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.

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.

Zoophilia and Pedophilia

This is another topic I touched on in another post, a long time ago, but given the amount of discussion I've had on it recently I feel I ought to talk more about it.

Almost invariably, like some sort of sexual Godwin's Law, when debating with someone about the morality of zoosexuality my opponent will claim that zooerasty (or "be(a)stiality" as it is far more often termed, which as far as I'm concerned is like calling anal sex "assrape") is just the same as pederasty because animals, like children, have no concept of sex and are too uneducated to appropriately respond to it.

There are many arguments against this.  Most shouldn't be necessary: any ethologist, comparative psychologist, or animal breeder will know from study or observation that animals frequently proposition others for sex, have sex, react favourably towards sex, and eventually come back again for more sex.  Sex can even be used as a reward stimulus in Pavlovian conditioning.  Humans too.  And anyone with any knowledge of natural selection would surmise that if every animal on the planet apart from humans was not capable of showing sexual readiness, propositioning others for sex, and enjoying sex, then biodiversity would be very slim indeed.  And this enjoyment of sex is definitely not limited to same-species intercourse.

But let's assume correctly that these assertions are not enough for many people, who believe that the reason children should not have sex with adults, and therefore the reason animals should not have sex with humans, is because children do not have the mental capacity to understand it.  This is true, but what these individuals do not realize is that this truth does not extend to mature animals, and that this fact is readily observable.  The easiest way to find the onset of sexual interest is to examine sex hormone levels.  These hormones are necessary not just directly to the sex drive but also to the development of various somatic and neurological structures.  We can actually see a child's brain readying itself for sexual intercourse, and this does not take place until puberty.  The same goes for any mammal, and the chemicals (mainly estrogen and testosterone) and brain structures (especially the hypothalamus and other subcortical structures in the forebrain, such as the pituitary gland, nucleus accumbens, and caudate nucleus) involved are universal, with only slight changes to relevant structures and none suggesting any human exceptionalism.



There have been organizations of pedophiles who have suggested otherwise.  Perhaps most famous is the Party for Neighbourly Love, Freedom, and Diversity (Partij voor Naastenliefde, Vrijheid en Diversiteit) in the Netherlands, in existence from 2006-2010.  It advocated initially for a drastic reduction of age-of-consent and eventually its elimination, and it and other organizations have released pamphlets, for adults and children, with the suggestion that pre-pubescent youth can desire and even frequently proposition adults for sex.  Is this any different from what zoosexuals say about animals?

I would naturally argue that it is.  Active pedophiles tend to view entirely innocuous gestures as sexual proposition: an eight-year-old girl does a headstand and inadvertently shows her panties, or a six-year-old boy urinates at a campground, unaware or uncaring of his visibility.  Children themselves, of course, don't respond sexually when they see one another's undergarments, and even were adults to perform them, these gestures would never be recognized as sexual overtures.  The assumption would then have to be that not only are children capable of making such overtures, but have a far more complex social and sexual mind than do their post-pubescent counterparts that belies the fact that they may not get why peeing in public should be embarrassing.

It is sometimes suggested that prepubescent children masturbate or even engage in sexual conduct with one another, but this is a misrepresentation: while children may touch themselves, or touch one another in what is called "sex play" by developmental psychologists, these never result in orgasm, nor do they ever result in consistent sexual attention.  It is best regarded as exploratory, in the same fashion that a seven-year-old child who plays around with the terminal of a Linux box is not intending to learn to superdo his way into becoming a hacking sensation.  He's just curious about what's going on.

Animals are entirely different: the signals they give off, whether they be humping, displaying of genitalia, or other relevant actions, are unmistakably sexual in nature and could not conceivably be perceived to mean anything else.  As expected, animals respond sexually to one another when presented with these signals.  And unlike children, and like adult humans, they seem to benefit from consensual sexual intercourse physically and psychologically, whether their partner is of their own species or not.  It should be noted that there are many long-term physical and psychological consequences for victims of child sex abuse; indeed, the majority of individuals diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are victims of child sex abuse.

Finally, there is the question of authority.  This, I think, is best answered with observation and common sense: while a child, even if he or she really does not want to do something, such as going to school, washing the dishes, or eating their broccoli, they will usually do so when told to by an adult, especially one with authority, such as a parent or a teacher.  This is because we as humans have a very developed social intelligence; we have language, we have culture as a result, and we have very complex social norms that often even supercede basic needs and conditioning: that child will eat his broccoli even if it makes him vomit later, because his mother told him to.

Anyone with an animal, on the other hand, even an animal traditionally regarded as very loyal, like a dog, will know that there are many things they will simply not do without a fight no matter how much they seem to dote on you otherwise.  Whether it be going to the vet, going outside when it's cold out, or swallowing a pill, their resistance is clear even if they eventually give in.  With animals such as cats or horses, this resistance is even more clear, and more likely to result in injury to your person.  While there may be a social hierarchy in the mind of your animal, then, the importance of that power you have over them is not nearly as important as their basic needs to not be ill, not be cold, or indeed, not be used or abused sexually.  Any animal, particularly a female, will make it incredibly clear that she is not in the mood for sexual intercourse, regardless of how much she loves you: as an adult, she knows what it is, and knows that now is not the time, and that knowledge is more important than any thought that you might take away her walk privileges.

Which brings up the notion that an animal will jump to these conclusions in the first place: we don't tend to punish our animals for resisting when we want them to go outside, or take a pill.  We just make them go outside, or take the pill.  This is of course different for children: "If you don't stop whining and eat your greens, you won't have TV for a week," isn't that uncommon of a statement.  Children are trained early on to do everything their parents, and other authority figures, want, for fear of punishment.  We are far more lenient on our animals, so why should an animal ever even imagine that should they not consent to sex with us that something bad will happen?  If anything, this is much more likely to happen with our (adult!) human partners, who have been educated socially to believe that sex is necessary for a stable relationship.  To imagine that animals have any such concept is, frankly, to afford them some very hefty intuition about how our modern human culture is organized.  This is not to say that we do not have some level of control over the lives of our animals, and therefore responsibility particularly to take care of them and to ensure they act appropriately in the public space, it is not to all the same extents as children with developing biology and views of the world.

That's the end of my argument.  This took a lot of time out of a day that maybe should have been focused on something that will be productive in my career or for my family, given the time of year (Happy Holidays, zetas & friends!) but given the discussion that has been happening recently, I really felt I needed to update the blog again.

I would just like to finish on one note: despite the abuse and lunacy propagated by the most visible of pedophiles, I believe the average pedophile is someone to be pitied.  The PNVD actually advocated for a ban of zooerasty in the Netherlands, interestingly enough, all the while proclaiming that they should be allowed to have sex with prepubescent children; however, the large majority of pedophiles are not only fully aware that pederasty is grievous abuse, but are indeed terrified and often traumatized by the idea that they may someday lose control and be perpetrators of such abuse.  They have nowhere to turn in our current social system, and even mental health professionals that are willing and capable of assisting pedophiles are few and far between.  So while it has nothing at all to do with zoosexuality, I would like to appeal to the readers of this blog to empathize more with those sad individuals who are cursed with a sexual attraction to prepubescent youth.  It is only through this empathy, and the resulting support, that these individuals can be helped, and thus child sex abuse prevented for the future.  Thank you.

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".

The Mish Posish

This post will contain some naughty pictures of animals.  It's nothing worse than you would see on a PG-rated production on the Discovery Channel, but if you're particularly sensitive on account of being on this blog, I totally understand.  If it makes you feel better, I find primates icky.

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There's something I heard, again, a while ago that I kind of want to talk about now.  The first time I heard it, it was from a primatologist, and this statement is part of the reason I sometimes have difficulties with primatologists.  I have also seen it quoted online, though, in the years since bonobos became the animal of the day. (Now it's the honey badger.) The statement is, roughly, this: Bonobos are more sexually/interpersonally evolved than other animals on account of the fact that they have sex while facing each other.

Bonobos have only been identified as a species for a little over half a century or so, depending on who you ask.  They have only been intensely researched for a few decades.  Zoologists and comparative psychologists were of course astounded by the unique behaviour of the species: in contrast to their close chimpanzee relatives, they are quite nonviolent, females hold a lot of power, and they have lots and lots of crazy sex.  They have sex for many reasons: they have sex to calm everyone down, to build relations, or even to exchange favors.  They have sex with the opposite sex; they have sex with the same sex.  They have sex with their juveniles.  And, what was for some reason astonishing to researchers, they have sex in the missionary position.

The reason given was that because they are having intercourse face-on, it must add to the idea that sex in bonobos, like in humans and unlike in nearly every other animal, must play a very important social role and may even suggest a loving context.  After all, the face is the main outlet of emotion in primates, and we are a highly visual taxonomic order.  I say they are fascinated, "for some reason," though, because of this

this

and even this

Ignoring the fact that I probably have far too many pictures of lions at quick access, most ethologists would tell you that there isn't a whole lot going on between a male and female lion when they're doing their thing up to fifteen times a day.  Lions are also not terribly visual: they rely mostly on smell, like most mammals.  So what exactly is the deal here?

Well, as for why animals do it... we're not entirely sure.  Quite possibly, as it is with humans and weird positions, it's just a cool thing to do.  As for why some don't, though, or don't that often, it comes down to anatomy: if you've ever looked at a dog on his or her back, they're not quite as, erm, accessible as is a human on his or her back.  Any effort to make them more so would likely lead to at least some discomfort, particularly if you are a quadruped, with a quadrupedal spinal structure: you would need to have your entire body on top, pressing all the limbs that normally want to stick up back down, and things get way more complicated than is generally worth it.  In addition, a female is more prone on her back, and unable to escape.  A little more controversial, perhaps, but when you consider that rape seems much more common among apes, including humans, than quadrupeds, it may be that the missionary position developed to keep females safe and males "productive" among those species were rape is more frequent.

In any case, some primates in particular seem to have evolved towards the missionary position.  The spines of Old World apes are more erect.  Our limbs are very flexible.  Apart from humans, there is no animal that better exemplifies these crucial qualities than the bonobo.

On a side-note, and as an excuse for one more picture, have you ever wondered why human women have much larger breasts for their size than those of any other mammal?  It's not because of milk production: breast size has no impact on that.  It's not a conspiracy orchestrated by Playboy, either. (Or is it?) It's because they make a pretty great cushion in the missionary position, just as big butts do so in "doggy-style". (see Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, 1967) And bonobos look to be heading in that direction.

So, is there something special about the missionary position?  Quite honestly, not one bit.  It's a side-effect of the anatomy that evolution has given us, and bonobos just happen to be on a similar pathway.  Sorry, bonobo fans.

Zoo Rights

I look around that freaky part of the internet that is filled with zoosexuals and I see a whole lot of two things: firstly, the idiots/rapists/holy-shit-crazy people that I've already torn into quite enough for one month; secondly, people who have quietly accepted who they are but are saddened by the social stigma and fear they know they must live with until they die.  I recently had a chat with one such individual, and though this week I was going to do a quick silly post, that will be put on the back-burner so that I can whisper into the ears of all the rest of you dejected zoos.  I'm going to tell you why we are the next sex rights revolution.

This isn't because of crap like COMING SOON or predictions by Bill O'Reilly, although we should certainly be inspired by the success of the LGBT and other sex rights movements.  It's because, quite simply, we are right.

And people are starting to know that we're right: today, we in the western world are encouraged to question absolutely everything.  It started with creationism, branched off into religion as a whole, later into ethnocentrism and sexism, and finally into sex: we've questioned whether it really is wrong for a woman to be lustful and kinky, or for a man to love another man, and we are so used to questioning such things by now that we are beginning to be able to question whether it really is wrong for a human to fall in love with an animal, and to express that love physically.  If you don't believe me, check my last blog post, in which Peter Singer, who is among other things a supporter of zoo rights, was given a very prestigious award by the nation of Australia.

And it only takes a quick trip around the smarter places of the internet, and a good head on your shoulders yourself so that you can support a brief argument (or links to this blog ;) ) to find that when people are made to think about these things, the forward-thinking of them, which are a surprising amount, are quick to reach the conclusion that zoophilic intercourse is no more wrong than anything they might consider doing themselves.  The days in which we could fall back to religious arguments and knee-jerk reactions and have it work in science and politics are quickly leaving us here in the first world.

We have a leg-up, too, on the LGBT movement as it first started: it wasn't until 1974, after a lot of pressure from rights groups, that homosexuality was no longer regarded by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder.  With the release of the DSM IV in 1994, though, zoophilia (as it is called there) and other paraphilias (barring some exceptions) are only regarded as mental disorders if they cause significant distress or inhibition of daily functioning to the individual.  As such, few zoos, despite their fear of social stigma, fit this disorder, and zoophilia is a rare diagnosis.  The most that could be done is to have the name changed to fit the nomenclature we have established, and to have it include an addition to make it similar to the diagnosis of Sadism, in that it may also be considered pathological if it includes harm to another.  At the moment, zoophilia is only listed in Paraphilias Not Otherwise Specified.  The Word Health Association's ICD-10 has a similar thing going on, so the insanity argument is already null and void.

So what needs to be done for this push for acceptance?  It will of course be difficult and take a long time: although zooerasty is legal in many places, it is not widely accepted anywhere.  It therefore is not legislation that we need to be pushing for, but for a change in people's  collective mindset.  It involves getting allies: people who sympathize with and understand us, even if they are not zoophilic themselves.  If you're zoo, it involves coming out, where it is safe; at the moment, the only people who often come out are the ones you don't want to be associated with: these people who don't have the brains to fear society.  We need to mediate that fear, though, even if it's only on the internet, and get out and talk to people about our orientation.  Not getting up in people's faces, but should the topic come up, or should the opportunity to arise, we must become educators.  We must be well-armed with information and we must not back down from a debate.  You have the resources.

I also feel that women who typically orient towards male animals are crucial here.  The big argument against us is that animals cannot possibly consent to human intercourse.  We of course have all sorts of data and observation that is contrary, but unfortunately, with few if any scientific studies on this and no terribly good way to show people, it remains the largest argument against us.  The sad fact is that most people are unable to read animal body language, and will invent scenarios in which what they expect to happen is happening.  You can't exactly show them pornography (and if you can, please don't), but what about your own life?  Most people have great difficulty with the idea of a female raping a male, and even more if the male is an animal, due to anatomical reasons.  It's important, though, when your arguments involve explicit content, that you know how to sound professional, and know when to stop creeping out your opponent.  Keep it short and to the point.

Here is what I think: Telling the world that, contrary to popular belief, zoos exist outside of the realms of animated comedies, they love their animals, and that the time has come for them to get the facts and seriously think about them - this will be the heart of any movement towards acceptance.  If you're zoo, so long as you're safe and smart, you need not be afraid any longer.  Your coming freedom from the hatred of society rests on you, and it rests on us working as one entity.  Here's to a liberated future.

The Furry Spectrum

This post is on a question that I get asked a lot.  Not via this blog, but other places, even places that don't know I am a zoo.  The question is: "are you a furry?" So yes, this post will be going a bit into what "furry" has come to mean, how it might or might not relate to zoophilia, and what this relation means in the grand scheme of things.

First of all, to answer that question is always tough for me; my response is generally along the lines of, "Kinda." I like furry art, certainly.  I'll confess I like furry porn.  I like animal fiction, and I've seen The Lion King many dozens of times.  Nala is a total hottie.  If this is all there is to furridom - a proclivity, a paraphilia, whatever - then most certainly I am, and I don't know a lot of zoos who aren't furries in this sense, particularly if we're counting "ferals" (that is, non-anthropomorphic anthropomorphic characters [?]).

On the other hand, I have little to nothing to do with the furry community, don't fursuit or anything like that, don't fancy myself anything other than a simple human, and quite honestly, a lot of self-professed furries would or do hate my guts.  To them, furry is more than just a weird interest in anthro and animal fiction, and I wouldn't count, particularly since people like me make them look bad.  And I can sympathize with this.

I'm not going to claim to be able to draw a line between these two parts of the furry fandom.  Whether I'm a furry or not will continue to be up to judges other than myself.  What I am going to do is draw a line between furry as a paraphilia and zoophilia.  Right after I erect these sandbags around my dwelling.

Alright, so, here's the thing: ever since Kinsey (1948) we have had the idea that sexuality, at least homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality, are not exclusive categories but are instead along a spectrum.  Later on, this became a series of two axes, which is now widely accepted:



For those who are unfamiliar, what this means is that everyone in the world fits somewhere on this graph: if they are further towards the top-right of the graph, they are more homosexual, and more highly sexual (towards hypersexuality) than the norm (on Y) and bisexuality (on X); if they are towards the bottom-left, they are more heterosexual and asexual (demisexual).  It should be noted that placement on this graph should be considered more diamond-like than square-like, as it is impossible to be 100% asexual and hetero/homosexual, and it is impossible to be 100% sexual (hypersexual) without being bisexual.

Now, it has been suggested, albeit sheepishly, that there may be more to this graph.  A hell of a lot more, to put it bluntly: there may be dozens more axes that can be placed here.  Unfortunately, there just isn't that much interest in research in this area, and no one cares to fund it, so you won't find it in your textbooks anytime soon.  These spectra range in all sorts of paraphilias: sadism-masochism, chronophilias (pedophilia to gerontophilia), anthrophilia-zoophilia, necrophilia-vitophilia(?), and whatever else.

You may think, after considering how generally well Kinsey has been accepted, especially given the time since the bulk of his research was conducted, that this would be a no-brainer.  There are, however, problems with these becoming widely accepted.  The first problem is that, as I mentioned, very little research has been done to support or fail to support such a paradigm shift, and there is no drive to conduct any.  Even pedophilia, which once might have got some interest from legal establishments, is actually quite well-controlled these days, and convicted pedos have some of the lowest recidivism rates of sex offenders.  The second problem is that the current versions of both the DSM and the ICD, which are the two manuals used most commonly by psychologists in making proper diagnoses, really like their categories, and all sexual disorders listed are categorical: that is, you can't be kind of a masochist, according to the APA and WHO.  Thirdly, society doesn't like these people; most of us don't like the idea that we all fit onto a pedophilic spectrum, a necrophilic spectrum, and whatever else.  It's not very scientific, but popular opinion has a much greater effect on the social sciences than we like to admit.

Now that I've finished that little rant, what exactly did it have to do with furries?  As the title implies, it is my personal belief that the furry fandom is on that theoretical anthrophilia-zoophilia spectrum, based on the fact that zoophilia is much more prevalent among furries (Evans, 2008), that I have met few if any zoos out of the many who are not at least mildly interested in some aspects of the furry fandom, and that if you brave it and actually look at furry communities and art, you can literally see that sliding scale.  This is not to say that all furries are secretly zoo.  In fact, it means quite the opposite: although a fair number of furries self-identify as zoos, if we consider that sexuality is incredibly difficult if not impossible to change, based on the fact that there is no 'cure' for homosexuality, pedophilia, etc., you can actually be quite sure that if someone is into furry porn but doesn't have any such interest in real animals, that they are not going to somehow progress into zoosexuality: they already have their place on the spectrum, and they are going to stay there, given that sexuality tends to crystallize by one's mid-twenties.  In short, if we accept that there is such a spectrum, we no longer feel the need to pigeon-hole people into one thing or another, or to make assumptions about someone fitting into some imaginary category simply because they're close.

If we extrapolate here to other sexualities, such as pedophilia, this can have some interesting implications, even affecting national legislation.  Lolicon - that is, children or childlike individuals portrayed sexually in drawings or animations - has come under a lot of fire in the last few years, with people being arrested for creating, distributing, or possessing it.  The idea is that people who view lolicon may eventually "graduate" to child sex abuse, either because they must already be pedophiles if they are viewing lolicon, or because the lolicon itself may make them become pedophilic.  If we consider that lolicon may be to pedophilia as furry may be to zoophilia, some research (already backed by the fact that there are a great many people who enjoy lolicon but are not pedophiles, evidenced by the success of certain television shows that would not exist if they only appealed to the ~3% of the population who are pedophilic) would end the equation of loli fans and pedophiles, and thus the fear and criminalization.

Something to think about.


By the way, over the last week, this blog hit 1,000 views.  Let's celebrate by getting 1,000 more, hm?  Whether you think this blog is insightful or disgusting, entertaining or insulting, don't be afraid to share it; no one will think less of you if you do. ;)

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!

Ancient Lifestyles and Animals

Let's talk a little more about history: this time, the more ancient sort, before we had the concept that one could 'own' an animal any more than one 'owns' a child.

We'll start with what we can see with our eyes: in every corner of the world, one can easily find ancient graves in which there are animals buried with humans.  Often times, they were killed or sacrificed so that they could follow their masters into the afterlife.  Incidentally, this is also not uncommon with spouses, particularly wives, although suicide was more common here.  In Ancient Egypt, of course, we have millions of mummified cats, ibises, dogs, birds, and whatever else you might think of either given as a sacrifice to a relevant deity (because if your deity is represented by an animal, it logically follows that you should kill it) or, again, buried along with a human to accompany them in the next world.  Even in less structured regions, though, from Europe to the Americas to Japan, people are buried with their cats and their dogs.

Animals also crept frequently into the beliefs and the resulting art of these people: whether we're looking at tipi paintings in Montana or carvings on Norwegian jewelry, more often than not an animal will feature, frequently as the central aspect.  Old gods are often associated with animals: Horus and the falcon, Inari and foxes, Athena and her owl, Tezcatlipoca and his jaguar counterpart, Thor and his goats.  People became associated with animals, too: although when many of us, especially in the west, think of spirit animals, we think of Native American cultures, identical concepts existed all across the world essentially until the introduction of monotheism: the old Norse concept of fylgja mirrors precisely the idea of a spirit animal, which follows a person throughout their lives, representing them as part of their soul, and protecting them while they dream, and families in Japan are still sometimes represented by a zoomorphic deity.

Why was this?  What was so important about animals that has been lost today?  What has attracted us to animals so much?  First of all, from the earliest times, we have relied on them.  Today, when we say someone relies on animals, we think of beasts of burden, or food sources; however, until we started living close together in more urban settings, we instead lived closely with our animals.  Central heating didn't exist, so in colder climates people would sleep alongside their dogs to keep them warm.  Pesticides weren't exactly widespread, and since humans had not yet dethroned rodents as the number one carrier of human disease, cats were very often seen as protecting agents, hunting down those things that would not only deprive them of food but may well be the death of them through contagion.

Secondly, the divide between the human and non-human environments was not so distinct as it is today.  People both feared and respected the dwellers of the wild, and that often came to admiration, as we see so often in the association between deities and animals that had not at that time been domesticated.  Even as tarantulas bit us, snakes terrified us, wolves hunted us and foxes broke into the hen-house, and we were literally pitted against them, we recognized their power and wished for it ourselves, to be associated with these animals as our gods were.  This changed eventually as our prime nemeses in life came not from the climate and other species but from our fellow human beings.

The question we're left with is what precisely this means for us.  As noted in a previous post, it means that we're no longer as in-tune with our animal friends; that we have relegated them to a lower point than we once did and assumed them to be inferior to us, often to the point of having no consciousness of their own.  It also means, though, that we have lost touch with some of our own nature: many mental disorders, including schizophrenia and certain personality disorders, have roughly equivalent prevalence rates across the globe, mood disorders and anxiety disorders are most common in urban areas, where there is very little contact between species and very high contact within ours.  There is also a great deal of research on the negative correlation between depression rates and whether or not someone has a pet. (Hint: dogs are the best, but cats are great too, especially if you're female.) Animals have also proved very valuable in people with disorders like autism, (from Animals In Translation) and have other health benefits.

I already talked a fair bit about this before, so I won't yammer on, but it's something to think about: should we be looking backwards in time for our social and moral salvation?  In regaining a more mutual relationship with animals and animal nature, will we have a better sense not only of the world around us, but of who we are, and become more stable as individuals and a society?  In some ways, is the old better than the new?  I've obviously already made up my mind, but I invite the reader to do some research on his own, looking past the image of a boy and his puppy and thinking about what exactly the partnership depicted in that image means for each of its constituents.

Cats & Dogs

One suggestion I got recently was to talk about the differences between cats and dogs as far as how they interact with each other, and how we as the humans in their lives interact with them.  Now, I think this individual wanted more me to discuss why cats rule and dogs drool, but I am going to take a different approach and examine the different ways in which each species is intelligent, and what those forms of intelligence mean to us.

I’ll start with dogs, then, because dogs are the species that we are most familiar with.  We, as humanity, have been befriending, working with, and selectively breeding dogs (from the grey wolf) for potentially as long as 30,000 years.  They are the first animal we domesticated, and the closest from day one.  Many scientists believe that humans actually nursed wolf cubs in the early years of domestication (from Grandin, T. 2005. Animals In Translation, an excellent book regarding comparative psychology and sociology).  It’s really little wonder, then, that today we feel much more at home with dog emotions, whether they have become more like us or we have become more like them.

The first and most obvious similarity is that we are both highly social animals, and rely very heavily on each other and social hierarchies.  Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not view their owners as “the alpha” – the pack mentality was bred out of them long ago, and we can see this today in the looseness and disorganization of feral dogs descended from domestic breeds.  They do, however, tend to put a great deal of stock in our happiness as individuals that they cherish, and retain a great deal of the social intelligence of their lupine ancestors.

Some of this intelligence is in their willingness to display how they are feeling in terms that we understand.  Dogs use facial expression well, including using their eyes.  Perhaps ironically, though, while they have little qualms about being embarrassed or making mistakes that impact them personally, they are more likely to inhibit themselves if they feel it necessary for the happiness or agreement of their enigmatic human companions.  I want to write a significantly creepier article on this later, but for now, this means simply that we as human beings must not fall into the hole created by the dog’s usual openness, and learn to read the more subdued cues they give, especially when they are uncomfortable.

I want to talk about cats more, because cats are far more mysterious – and they seem to like it this way, so I apologize to any cats whose veils I am preparing now to lift.  This desire to not show certain aspects of themselves, particularly anything that may make them appear weak, is pervasive across all breeds and species.  Perhaps the most famous and distressful example of this is that cats will seek complete solitude when they are dying.  Many cat owners, even those who have not lost a pet, are aware of this solace-seeking behaviour when kitty is ill; she will hide beneath or behind a piece of furniture and not come out for anything, even if she has had no prior experience with the veterinarian.  The etiology of this behaviour is pure instinct: a cat that is ill does not want to bare herself in the open as an easy target, and it is instinctive behaviour like this that often separates them from dogs.

Cats have been domesticated for a long time, but not nearly as long as dogs – only at most 9,500 years ago.  More importantly, we have never become partnered with cats – apart from, on occasion, using them as hunting partners, and even in combat, we have mostly just kept them around the grain bins and barns to keep away rodents.  We give them a place to stay and a nice source of bait for their food, and they keep that bait from being eaten by their food.  Only relatively recently, mostly since the late Bronze Age according to region, have we done much for keeping them as vanity pets and companions.  It’s therefore little wonder that they have much more for instinct, and we understand them far less than we do dogs.

However, one can learn cat.  While cats are still so well tied to their feral nature that they can even be expected to survive in the wild if abandoned, they do have some surprising social skills.  Although they are not nearly as tightly-knit as wolf packs, cats do form small social groups that are mainly for collective hunting and protection of queens and kittens.  Cats also have a huge range of communicative abilities, but there are two difficulties that we have in interpreting them.  Firstly, their base level is the way that dogs are when they are concerned with your reaction.  They keep their emotions tight to the belt in order to not appear weak, until they are needed.  In short, they are the opposite of dogs in their expressiveness.  Secondly, their ways of expressing themselves are much more foreign to humans: rather than using the direction of their gaze or ecstatic activity that are very easy for us to interpret, they use their ears, whiskers, tails, eyelids, and very minute tactile methods of communication that we simply are not very well-acquainted with.  Someday, perhaps, I will talk about these as well in more detail, but the simple fact is that unlike both dogs and humans, they put a great deal more stock in hearing, smell, and tactile information (ie whiskers) than they do sight, which leads to differing forms of communication.

Due to both the historical nature of our relationship, then, and our varying methods of communication that neither side has a great deal of ease in understanding, we tend to assume that cats are less amiable or even less intelligent than are dogs, which is not true and is merely a gross oversimplification of the differences in their respective psychologies.  The last number of posts I have made, I have left the reader with an overarching message to chew on until next week, and I believe this is a fine time for that: each animal genus and even species has its own idiosyncrasies, intelligences, and methods of communication, and all are deserving of respect and striving towards understanding, even (especially) if we need to leave behind our human mindset.

Genes, Animals Mating, and You

Some conversations I’ve been having recently have had me considering how sex is different across species… but also how it is the same.  This isn’t a new train of thought for me, but it is a new topic for this blog, and I imagine the handful of readers who have found this page without my linking them directly to it or finding it through some other zoophilic page have probably been waiting for me to talk about animal sex.

The conversation in particular I’m thinking of had to do with vorephilia, specifically why it exists in the first place, and I as a well-read academic and aficionado of kinks, paraphilias and orientations of all kinds immediately jumped up to posit the theory (not my own, but someone else’s) that vorephilia – a paraphilia related to biting and swallowing – is vestigial of the biting that many mammals engage in while mating to give themselves a certain dominant role.

But then I thought: why do they do it?  Anyone who watches enough Animal Planet knows that the species who are known for it – cats, canines, bears, etc. – don’t always do it, and the female (or male receiver) tends to be submissive enough anyway without all the biting.  Indeed, a lot of the time it’s not even real biting, but just sort of a threat that he could bite her if he felt like it.  It appears to have little to do with physical necessity and far more to do with the psychological, so we’re back to square one.

From there, I can take a different direction and philosophize a little about how mating activities have evolved – sex across the ages, if you will.  Sexual selection in larger, more modern mammals, such as the ones mentioned above, tends to be quite complex, with the female exerting a great deal of power over precisely with whom she will mate with, and the male more or less needing to put up with this because the female, while being a bit smaller, still has many sharp devices at her disposal that she can use to make sure that even if he impregnates her against her will, he may well die of infection or of the difficulties any injury may cause him.  The only large mammals in which rape can be called by any stretch common are primates, in which the females lack this natural weaponry, or, in the case of humans, any injury incurred by the male will not pose too much of a threat to his life.

This changes when we get to smaller, simpler creatures, such as most rodents, for many of whom mating success for the males depends on how quickly he can mount and disable the female.  Mating, then, tends to be quite violent, and often does result in injury – presumably, the number of young in a litter is considered to be genetically “worth it”.  In order to prevent herself from being injured, though, it is better for the female to be submissive, since, unlike the male, she cannot be mortally injured at the time of copulation and still have healthy young, thus passing on her genes.

We do not see these power-oriented sexual activities in non-mammals: in birds and reptiles, although the mating rituals can be extraordinarily complex, the action of mating itself is quite straight-forward.  In most fish, no real sexual interaction takes place at all; only in cephalopods do we see similar interactions to our rodent cousins, and in none do we see the symbolic gestures displayed by larger mammals.

It is from rodents that most other mammals have evolved from.  Is it possible, then, that this fixation on dominance in sex that manifests in such interests as vorephilia, sexual sadism and sexual masochism, and practices like bondage and necking, still remain in our genes from millions of years ago when we were merely rodents?  Were these paraphilias, which we now sometimes consider to be maladaptive and perverse, once part of an instinct necessary to pass on one’s genetic material?  This gives us an interesting perspective on these enigmatic paraphilias, which are sometimes, in the case of ones like vorephilia, to the point of being sheer fantasy.  Although this explanation obviously does not cover every paraphilia, if we consider how such interests and activities would have affected our non-human ancestors, we can get a better idea of precisely why they exist in the first place – and, in this, derive a greater tolerance for the associated individuals.

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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