals cannot consent.  This argument, I find, is indicative of an individual who has spent little time with animals in their life.  Indeed, I attended a lecture a few weeks ago in which the lecturer asked a room of two hundred or so people how many of them had pets.  Maybe ten percent raised their hands.  When he asked off-handedly how many felt attached to their pets, only half of that figure did.  The assumption, then, that someone who believes that animals are so unthinking and unfeeling that they are not even able to articulate a very basic desire actually has no experience to back this reasoning seems to be a fairly solid one; indeed, when I end up in a debate with such an individual, I can usually flabbergast them by showing them some random video of an animal in heat.  I beg your pardon, sir, but does your girlfriend scream and brandish her genitalia in front of you when she wants something?  Oh, but it’s not verbal consent, therefore it’s not legal.  Well, does your significant other ever even ask you if you want to have sex, or does it just happen – clothes start falling off, as it were – because it’s a natural thing to do?

This debate and the health debate are both hypocritical veils for that original, gut-driven objection.  So we’re still left with this original question: why, when so many other taboos based on nothing but faith and proximity discomfort have been abolished, is zoophilia still illegal in most parts of the world, and is despised by the majority of the population in every nation?  I believe the reason is two-part: adherence to old values, which is a hallmark of culture itself and has retarded such progressive thought, such as gender equality and religious tolerance, from manifesting; and our view of animals in general.  We, as modern humans, see animals at once as lovable, animated creatures, and as inferiors to be exploited by tools.  Hospitals employ cats and dogs to visit their patients because, as a species, we adore them, while at once administering to the same patients medications that were discovered only through cruel experimentation on, yes, cats and dogs.

What does this mean?  Simply, our animals are objects: we may dispose of them, so long as we don’t have to see it happen.  We don’t have to learn about them, because there are more important things to be attending to that involve us.  They are, in short, slaves, only without the non-crazy emancipation movements, so those who do become attached to them in some of the ways we generally reserve only for humans are treated as though they are willingly lowering themselves to the level of the slave – something we have always found distressing.  Couple this, of course, with the foreignness of non-human anatomies – as foreignness almost always produces an instinctual withdrawal – and you have a great deal of distress regarding the situation of the zoophile.

From this, we can glean a solution: although we cannot eliminate resistance to social or cultural change – nor, I believe, should we, for too much change at once can be harmful – we can work towards reconstructing the bond between humans and other animals, showing people that, apart from our ability to speak and produce culture, there is very little difference between ourselves and other species.  Following this is perhaps the more difficult imperative: we, as zoophiles, must come out in force, so that the concept of a human who desires romantic relationships with non-humans is not so bizarre to the common folk.  I believe that it is actually up to us to achieve both of these goals: with the failure of such movements as PETA and the ALF on account of being batshit insane, we are the best individuals for the job to show the world just what animals are capable of, and how similar we truly are.  Only once this is accomplished will our world take that one giant step closer towards rationality and equality, and will we be allowed to live without fear.