Terminology

There's a lot of discussion in the zoo community and interested parties about what certain words mean.  Generally, it is said that because said community is disorganized and often less than stable, there is no agreement on what means what.

I'd like to change that.  We don't have a definitive lexicon, so I'll attempt to put one here.


Anthrosexuality
A sexual orientation towards humans.  The opposite of zoosexuality, although the two are not mutually exclusive.

Bestiality
The sexual use of animals.  Bestiality and bestials/bestialists, unlike zoophilia and zoophiles, give no regard to the emotions or desires of the animal, and there is no emotional attachment.  First used in the seventeenth century, it's now the usual term used in legal documents.

Faunoiphilia
Sexual arousal from watching animals mating.

Fence-hopping
Having sexual interactions with an animal that is not yours, without the permission of the animal's legal owner.

Horse-ripping
Rather explicit abuse of horses in an often sexualized context that has unfortunately become common enough that it has its own term.  Unfortunately one of the big reasons zooerasty is still illegal in many places.

Zooerasty
Zoosexuality in practice, ie the act of a human having sex with an animal. cf pederasty

Zoophilia
(1) A romantic attraction to animals.  An emotional attachment is necessary (-philia meaning love) and a sexual attraction is generally implied.  It does not, however, need to be present, nor does an individual need to have had a partner to be a zoophile. cf nyctophilia, etc.
(2) A paraphilia involving animals, used in a clinical context. cf necrophilia

Zoosadism
Bestiality, but above and beyond a simple lack of concern for the animal partner in being explicitly physically abusive.

Zoosexuality
A sexual orientation towards animals.  May cover either zoophilia or bestiality, but, like zoophilia, does not necessitate an existing relationship.  Sometimes used today to mean someone who prefers animals, as opposed to someone who will orient towards animals but prefers humans.

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!

Homosexuality in Nature: Gay Animals

Oftentimes when browsing the internet or listening to a right-wing tirade from some backwards-thinking fundamentalist, I find arguments against homosexuality. The most common one is: “it’s unnatural”. Disregarding arguments from religion, apparently if a species were to “go gay” it would die out due to a lack of reproduction, which is why homosexuality is unheard of in animals.

This is, of course, entirely false. This article, in the spirit of the last, will address common misconceptions about homosexual behaviours outside of the human species.

”Doesn’t it only exist in a few species?”

No. Homosexual behavior has been noted in nearly every family of birds, mammals and reptiles, if not every species. Everything from giraffes to lions to penguins to goats, the tendency of which to be exclusively gay is problematic to many farmers.

”But it’s a dominance thing!”

No, it’s not. As it is with female-male relations, the submissive participant in homosexual intercourse is usually the initiator. Furthermore, in gay “relationships” in many species, there is not a single partner who is always submissive and the other always dominant. The partnerships also exist within species that do not have a real social hierarchy. Finally, as it is in heterosexual partnerships, a great deal of affection may be shown.



It should also be noted on a more intimate note that homosexual activities between males is often penetrative, depending on the species (nearly all mammals).

”It only happens in captivity.”

Also wrong. Many of the photos and articles given above were taken in the wild. The fact is that it is much easier to observe animals in captivity, so most of any animal behaviours we’re aware of, we’re aware of through observation of captive animals, at least initially. Naturalistic observation, though, confirms homosexual activity of a wide variety of species outside of human influence.

”It’s a freak of nature; their genes don’t get passed on. They’re going against evolution!”

I see and hear this one a lot, and it’s patently stupid for two reasons.

The first of these reasons is that evolution is not a god. It does not have some grand master plan in mind. There is no driving goal behind evolution except to ensure that a given species thrives in a given environment. While this means that a species must have proper energy usage, tools for utilizing its environment, a certain social structure if necessary, etc., it also means, perhaps even more importantly, that a species must be quite various. If a species’ gene pool is small, not only do you get birth defects as damaging recessive genotypes are realized, but you also have the problem in which if the environment changes radically or some similarly traumatic event occurs, the species is unlikely to be able to adapt. It can never be well-told what a species will be required to adapt to, so it is always good to have as much variety as possible without speciation.

The second reason is something called colloquially the Gay Uncle Theory. This theory has received a great deal of acknowledgment in relevant fields, and essentially states that a while homosexuals are less likely to breed than heterosexuals, they are more likely to assist their relatives in child-rearing, increasing what we call inclusive fitness. Those relatives’ children will be more likely to thrive, and they will also be likely to have the same genes that contribute to homosexuality, so they will be likely to pass on those “gay genes” (on that note, it should be considered that homosexuality only has a genetic factor of about 20%). This theory works primarily with humans and other highly social creatures.

What about those who are not terribly social? It should be recognized that sex in animals is not so much like sex in humans, because they lack that cultural taboo and other lofty implications: it’s simply a mutually pleasurable activity. Some early human societies recognized this, and we of course know of Greek soldiers being encouraged to engage in homosexual activities to strengthen bonds in the army. Animals, it seems, think similarly. Whether they are bonobos trying to chill their group out, or a trio of male lions looking to found or capture a pride of their own, homosexual intercourse seems to play a potentially large role in strengthening important social bonds.

Hopefully this article has cleared a few things up for some people. Though I’m afraid that the people that really need to read this likely won’t, and probably wouldn’t change their minds even if they did, and actually, given the nature of this blog, would probably become even more staunchly homophobic, I imagine that those intelligent people who are reading this will later be able to use these facts, reasons, and sources in future debates with the bigots. Godspeed.

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.

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.