Pound Town: A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Bestiality
Let’s workshop the full essay exploring the circumstances under which bestiality is morally permissible.
Pound Town: A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Bestiality
Dedicated to Gary Varner and my Grandpa Jack
If you include in bestiality only people who have sex exclusively with animals, then the percentage of course falls far below 1 per cent. On the other hand, if you drop the requirement that for sexual contact something has to be inserted somewhere and that something has to be fiddled with, and it is sufficient simply to cuddle, to derive a warm feeling from each other, to kiss perhaps at times, in brief to love, then bestiality is not a deviation but the general rule, not even something shameful, but the done thing. After all, who does not wish to be called an animal lover?[1]
1. Introductory Remarks
Rare it is to come across someone who would argue openly for the moral permissibility of bestiality, the sexual contact between human and nonhuman animals.[2] The prevailing view is that bestiality is immoral under all circumstances. The central rationale has long been that bestiality debases our special dignity as humans, tarnishes our privileged status as deliberative agents whose rationality frees us from the instincts that puppeteer animals. In our era of animal-rights activism, this rationale has been reinforced by the notion that animals have inherent moral worth and so should not be subject to indignities and cruelties.[3]
I contend, on the contrary, that under certain circumstances sexual activity with animals is morally permissible. Especially when the wants and welfare and moral worth and autonomy of all parties are respected, especially when the interaction is voluntary and non-distressing and non-exploitative and mutually enjoyable and mutually opt-out-able, bestiality is merely a benign form of nontraditional living. It is much more benign, in fact, than many popular practices whose moral permissibility largely remains unquestioned: grooming animals to serve as our tools and playthings, or castrating them into docility, or fondling their teats and vaginas to get them in the breeding mood while tied up to what are known as “rape racks,” or sticking electric rods up their rectums to produce reliable ejaculations—or, of course, putting them through literal meat grinders and then onto our grills.
The burden of proof, I take it, falls upon me—yes, despite the fact that most of us regard as unproblematic various barbarities inflicted upon animals, even when they dissent through skin-crawling screams and heart-wrenching attempts to flee. Although sexual activity with animals has been happening as long as humans have been around, and although pro-bestiality organizations and forums are gaining popularity in the digital age (especially in progressive countries like Germany, Denmark, and Norway), bestiality remains condemned across a variety of cultures.[4] Laws prohibiting sexual contact between humans and animals, which range back to the Hittites in 1650 BCE, are widespread across western nations (with noted exception of Hungary and a few other countries). These laws have become increasingly stringent especially in the US since the turn of the millennium, where such contact—unless carried out for husbandry or veterinary or research or educational purposes—is an offense in all states except New Mexico and West Virginia (some of which—like Texas and Florida—have laws according to which the mere observing of bestiality is a criminal offense).[5]
There are enticing reasons behind the longstanding criminalization of bestiality. Bestiality violates our intuitions concerning right and wrong while also seemingly violating both the commands of the Abrahamic God and the so-called “natural way of things” (issues I discuss in sections 3 through 5). Cutting even deeper than that, many argue that bestiality endangers both animal and human welfare (issues I discuss in sections 6 and 7).
However compelling these reasons might seem, my intention is to show that—perhaps in some sense reflecting how often in history lawmakers banned bestiality in the same breath not only as masturbation and anal sex, but also as witchcraft and sorcery[6]—solid foundation is lacking for our moral opprobrium here. By no means do I intend to promote bestiality. I simply hope to bring into relief the possibility of humans and animals engaging in morally unproblematic sexual interactions.
2. Cases of Bestiality
Not all instances of bestiality are morally permissible, at least I am willing to grant. This should be clear by considering the following array of cases, which serve as touchstones throughout the essay.
A. Cases where the sexual activity is coerced, cruel, and harmful
Case 1.—A man pound-towns away violently up the egg hole of a hen squawking in her vain attempts to fly away—ultimately, so that the involuntary contractions of her traumatic dying align with his climax, wringing her neck (a technique known to have been used on turkeys by the French and on geese by the Chinese).[7]
Case 2.—A woman covers her vagina in peanut butter after starving her border collie and then, after it has licked her clean and tries to move away, forces its snout into her—back and forth—despite its desperate yelps for breath.
Case 3.—Unable to control the piglet enough to get his penis inside its rectum and yet not wanting to resort to the ground-smash move of the factory farm (since his parents keep a tight inventory on the number of pigs), a teen boy drugs it into complacency first.
B. Cases where the animal is neither aware of sexual activity nor sexually stimulated
Case 4.—Vulvic wetness and engorgement chronic over the recent weeks, a tween girl—who, by the way, has a strong bond with her horse and only rides him when he wants to ride—has been enjoying galloping on his back because his gyrations readily bring her to climax.
Case 5.—In line with more rural men than one might think over the centuries, a farmhand utilizes the suckling reflex of a calf to receive a so-called “Kansas milking” (pulling out during climax because he could not locate a definitive Reddit or ChatGPT answer as to whether his ejaculate would cause any discomfort to the calf).[8]
Case 6.—A man ejaculates onto the shell of a turtle he finds wandering by the creek, making sure—out of respect for its unknown goals and projects—not to disrupt its slow walk to wherever it might be headed.
C. Cases where the animal is the aggressor or enticer and both parties are sexually stimulated
Case 7.—An orangutan, branch shaking and chest-beating in showcase of sexual prowess, swoops onto the bathing primatologist, and she—excited by this, and feeling bonded to the creature she so often writes about and photographs—takes on a lordotic posture of access so he can take her with his diminutive penis, enjoying it afterwards when (out of curiosity, one would guess) he licks his own ooze from her vagina.[9]
Case 8.—Having formed an attachment with a man who started swimming at the dock a year ago (so much of an attachment that she can recognize his car as she waits for him; so much of an attachment, in fact, that his human girlfriend is rightfully afraid to get in the water with him), a dolphin—in sexual forwardness complete with arousal whistles and belly-brushing passes of darting flirtation as well as vivid puckering and protrusion of her genital slit—starts to grind her double-A-sized clitoris against his knee and then (not high on pufferfish, mind you) mounts him when he sticks his penis out for her.
Case 9.—Getting the hint from the aggressive heat behavior of the family cat (the attention-seeking yowls, the restless rubbing on furniture and rolling on the floor, the increased affection coupled with rear-end elevation flaring out her vulva), the aroused boy holds up the eraser-end of a pencil, coaxed to do so by her nudging head, so she can grind away on it how she sees fit.
D. Cases where the human is the aggressor or enticer and both parties are sexually stimulated
Case 10.—A dog has been humping the throw pillows in sexual frustration for a week (heightening the horniness of everyone in the house, by the way), so the owner—out of both empathy and desire, but by means neither of coercion nor extra-sexual manipulations like treats—sucks it off to its intense enjoyment (jouissance evident not merely in its remaining in place despite its freedom to dissent at any point, but more so in its dopey smile and tail-wagging moans of release).
Case 11.—A man is feeling kinky and so, from his stool after a soothing groom session outside the barn, performs cunnilingus on the black mare who, to be clear, has not been specifically trained to tolerate this activity and who can walk away at any time and who exhibits various signs of excited receptivity: nickering vocalizations as well as tail lifting in a slight squat down to make the vulva more accessible—a position the man eventually takes full advantage of by slipping himself inside her while standing on the stool.
Case 12.—In a near future where scientists have synthesized dolphin pheromones, a dolphin-attracted aquarium director perfumes herself with the scent of female-dolphin heat and enters the after-hours tank, which results in one of many male dolphins—the one already bonded to the director—copulating with her (rather awkwardly, for whatever it is worth).
Straight out of the algolagnic playbook of Dmitri Ivanovich (youngest son of Ivan the Terrible), Cases 1-3 are unequivocally immoral—at least I will admit under the assumption that animals, unlike rocks and hammers, have inherent worth and should not be subject to suffering merely for our pleasure. Since in these cases the animals are clearly dissenting and being coerced while being subject to unnecessary pain and sometimes even death, the moral assessment here seems uncontroversial—yes, even if the hen’s traumatic death in Case 1 is a welcomed release from a life of confinement on the factory farm. Now, I will say—and perhaps this will shed some light on what I think factors in to deciding whether an incident of bestiality is morally permissible—that, with only a few tweaks, Case 2 becomes morally acceptable. Let us say that the collie is not starved and that the women never forces its snout into her desired cavity. Let us say that the woman merely places the peanut butter on the area she wants licked (her foot, her vagina, or whatever area gets her juices flowing) and splays herself out waiting. If the collie comes in (say, without being called) and licks the peanut butter off to its enjoyment, and is free to stop at any point and move on, and so forth, then the incident is benign. Treats in themselves present no problem. What is the relevant moral difference between, on the one hand, putting plastic wrap on your head and sticking peanut butter on it so that your dog will lick it while you clip its nails (a common practice on TikTok) and, on the other hand, slapping some peanut butter on your foot so the dog will lick it off (and thereby get you off)? If anything, the former is worse. For whereas in the former you are doing bodily damage to the dog (taking away its defenses and even exposing it to possible pain), in the latter you are providing harmless and autonomy-respecting sensory stimulation that brings mutual pleasure.
Cases 7-9 are clearly morally permissible. These cases, on top of being mutually enjoyable, are cruelty free and consensual and aligned with the wishes of each party. Indeed, the human in each case follows the self-ruling lead of the animal, neither treating the animal as a mere tool of gratification nor exploiting the animal (say, by filming the interaction so as to upload it on bestiality forums—a procedure the animal could never fathom). Cases 7 and 8 stand out as especially unproblematic. The animals in both cases, exercising their personal autonomy in pursuing sexual pleasure, are not only undomesticated higher-order mammals, but also more physically imposing than humans and operating in elements (jungle and water) where humans—at least those involved—are vulnerable and lack the power to do much of anything to stop from being hurt or killed. Case 7 goes even further. It shows the potential for meaningful interspecies relationships, where humans and animals can form deep bonds around mutually-enjoyable sexual interactions aligned with each party’s goals.
Cases 4-6 I also regard as morally permissible. Even though the animal in each case has no idea what is going on, no distress or coercion is involved and the animals are free to pursue their own agential goals without disruption. These cases are morally permissible, in short, for reasons similar to why it is morally permissible—so at least I assume—for the primatologist in Case 7 to take the orangutan’s photo (even though the orangutan has not even the slightest conception of photography or what taking a photo amounts to). Now, it could be argued that the man in Case 5 is using the calf as a mere means to his own satisfaction. To this I might respond how some slaughterers respond to the ethical objection that they treat cows as mere means to their own personal gain. Namely, just as the cows are not being treated as a mere means in being slaughtered since the cows were paid with food and shelter, the calf in question is not being treated as a mere means when the man lets its suck his penis since it is paid with food and shelter (and, so we can imagine, loving care until the end of its natural life). One might insist “But it wants to suck a milky udder, not a penis.” Although I remain unconvinced of the relevance of that fact, I can just change the example to avoid debate. Let us say it simply wants to suck on things for self-soothing reasons. Let us imagine that the man knows this and gives over the penis. He uses the calf in this case as a mere means no more than I use a dentist as a mere means when I have him fix my teeth for money. I am willing to drop the point, though. For clearly the humans in the other two cases are respecting the goals and purposes of the animals (and so do not reduce the animals to nothing but tools).
Cases 10-12 might seem more controversial since the human is the initiator. These too, nevertheless, I regard as morally defensible. All parties experience gratification without distress and all parties are able to dissent at any time. Nor is any animal being treated as a mere means. The human in each case does the equivalent of asking for permission—permission, when applicable, simply to touch the genital region (rather than doing what would be permissible anyway, at least according to the standards we use in instances of animal touching whose permissibility we would not think to question: namely, making a quick pass over the area to gauge the animal’s receptivity). The human in Case 11, for instance, procures the mare’s receptivity to genital touching before even the slightest contact with that area. To be sure, the woman in Case 12 uses a mate-attraction bait to enhance her desirability. But this is unproblematic throughout the animal kingdom: from courtship dances in the case of blue-footed boobies and peacock spiders, to pheromones and acrobatics in the case of bottlenose dolphins, to bioluminescent flashes in the case of fireflies, to perfume and makeup in the case of contemporary humans, to use of optical illusions for making one’s bower look bigger in the case of vogelkop bowerbirds, to rapidly changing color displays in the case of octopuses. For whatever relevance there might be in saying it (and I think there is none), the use of pheromones in Case 12—as with the use of all the other courtship manipulations just mentioned—does not necessitate copulation. Let us assume—as is true in the case of humans, where even the most beguiling cologne is insufficient to secure sex—that the prior bond was an additional factor for that dolphin, unlike the others in the aquarium, copulating with the director.
3. Intuitive Case Against Bestiality
3.1. Argument
One common reason cited for the moral impermissibility of bestiality is that it is just intuitively wrong. It shows in our immediate disgust. It shows in that questioning the permissibility of bestiality merely from intellectual curiosity is arguably more triggering than questioning whether trans women are real women or whether blacks are indelibly oppressed by the ever-growing boot of white supremacy, triggering enough to rouse ire and violence—as I know personally, having done so once at a playdate barbecue. Even progressive books on abnormal psychology, those which tell empathetic stories as to how someone came to be open to sexual activity with animals, cannot help but state what used to be stated about homosexuality: that such an orientation, even if compassion-deserving, is too vile to be left untreated.[10]
The basic argument from intuition, then, should be clear.
1. If it is intuitive that bestiality is morally impermissible, then bestiality is morally impermissible.
2. It is intuitive that bestiality is morally impermissible.
Therefore, bestiality is morally impermissible.
As much as admitting it might seem to undermine my case, I too find it disgusting to envision someone, say, performing fellatio on a horse (the preferred animal, second only to dogs, in human-animal sexual contact). If I picture myself taking a pig from behind, it is hard not to feel nauseous (even if the pig is fully enjoying the interaction with one of its renowned thirty-minute orgasms). No doubt I get at least semi-erect when I think of the women of ancient Rome who would train snakes “to coil around their thighs and slide past the lips of their vaginas.”[11] But that is mainly because I am homing in on the human’s sexual organ and, if anything, reducing the penetrating entity to something more like a dildo. For whatever it might be worth, I do wish I were liberated enough not to feel the repulsion. But I cannot help it. Might there be, as Leon Kass or Clive Hamilton would say, ethical insight in my indelible repugnance? Might my disgust be my conscience telling me that bestiality is immoral?[12]
3.2. Response
The argument from intuition, I sense, is the core reason for our strident rejection of bestiality. The first thing one experiences if one questions the rationality of the taboo is, if not a fist or a glass thrown one’s way, the indignant exclamation “Animals can’t consent!” It is intriguing how these same individuals almost always ignore the issue of consent when it comes to confining animals in cramped cages or slaughtering them for consumption—yes, even in our no-excuse era of the so-called “impossible burger.” Funny enough, the mother of my son’s friend at the aforementioned playdate—after yelling “Do you wanna fuck my dog, you pig!”—threw her burger at me (missing) in what would have been a total waste of factory-farmed kill were it not for my liberal-Mississippi interpretation of the five-second rule. What I really think is going on is that all the gum-flap about consent, an issue I will get to section 6, is just a righteous-sounding veneer over what is ultimately a gut reaction of disgust. Disgust drives our condemnation.[13]
The argument from intuition can be quickly put aside, though. This line of reasoning suffers from some obvious deficiencies.
Let us begin by looking at the problems surrounding premise 2.
(1) Our intuitions against bestiality are by no means universal. It was not uncommon in ancient Egypt for women to have sex with dogs and men to have sex with cattle. Or think of the ancient Greeks who regularly practiced sex beyond the species divide (especially during religious celebration). Think of the ancient Hindus who captured their widespread sexual activity with animals in temple art across India. Think of the Kisii people of Kenya who regard sex with animals as normal in adolescence. Think of the Masai teens who use donkeys to satisfy their needs and hone their sexual competence. Think of the “Comeburras” of Colombia who, starting around seven, have sexual interactions with female donkeys. Think of the Inuit peoples who, male and female alike, have been known to engage in sexual contact with dogs in particular. Think of those North Costa Rican tribes who, although banning sex with dogs, see sex with donkeys and pigs as no biggie. Think of the Matis men of the Amazonian rainforest who prize sloths as sexual mates. Think of the youths of Crete and Cyprus who, up until the 1980s, would practice their sex skills with donkeys, goats, pigs, and birds. Think of the Yoruba of Nigeria who would commemorate their first antelope kill by having sex with it. Think of the Crow Indians of Montana who were known to have sex with the animals they killed too. Think of Beirut in the 1960s, which was known as a bestiality hotspot (close to that of the biblical land of Canaan). Think of the Babalonian orgies involving dogs during the Spring Fertility Rites. Think of the Tamils of Sri Lanka and their relations with cows and goats. Think of Thailand or Taiwan and their human-animal sex shows (which purportedly put to shame the famous donkey shows in mid-twentieth century Mexico). Think of the Hopi tribe, the Sioux tribe, the Apache tribe, the Mohave tribe. The list goes on and on, back into a prehistory of art—cave paintings, carvings—that reflect a people with, let us just say, much less hangups around sexual pleasure.[14] So no, not everyone feels intuitive disgust toward bestiality. Some find it as welcoming as I find performing analingus on my (human) girlfriend. No doubt this is true for at least some of history’s famous animal lovers: Tiberius (and his wife), Claudius, Nero, Constantine the Great, Eudoxia, Catherine the Great, Giles de Rais, Thomas Grainger, Thomas Weir, King Edward II, Aleister Crowley, Larry Flynt—to name but a few. Perhaps this explains why between 1630 and 1778 around 700 people were executed for bestiality in Sweden alone. It has got to be delectable for some if it is worth the risk of being slain like homosexuals in a bonfire by the government (sometimes after drawn-out torture in the town square)![15] Even if the paranoia from which it springs is overblown, why else would the Talmud—in perfect alignment with the Papua-New-Guinean maxim “No one likes a dog better than a woman”—demand that widows get rid of their sexually-tempting pet dogs? Why else would the colonial government in Plymouth list bestiality as grounds for divorce? Bracketing off, of course, the pervy eagerness to masturbate to taboo tales behind the penitential screen, why else would it have been so standard (up unto the 1960s) for priests in France and Poland and Sicily to ask during confession whether there had been any use of animals for sex? Why else would there be bestiality magazines such as The Wild Animal Revue whose advertisements include dildos shaped in the form of various animals?[16]
(2) However unshakably gross it seems to me, I find it intuitive—well, intellectually intuitive—that bestiality is morally permissible under the right circumstances (see sections 2 and 8). Premise two, then, is false as far as I am concerned. I have felt this way since I was a teenager. It has been a strong enough belief that I have always used it, along with some other measures, to filter out potential long-term mates. If a woman could see no way in which certain forms of bestiality could be morally acceptable, then that was a hard boundary for me.
(3) Our intuitive response to bestiality could shift in the future. Just as our repulsion toward homosexuality and miscegenation diminished as it became more accepted in society, it is plausible that our repulsion towards bestiality would diminish if it became more accepted (like, say, in rural Sicily in the 1940s or parts of Denmark just a decade ago).[17] It seems likely that with greater exposure to people who engage in bestiality (friends and family, in particular), our disgust will give way to a nuanced understanding and acceptance—perhaps even a new breed of look-who’s-coming-to-dinner films. It is hard to see why it would not, especially when it comes to the obviously nonproblematic instances embodied in Cases 7-9.
The most devastating problems, however, concern premise 1.
(1) It is crucial to consider whose gut intuitions we are relying on when evaluating the moral permissibility of bestiality: the gut intuitions of humans. But we are the sort of critters who can bomb a village full of infants from afar with little problem and yet who crumble when it comes to shooting just one in the head up close—and even if it will save all the others. We are the sort of critters who are fine with kids watching people get stabbed and shot and blown up and poisoned each day on TV and yet who restrict them from seeing a nipple flash across the screen as if their souls depended on it. We are the sort of critters who placidly take in hunks of veal and chicken and pig into our mouths and yet insist that eating cat or dog or horse meat is morally reprehensible. We are the sort of critters who impose laws against photographing animals and children together in any manner that could be even remotely deemed sexual and yet who sponsor afterschool programs to teach children how to stimulate female cows through teat massage and spanking and fingering to make them receptive to semen. We are the sort of critters who once found it a core intuition, an unshakeable conviction, that what goes up must come down, that the Earth stands still, that the Earth is flat, that the Earth is the center of the universe, that people can rise from being long dead, that this wafer is the literal body of Christ, that personality traits can be discerned through skull contours, that prayer can cure the illness of a stranger on the other side of the world, that certain stones can cure cancer and bring wealth into your life, that a sky God judges each of us for how many times we shake after we pee, that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism (rather than simply being correlated with the time around which diagnoses are most likely to be first made), and so forth. We are the sort of critters who often exhibit cognitive biases that can hinder rational thinking and decision-making: favoring information that confirms preexisting beliefs (confirmation bias) or making decisions—such as not to fly—based on recent or easily-accessible examples like news of a plane crash (availability heuristic). We are the sort of critters who often prioritize short-term benefits over long-term consequences: poisoning the air and sea and land for quick profits; overeating and overfishing and overlogging despite the tumultuous impact not only to other creatures but to humans themselves. We are the sort of critters who often act on reason-clouding emotions (impulsively buying things we neither need nor can afford; hastily deciding on a course of action based on fear rather than evidenced-based analysis). We are the sort of critters who, given our limits in duration and knowledge and power, form generalized assumptions about entire groups of people based on their most superficial characteristics and without even much exposure to individuals that might be said to belong to those groups. We are the sort of critters who have a tough time understanding even people of the same language, preferring to see in their words what we want to see rather than what is really there. We are the sorts of critters who die in droves convinced that God is on our side of the war. We are the sort of critters—selfish and power-hungry—who exhibit an intense resistance to change, preferring the familiar and comfortable (Jesus rose from the dead, Earth is flat) no matter the evidence to the contrary—indeed, even ready to kill others who threaten to question our taboos or call us out on our hypocrisies (which is a central reason why it would be hard to place a paper like this in a mainstream philosophy journal).
(2) There are various examples of behaviors that the majority regarded as intuitively immoral but clearly are not. Homosexuality serves as a poignant example. Even today I would feel uneasy, although it does shame me to admit it, if I stumble upon male-male pornography. And the mere thought of being in hardcore situations with another man elicits within my gut queasy revulsion. Just as in the case of bestiality, I do wish I were more liberated. But it would be intellectually unsound, and downright barbarity, for me to conclude that because I feel such disgust, and because the majority of my society feels such disgust (let us imagine this is taking place a hundred years ago), homosexuality must be morally impermissible. The same goes for bestiality.
(3) Claims of what is intuitive cannot settle debates in philosophy classrooms. This is clear even when we push aside the fact that initial gut reactions and intuitive repulsions can be influenced by cultural biases and societal conditioning. After all, people on each side of the core philosophical issues (whether God exists, whether human moral freedom is compatible with determinism, whether abortion is morally permissible, and so on) have equally ingrained intuitions. If intuition alone could settle the matter, that would imply what is logically untenable: for instance, that God exists in the very same respect in which God does not exist. To be sure, all other things being equal between two competing positions (equal in respect to parsimony, explanatory power, or so on), we go with the one that aligns best with the intuitions of the majority. But as I make clear in the rest of this paper, all other things are not equal between my view (that sometimes bestiality can be morally permissible) and the competing view (that bestiality can never be morally permissible).
3.3. Conclusion
Merely citing our personal gut, even when that gut wretches, is insufficient to establish the moral impermissibility of bestiality. More impersonal justification is needed. Look at it this way. Presumably kicking infants in the head for the fun of it is wrong, if it is at all, not at root because our intuition says so. Instead of being, in effect, the arbitrary decree of our intuition, the direction of explanation goes the other way around: our intuition says kicking infants in the head is wrong because doing so is wrong, wrong according to facts independent of whatever our intuition says. The opponent of bestiality, therefore, needs to needs to disclose what these facts are in the case of bestiality.
4. Biblical Case Against Bestiality
4.1. Argument
Turning away from our gut and moving instead to the Bible, many think, can settle the debate. The Bible, after all, is revered as the inerrant word of God and—unlike, say, the earlier Hittite codes, which criminalize sexual relations with pig and dog (a death-penalty offense) but not at all with mule and horse—the biblical codes condemn bestiality across the board.[18] Since the God in question here is defined as perfect in goodness and knowledge, whatever he says is wrong must be wrong (regardless as to whether it aligns with our personal judgments).
Here are the key anti-bestiality passages from the Old Testament.
Whoever has intercourse with an animal shall be put to death. (Exodus 22:19)
You shall not have sexual relations with any animal and defile yourself with it, nor shall any woman give herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; it is perversion. (Leviticus 18:23)
If a man has sexual relations with an animal, he shall be put to death, and you shall kill the animal. If a woman approaches any animal and has sexual relations with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall be put to death; their bloodguilt is upon them. (Leviticus 20:15-16)
Cursed be anyone who lies with any animal. (Deuteronomy 27:21)
The New Testament too—although never getting too specific—condemns “sexual immorality” (porneia) altogether, which would include bestiality along with adultery, incest, rape, prostitution, anal sex, and so on (1 Corinthians 6:18; Mark 7:21-23).
Why is bestiality targeted so incessantly as an abomination? Why does it stand as such a deep transgression that, to add “injury to insult,” even animals raped in the process are due the death penalty?[19] Well, putting aside the fact that non-reproductive sex conflicted with the desperate desire of the Jewish tribe—small and persecuted—to secure its numbers,[20] and putting aside the fact that many of the pagan practices from which the ancient Jews sought to separate themselves involved bestiality,[21] the theological answer lies in the contradiction bestiality poses to the special dignity and rationality that God gifted to humans alone. Superior as created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), humans—knowing right from wrong—have the power to resist the lustful drives, the base urges, that have mastery over the beasts. Engaging in bestiality, then, is the most slanderous way to reject the divine spark inside each human.[22] Yes, other activities as well—ranging, so at least some religious pamphlets say, from drunkenness and profanation to adultery and incest—amount to declaring “I am mere beast!”[23] But the starkest way to deny that God put you above pigs and dogs is to have sex with pigs and dogs—particularly anal sex, which at times was considered a sin too wicked to be named (even when “merely” between two consenting men).[24] That is the idea anyway.
We can summarize these considerations in the following argument.
1. If the Bible says that bestiality is morally impermissible, then bestiality is morally impermissible.
2. The Bible says that bestiality is morally impermissible.
Therefore, bestiality is morally impermissible.
4.2 Response
The obvious target to attack is the first premise, the assumption that the Bible provides authoritative moral guidance on the matter of bestiality. Here are the central problems it faces.
(1) Numerous holy texts make claims concerning what practices are moral and immoral. These claims often enough contradict one another. It seems futile, therefore, to declare a particular ethical standpoint wrong based solely on the decrees of a holy book. In the crucible of the philosophy classroom, people debate using public reason (as opposed to brute force or emotional manipulation or claims of divine insight or so on). We need to turn to a more objective and universally-compelling justification for the immorality of bestiality, in that case—a reason that ideally would resonate with anyone of sound mind. Other than doing that, which I think we really start doing in sections 6 and 7, the person giving the Bible-says-so argument against bestiality faces the burdensome task of showing not only that their holy book rejects bestiality under all circumstances, but also that it is the uncorrupted word of an entity that both exists and is perfect in moral knowledge.
(2) The Bible considers homosexuality death-worthy immoral.[25] But homosexuality is something I take to be acceptable, as I imagine most people would agree (especially in our era where nonnormative sexual orientation is considered not only a respect-deserving aspect of an individual’s identity, but also grounds for special dispensations). Such a stark discrepancy indicates that the Bible’s stance against bestiality is insufficient to demonstrate its impermissibility—unless definitive proof can be shown that the God of this Bible exists and really is all perfect (which would entail that whatever he says must be correct, however much we do not like it). Since we cannot trust the fact that homosexuality is wrong just because the Bible says so (at least until such proof is given), we cannot trust the fact that bestiality is morally impermissible just because the Bible says so.
(3) It might very well be either (a) that the Bible does not reject homosexuality altogether—only certain forms, like pederasty, popular among the pagans (ancient Mesopotamians, ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks, and ancient Persians) from which the ancient Israelites seemed desperate to distance themselves—or (b) that, even if the Bible does reject homosexuality altogether (which is the interpretation I lean toward), it is fair game to adjust the proscription to our new times (as we have done with eating pork now that we enjoy the benefits of refrigeration). But not only does either option invite further problems for the Bible-says-so argument (opening the door for me, in effect, to pull the same two spin moves in the case of bestiality),[26] the bigger issue is that the Bible, contrary to the background presumption of the argument, seems full of indications of its moral errancy. Homosexuality aside, the Bible considers morally impermissible many things that pretty much all of us consider morally permissible: having anal sex (Leviticus 18:22; Romans 1:26-27),[27] eating lobsters and snails (Leviticus 11:9-12), getting tattoos (Leviticus 19:28), wearing linen-wool blends of fabrics (Leviticus 19:19), playing with pigskin footballs (Deuteronomy 14:8), werking the runway as a drag-queen (Deuteronomy 22:5), consulting psychics (Leviticus 19:31), engaging in usury (Leviticus 25:36 and Exodus 22:25), initiating a divorce for any reason aside from infidelity (Matthew 19:9), failing to obey one’s slave master like one obeys God himself (Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-25), getting a fade at a black barbershop (Leviticus 19:27). Since we cannot trust the fact that anal sex (and the other actions from this quirky list) are wrong just because the Bible says so (at least until proof is given that the God of this Bible exists and really is all perfect), we cannot trust the fact that bestiality is morally impermissible just because the Bible says so.
4.3. Conclusion
Merely citing biblical passages, even when those passages are revered by billions, seems insufficient to establish the moral impermissibility of bestiality. More rationally-compelling justifications are needed, right? Consider again the point I raised at the end of section 3. Presumably kicking infants in the head for the fun of it is wrong, if it really is wrong, not at root because God says so. Instead of being, in effect, the arbitrary decree of God, the direction of explanation goes the other way around: God says kicking infants in the head for fun is wrong because doing so is wrong, wrong according to facts independent of whatever God says—facts that seem to have a direct bearing on the issue. The opponent of bestiality, therefore, needs to disclose what these facts are in the case of bestiality.
* * *
It is tempting for me to leave the discussion with that reasonable remark. Out of transparency, however, I should note that the assumption behind that remark—namely, that right and wrong is not a function of God’s arbitrary say so—is, although endorsed by the majority of philosophers throughout history (including Plato and Leibniz), more controversial than nonspecialists might realize. There are grounds to debate whether right and wrong is a function of the arbitrary decision of God. An advocate of this view (a form of ethical relativism known as “divine command theory”) would remind us—and here I am summoning the voluntaristic reasoning of Hobbes and Pufendorf—that the God in question is the everything-maker, limitless in what he is able to do and what he has jurisdiction over. But if right and wrong are ultimately a function of facts independent of God’s say so (facts such as that it causes unnecessary suffering, for example), then that would imply that God does not have jurisdiction over the standard of right and wrong. Perhaps even stranger than saying that God—the almighty—does not have jurisdiction over something, God himself would be judgeable by this independent standard. But that does not mesh with the idea of God as the supreme authority, perfect in power.
If it is true that (a) right and wrong is purely a function of God’s arbitrary decision (such that it would not be wrong to kick an infant in the head if God decided it was not wrong), then my thesis would be dead in the water if, in addition, it were also true that (b) God exists and (c) God rejects bestiality wholesale. Leaving claim-b alone (both because it might take us too far afield into metaphysical matters and because I accept God’s existence in at least a roughly Spinozistic sense), there are some things I can say in response to these other claims.
(1) Despite my strong inclination, I cannot attack claim-c simply by saying that—in light of the cases of seemingly unproblematic bestiality (like Case 4 or Case 7)—a supreme being perfect in moral knowledge (like God is supposed to be) would never reject bestiality wholesale. Such an attack would not be efficacious, after all, if claim-a and claim-b are true. For if whether bestiality is moral or not is just a matter of the random decision, the groundless whim, of an existing God, then my reasons matter no more than my pleas to him for forgiveness if he has already made up his mind for good that I would be damned. That all said, I can turn this admission around in my favor by raising an epistemic problem for claim-c. Even if we assume—which we must in order not to violate claim-a—that right and wrong is ultimately an arbitrary matter of God’s say so, what is the method for figuring out what God’s commands actually are? How is one to know whether God really does reject bestiality? One might try to rest one’s case on the Bible’s remarks against bestiality, but why believe that the Bible reflects God’s word—why, especially in light of its quirky proscriptions and the various other holy texts with different views? If one rests one’s case on more compelling grounds (such as that bestiality violates animal wellbeing or whatever), then to make that move mesh with the spirit of claim-a one would have to show that the grounds cited clue us in somehow to what God has arbitrarily decided—a difficult task since one cannot resort (without violating claim-a) to the instinctual move of saying that God’s decision was because of those grounds. Here is my stab at a solution on behalf of divine command theory. Perhaps God constructed us in a certain way that we would be, say, upset by violations of, say, animal wellbeing and that such hurt would point us, like a compass pointing north, to what he decided ultimately for no reason whatsoever: namely, that bestiality is wrong. But if that is how the response is going to work (and that does seem the best strategy to get out of the epistemic problem I have raised), then we can move on, like I said at the beginning of this conclusion, to looking at other grounds for rejecting bestiality.
(2) On top of reminding the reader of the repugnance of saying that whether raping babies in torturous fashion for the pure fun of it is ultimately an arbitrary decision of God (such that raping babies for fun would be morally kosher if God said it was), I might raise doubts about the rationale given for claim-a, a rationale that boils down to this: saying that right and wrong is a function of facts independent of God’s say so violates God’s being the omnipotent maker of all. How might one get around such a compelling line of reasoning? Well, most theologians agree that God’s inability to do certain things need not impugn his omnipotence. For the things he is unable to do—make the number three divisible by two without remainder, or make the top of the mercury in a thermometer be two inches from the bottom at the same time and in the same respect as it is merely one inch from the bottom—are, being logically impossible, not even “on the table,” so to say, as candidate things to be done. Why is saying this relevant? Well, a case can be made for the claim that ethical truths, such as that it is impermissible to kick an infant in the head for the pure fun of it, are necessary—necessary in the sense of being true in all possible worlds. The ethical statement in question is necessary, we might say, in virtue of being implied by a principle that is self-evident—a principle, in other words, that is necessarily true since it provides the rationale for its own truth; a principle perhaps whose predicate is already contained in its subject. A good candidate for such a principle here is the so-called “principle of mercy,” which says that unnecessary suffering is wrong. So just as God’s inability to kill himself or make two plus two equal five or change the nature of circularity does not impugn his omnipotence, neither does his inability to change ethical truths. Of course, the issue remains that God does not seem to be the everything-maker on this view. But what is stopping us from saying, as Leibniz does, that all necessary truths belong to the essence of God?[28] It seems nothing (especially if God is conceived as the very isness of everything that is, rather than some superbeing in the sky).[29] Since God creates himself (not by some choice but rather simply by having existence baked into his very nature), God can be said to create these too—yes, even as what they are is no more changeable than that he is.[30]
In light of the fact that the wrongness of raping an infant in drawn-out torture for the pure fun of it (if it really is wrong) does not seem to be ultimately an arbitrary matter (as it would be according to claim-a), and in light of the grounds for reconciling God’s being the all-powerful everything maker with right and wrong not being a function of God’s arbitrary say so (despite the rationale given for claim-a), and in light of the epistemic problem of distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate commands of God (such that there is room to doubt the truth of claim-c without compromising claim-a), I think it is safe to move on from the God angle against bestiality.
5. Natural Case Against Bestiality
5.1. Argument
Another popular justification for the immorality of bestiality is that it is “unnatural.” When in the seventeen century Mary Hickes was indicted for bestiality, the charge describes her as in defiance of nature: Mary Hickes, “to the disgrace of all womankind, did commit Buggery with a Mungril Dog . . . and against nature had venereal and Carnal copulation with him.”[31] Or take the case of John Cole, the charge against him being that he “committed an unnatural crime,” having “against the order of nature attempt[ed] carnally to know a certain female dog.”[32] Looking at the US legal codes, we see similar language. North Carolina, for example, calls bestiality a “crime against nature” and Maryland calls it an “unnatural or perverted sexual practice.”[33]
The core meaning of “unnatural” in discussions of bestiality has traditionally been that it runs contrary to the reproductive purpose of sex. Aquinas, one of the giants in the history of philosophy from which this language has branched out across the globe, says that the affront to the natural order posed by bestiality makes it—along with homosexuality and masturbation—a moral transgression worse than heterosexual rape and heterosexual adultery (since at least these can be procreative).[34] However much we use the Aquinian language today, though, a growing number of us have other things in mind when we call bestiality “unnatural.” North Carolina and Maryland, in particular, must mean something different. After all, numerous nonprocreative sexual practices (like masturbation and homosexuality) are not illegal there. Or think of all the people just a century ago who shook their heads in disgust over the dinner table at how unnatural miscegenation is. Surely they did not mean that it cannot result in babies—or, more in their language: “tar-brushed abominations.”
Let us look, then, at the various options as to the meaning of “unnatural” in this context. Here are the most common, several of which overlap in my effort to be exhaustive.
(1) Interspecies sex is a lifestyle choice rather than an evolutionary drive.
(2) Interspecies sex is unusual, a deviation from instinctual norms.
(3) Interspecies sex transgresses ingrained traditions and values.
(4) Interspecies sex reflects a neuroatypical—indeed, a deeply-distorted—mindset.
(5) Interspecies sex is not practiced among animals.
(6) Interspecies sex violates the procreative purpose of sexual organs.
(7) Interspecies sex is revolting—a fact that clues us in, like the urge to puke when we see someone eating poop, to its being a perversion for which nature stands ready to dish out payback (think: kuru in the case of cannibalism).
(8) Interspecies sex lacks any instrumental purpose or practical function.[35]
We can summarize these considerations in the following argument.
1. If bestiality is unnatural, then bestiality is morally impermissible.
2. Bestiality is unnatural.
Therefore, bestiality is morally impermissible.
5.2. Response
Premise 1 faces a serious problem. Any freshmen a few weeks into their ethics course would spot it: just because something is unnatural (whatever that might mean), that does not entail that it is wrong. Surely using an electric toothbrush is unnatural (if anything is, which is something I doubt).[36]And what about scrolling TikTok or flying in a plane or taking synthetic cancer drugs? Just because these activities are “unnatural” does not make them wrong. We value many things often described as unnatural (Nikes, guns, smartphones, cyberspace, governments) just as we regard as evil many things often described as natural (illness, war, earthquakes, rape, death). As I said in section 3, it is important to remember that we are dealing with humans here: so mentally stunted by the desire to have it their way that it is not uncommon to find them citing merely the unnaturalness of x, y, or z (nuclear power, gender-affirming surgery, cloning) as sufficient for their moral impermissibility even as they sleep with CPAPs in air-conditioned homes after their heart transplants.
The problem with premise 1, in short, is that it is fallacious to deduce a moral-ought merely from a nonmoral-is. But even if I grant the legitimacy of deriving a moral-ought merely from a nonmoral-is, the ought we would presumably get here would not seem favorable to the opponent of bestiality anyway. Think about it. Interspecies sex is merely relatively rare in nature rather than nonexistent, manifesting across the animal kingdom as well as in every region and time of human history.[37] Using the logic of the is-ought fallacy, then, from this nonmoral fact we can derive the following moral fact concerning bestiality: bestiality should be practiced, but only relatively rarely. That conclusion is fine enough for my purposes here.
These points suffice to dispense with the line of reasoning at hand. In case there is need of more convincing, however, let me respond to each of the various meanings of “unnatural” when one says bestiality is unnatural.
(1) Whether something is an innate disposition or a lifestyle choice has no bearing on whether it is morally permissible. Just because some people are born to be violent, that does not make their displays of violence morally permissible. And just because some people choose to cultivate a pacifist character (even to the extent of going against their inborn disposition), that does not make their refusal to engage in violence morally impermissible. It is true that interspecies sex has not been selected for by evolution. After all, it rarely can result in pregnancy. And even when pregnancies do occur, they are more likely—as we see with tigons and ligers—to suffer from health issues. But, of course, homosexuality too—according to the same standards at least—has not been selected for by evolution. That does not make the practice immoral.
(2) Most people do not play the yabajar. But surely that itself is no mark against its permissibility. Deviant forms of sexual behavior (like polyamory or homosexuality) are not rendered immoral merely on grounds that they are unusual. The same goes for bestiality, which has been taking place—not even counting our sexual activity with Neanderthals and Denisovans—for as long as humans have been in close contact with animals: an unbroken chain from the dawn of the human race until today.[38]
(3) Although bestiality violates norms and traditions and shared values (of at least our culture), and although violators of norms and traditions and shared values are likely to be ostracized and afflicted with great mental distress, that does not mean bestiality is immoral. It is not immoral for a girl to veer from traditional gender expectations by playing baseball with boys and by refusing to wear dresses. Nor is it immoral for a rich man to give most of his wealth to a stranger instead of to his family. Abolitionists faced ostracism for opposing slavery. That did not make their mission immoral. Homosexuals faced alienation from their own families for engaging in same-sex romance. That did not make such romance wrong.
(4) It seems odd to say that a person who lets an animal do sexual things to him as part of its own uncoerced desire, a person who also makes it a point to protect the welfare of the animal at all times, is mentally deranged. Especially considering unproblematic cases of bestiality (as in Cases 7-9), saying that bestiality is a mental illness sounds uncomfortably close to saying that homosexuality is a mental illness (as it was until the mid 1970s). Besides, there are many practices of the mentally ill that we regard as morally permissible, anyway (like washing one’s hands a hundred times a day). The mental illness charge is only a rhetorical flourish, irrelevant to the issue. And for whatever it might be worth to say at this point, not everyone who engages in bestiality is acting out of some warped sexual orientation or entrenched fetish. Just as some men engage in sex with other men in jail as a stopgap until women became available, some people engage in bestiality due to lacking options (for a variety of reasons).[39] I do not want to perpetuate an unfortunate stereotype, though. Just as it was not true (despite the old stereotype prior to the gay-rights revolution) that women only have sex with women because they are somehow unwanted by men, it is not true that people only have sex with animals because they are ugly or lacking in features a human mate would find desirable. Some engage in sexual contact with animals as a way to rid themselves of venereal diseases, or to grow their penises, or to increase their sexual prowess, or to practice before marriage, or to commemorate their first hunting kill, or to push boundaries and experiment. Some find animals better partners. Some find sexual contact with animals a holy aspect of religious ritual.[40] Think of the goat sex involved in the ancient Greek worship of Pan. Or take a less-familiar contemporary case: that of the Matang tribe, where men have sex with cows—the sacred symbol of life and motherhood in Hindu culture—as part of the devotional ritual worship of Kamakhya, a goddess of fertility.
(5) Despite Kant’s claim that no animal ever turns to sexual activity beyond the species divide (an assumption from which he derives the conclusion that to practice bestiality is to degrade oneself even lower than that of animals),[41] interspecies sex—even if comparatively rare—is practiced widely across the animal kingdom. Bonobos, our closest relatives, engage in sex with other primates as well as turtles and birds. Dolphins engage in sexual activity with various aquatic animals—and are known for trying to mate with humans. Then there are dogs, ducks, fruit flies, beetles, tortoises. The list goes on. The pet cat humping the pet rabbit; the billy goat horny enough force itself into any hole—sexual contact between species has been taking place as long as different sexual species have lived in proximity to one another.[42] But all that is no matter. Even if no other creature engages in interspecies sex, that would have no relevance to whether bestiality is morally permissible. No other creature builds airplanes or bakes cookies or plays basketball or takes out a second mortgage on their home for invitro fertilization. None of that entails that these activities are immoral.
(6) It could be said that licking stamps violates the original purpose of the tongue. But that does not make it wrong to do so. And consider some additional points.
(a) We do not say homosexual behavior or anal sex or fellatio is wrong just because it cannot result in babies. And for those like Aquinas and Kant (and a long line of others) who say it is wrong for precisely that reason, many of them I imagine do not find it wrong to have sex with their wives after menopause or after a full hysterectomy.[43]
(b) It is logically possible for there to be a species with which humans could mate. That logical possibility, in fact, motivated Mengele to force dogs and Jewish girls to copulate in an attempt to create the perfect slave laborer. Breeding between different species is rare, yes. The genetic difference is often too extreme for fertilization to occur. There are exceptions, however: ligers, for example. Some might say, although I would be uncomfortable agreeing, that interbreeding between humans and Denisovans was an actual case. But the actuality is no matter. The logical possibility of hybridism is all that counts for the specific objection at hand.
(7) People—well, some—find it revolting, and for evolutionarily-engrained reasons, to clean toilets and to handle tarantulas. And many people found miscegenation, long deemed “unnatural” too, as puke-worthy as I find engaging in scat-sex with a pig. But that does not make such behaviors wrong. We should also be careful about talk of nature “dishing out payback” to people who have sexual relations with animals, or to people who eat other people, or to people who eat feces. Diseases have spread in all these cases, yes. But human susceptibility to these diseases is not locked in place regardless as to how evolution unfolds. Many people are resistant to kuru, for example. And the culling hand of evolution selects such people as fittest (all other things being equal) in those environments so starved of protein that humans look tasty. It should be noted, in addition, that nature also equips humans with a high-powered brain to work around susceptibilities we do have, as I discuss in the section on zoonotic diseases (section 7). In the kuru case at hand, the humans can simply avoid eating the brain flesh of their fellow humans.
(8) To condemn bestiality as wrong because it serves no instrumental purpose is unreasonable when we consider that someone might masturbate their dog out of an empathy-oriented purpose of relieving the animal’s frustration. And what about the dolphin in Case 9? Surely she finds her behavior useful to some specific end: getting off and, so we can imagine, bonding too. The swimmer as well finds his part in the interaction useful to some specific end: getting the dolphin off, seeing what will happen, bonding. Especially if the swimmer loves the dolphin and is, say, more turned on by the exoticness of the encounter than he would be either masturbating or being with another human, the interaction serves an emotional and physical purpose. It helps foster a relationship. One might say that it is ridiculous to assume that a connection is being had here. But there are cases where dolphins—who do have rich emotional lives—get bonded to specific swimmers, even waiting for them to drive up to the dock. To say that we do not know if this is real (despite the repeated sexual play and waiting and cuddling) is to set the bar high enough that we could voice the same skepticism about human-to-human interactions. And what would that matter anyway, especially given our hookup-culture where it is popular to have unemotional sex? Such a world might not be preferable, but we do not say it is immoral for people to hook up. Deep connection is not a requirement of morally kosher sexual interaction.
5.3. Conclusion
Merely citing the supposed unnaturalness of bestiality is insufficient to establish its moral impermissibility. More relevant reasons would be needed even if bestiality were unnatural (which it is not). To make the point in the same terms I used against the other anti-bestiality arguments explored so far, kicking infants in the head for the fun of it is wrong, if it really is wrong, not at root because it is unnatural, but rather because of facts that have direct bearing on the issue—facts such as, for example, that the infant and its loved ones would experience unnecessary pain. The opponent of bestiality, therefore, needs to disclose what these facts are in the case of bestiality.
6. Animal-Wellbeing Case
6.1. Argument
Bestiality is morally impermissible, so more and more people now argue, because it negatively impacts the wellbeing of animals, whether by violating their welfare (that is, inflicting unnecessary suffering to which they do not consent) or by violating their rights (fundamentally, the right not to be treated as mere objects bereft of personal interests).[44] Beirne states the idea as follows.
Bestiality should be understood as interspecies sexual assault. . . . [S]exual assault on an animal by a human is a harm that is objectionable for the same reasons as is an assault on one human by another—because it involves coercion, because it produces pain and suffering and because it violates the rights of another being.[45]
The basic animal-wellbeing argument against bestiality should be clear.
1. If bestiality violates the wellbeing of animals, then bestiality is morally impermissible.
2. Bestiality violates the wellbeing of animals.
Therefore, bestiality is morally impermissible.
This argument has several key strengths. Saying that bestiality violates animal wellbeing is, unlike what we saw in earlier arguments, a directly relevant reason for its immorality. This argument, furthermore, better reflects contemporary culture, aligning with the recent shift in ethical and legal discourse around bestiality, a shift—one I find overdue, even if it is largely gum flap—from rejecting it on human-debasement grounds to rejecting it on animal-cruelty grounds.
So premise 1 seems hard to deny on the reasonable assumption that animals have moral status—reasonable, of course, since animals are sentient agents with various interests and a fundamental stake in their security. But what about premise 2? The opponent of bestiality might offer the following cumulative defense, revolving essentially around the issue of consent.
First, even in cases where it fails to cause damage or humiliation, bestiality involves treating an animal as a mere means to our own ends. If animals were like hammers, which have no goals of their own, then perhaps it would not be wrong to treat them as if their value were merely instrumental to our own goals. But animals have goals of their own, as well as the agency to figure out effective ways to fulfill those goals. As creatures, in effect, with inherent worth, they deserve dignity and respect (rather than being reduced to sex toys).[46
Second, engaging in sexual activities with animals exploits their inability to communicate consent. Consent makes the difference between rape and non-rape in the case of humans. The same principle applies to animals. But animals cannot consent. They do not have enough cognitive power to decide whether they are okay with engaging in sex. Hence sex with animals is wrong even in the absence of pain. Rape need neither hurt nor be pleasureless to be rape.[47]
Third, animals, like small children, do not comprehend the implications of sexual activity even when they are receptive and acting in alignment with their preferences in the moment. Their autonomy, in that case, is endangered any time they are in sexual situations with humans.[48]
Fourth, humans have physical and intellectual capabilities that animals lack. That does not change even in cases where animals enjoy sexual activity with humans, enjoy it enough to pursue it out of overwhelming desire and love. The power differential is particularly pertinent in cases involving domesticated animals. Relying on humans for nourishment and shelter, they lack the power to put a stop to sexual activities with humans. But the power to actively resist plays a crucial role in consent.[49]
Fifth, even when animals appear to doing what they want to do in sexual encounters with humans, we can never be certain of their willingness since they are of a different species. Hence we can never be sure we are not negatively impacting the animal’s wellbeing when we interact with them sexually.[50]
6.2. Response
The cases outlined in section 2 (Cases 4, 7, 8, and 11, in particular) show that bestiality need not negatively impact animal wellbeing. In none of these cases of mutually-voluntary and mutually-pleasurable sexual activity is anyone being treated inhumanely or as if they were not moral agents with interests and goals. Case 8 stands out as an example where such sexual activity even contributes, as do other socially-accepted forms of love contact (snuggling, kissing, petting), to the development of a meaningful interpersonal relationship marked by mutual emotional growth. Since the welfare and autonomy of all parties are being respected in these cases, and since these cases raise no red-flags of power imbalance or cruelty or exploitation, there seems no reason to address the intricacies of the rationale given for premise 2.
Questioning whether such cases are problematic when it comes to animal welfare feels so ridiculous to me, however, that one might worry about my ability to maintain a level head on the matter. Full disclosure, I do struggle in this regard. Using animals as our ploughing slaves and castrating them and eating them, okay—there is definitely debate there. But simply letting them, on their own accord, lick our vagina? That form of bonding plummets to the depths of moral depravity whereas letting them lick our face—nonsexually, of course—is perfectly kosher? Huh!? It seems we have yet another case where sex has made us idiotic, as in when we are totally fine with kids watching people’s heads get blown away each day on TV and yet draw the line—as if their very salvation depended on it—at allowing them to see a penis on screen. But if only because of my level of potentially reason-swamping conviction on the matter, I will gather myself and respond to each aspect of the presented rationale.
First, it is said that bestiality involves treating an animal as a mere means to our own ends. But to use this as grounds to say ultimately that bestiality is morally impermissible is suspect.
(1) Bestiality need not involve using an animal as a mere means. Cases 4-12, especially Cases 7-9 (where the animal’s goals and autonomy are integral to the interaction), make this clear.
(2) Many apparently permissible actions involve, so it seems, treating an animal as a mere means: we house them in zoos and slaughter them for food (often after subjecting them to distressing conditions—sometimes even, as in the case of foie-gras production, to enhance their taste). The opponent of bestiality might say, “Yes, and these practices are immoral too!” Even so (and I do think that conclusion is defensible), the first point applies: some cases of bestiality are clearly reciprocal, where the animal’s goals and purposes are being respected before during and after.
(3) I am willing to insult my intellectual conscience by granting that the slaughter of animals for food does not involve treating animals as mere means but rather is more like the interaction between a patient and the dentist: the patient uses the dentist as a means to fix their teeth and the dentist uses the patient as a means to earn a living. We might say, to try to make this analogy somewhat plausible, that the animals are paid ahead of time for their flesh: they receive care and shelter in exchange for their eventual suffering and “surrender” of life. But if slaughtering factory-farmed animals—or any animals for that matter—need not count as using them as a mere means, then surely bestiality need not either.
Second, it is said that animals cannot give consent. But to use this as grounds to say ultimately that bestiality is morally impermissible is suspect.
(1) Animals are capable of communicating consent and dissent. As ranchers and equine therapists and veterinarians (and anyone with commonsense) will tell you, horses clearly indicate their likes and dislikes through distinct sounds and postures. More importantly, they give okay-to-proceed signals and do-not-proceed signals[51]—signals that often suffice, by the way, for consent in human-to-human sexual interactions.[52] Even lacking the ability to give any sophisticated signals (and horses do have many, for those in the know), a caring human lover—sensitive both to the animal’s cues and the ethical issues surrounding bestiality—will let the animal lead the way (or at least refrain from interfering with its own agential pursuits).[53]
(2) It is crucial to nip in the bud a standard misconception that arises in this context. “If behavioral cues suffice for consent in the case of animals,” so runs the standard misconception, “then that implies something abominable: that behavioral cues—a steady erection and giggles of pleasure, say—suffice for consent in the case of a toddler whose guardian is performing fellatio on him.”[54] Why this is a misconception should be clear. There are relevant differences between the toddler and the animal that block the stated implication.
(a) The toddler has not reached a stage of hormonal maturation allowing for sexual desire. His erection reflects merely a change in blood flow. True behavioral consent, we might say in this case (although I remain skeptical), requires more than the outward signs of physical arousal: it requires as well the hormonal capacity for sexual desire.
(b) The toddler has a future of radically advanced socio-cognitive awareness and agential power, a future in which there is—especially given our culture, which considers being touched sexually by an adult one of the worst traumas—a strong likelihood for him to feel that any behavioral consent he gave in his underdeveloped state was insufficient to make the interaction acceptable.
(c) If in his adult stage he happens to retain memories of the fellatio performed on him, it is likely—considering mainly our social values—that these memories would cause profound emotional harm, would make him feel enraged and violated (likely more than many adults do today when reflecting on the fact that they were circumcised as children or had to suffer through so much secondhand smoke from their parents).
(d) Regardless of the societal values or his later feelings, it seems reasonable to say that the toddler should be “in his right mind”—that is, roughly in the fullest state of awareness we can expect someone of his species to achieve—before making the decision to allow fellatio to be performed upon him. Otherwise he would be signing up for something before his human program, so to say, finishes booting up to the point where it is the most aware it is ever going to be about what is being signed up for.[55]
The orangutan in Case 7, who penetrates the woman according to his own uncoerced plan, is not in the same situation. Aside from the fact that the orangutan does not share the toddler’s physical helplessness and associated need for protection, there is no realistic possibility that the orangutan will be harmed by memories of him pitching away in the primatologist. He is oblivious to our social taboos. He could care less about our hangups around sex, unmoved by what we regard as indecent. He is also at the peak of his powers of self-governance and awareness. Knowing these facts, a conscientious human would not rely solely on body language as an indicator of consent in the case of a toddler even if he does in the case of animals. Humans need only obtain consent from animals in the way that those animals can give it. But that does not mean that humans need only obtain consent from humans in the way that animals can give it.[56]
(3) Because animals can consent, the term “rape” should not be applied to all instances of bestiality. Cases 7-9 clearly do not involve animal rape. The same goes for most of the others. It is not as if the turtle in Case 6 would be distraught to learn what the man did. It does not give a damn about the sexual taboos of human society. If we take the perspective of the animal, the focus is on pleasure and excitement as well as on avoiding pain or stress or disruption in goals or death.[57] That is why there is no rape, for example, in Case 10, where the man sucks off the frustrated dog. The dog, able to dissent at any point, gets pleasure while not being coerced in any way. So long as the sexual activity respects the animal’s boundaries and adheres to their standards of non-injurious and non-distressing engagement (standards that humans do not necessarily share, as we see in cases of BDSM), everything is kosher. To say that the sex is indefensible on grounds that the dog cannot give informed consent is either to ignore that the dog’s consent is sufficiently informed (which I think it is) or else to hold the dog to standards improper for its interests and concerns as well as for its powers of cognition and perceptual awareness—a move as blatantly game-rigging as holding an infant to standards of reading comprehension proper for a twelfth-grader. Besides, requiring the dog to provide that level of consent would render its sexual interactions with other dogs morally impermissible, which is clearly going too far. Case 8 really brings the point home. The dolphin here leads the way, doing the dolphin equivalent of rose petals to the bedroom. And on top of consenting to the act (indeed, with such expressions of high-order reasoning that it is hard not to see her as giving rational consent), she holds the power in the waters anyway. She can dip away even when he is hitting his vinegar strokes. Rather than being taken advantage of, the dolphin’s goals and purposes—as with the swimmer’s—are being carried out live in the carnal interaction.
(4) As if completely out of our minds, people cut the testicles off horny dogs to stop their sexual advances and yet say, in virtually the same breath, that letting dogs—without coercion and acting on their own accord—penetrate human vaginas is one of the ultimate sins since—get this!—“Dogs can’t consent.” What bold—all-too-cretin-like—hypocrisy! Such a violation of our intellectual conscience (our special gift, many believe, from God) seems, so I might say if I were religious, a greater blasphemy of God and God’s standards for us than fornicating with a consenting animal could ever be. Look at it this way. Many would say it is not immoral for a person to nail horse shoes into horse hooves without securing the horse’s permission through okay-to-proceed cues—yes, even with the help of ropes and Cosby sedatives. Many would say it is unproblematic to do what is most commonly done when gelding a horse (“to reduce its aggression” and “to improve its behavior”): namely, restraining it in place so that it cannot get away—yes, even despite cues that its boundaries are being disrespected (irreversibly) and that it is in pain. Many would say it is morally acceptable that professionals be called in to “fix” or “break” horses resistant to being haltered and saddled—yes, even if such “fixing” or “breaking” involves forcing them to accept the lesser of two evils by means of punishments packaged, so goes the HR-cold euphemism we use to sleep better, as a matter of “establishing authority.” But if these activities are morally permissible, surely Cases 4-12 are as well. After all, even the more controversial of these cases never get more controversial than training your dog to find the fun in jump-catching a frisbee (despite the risk of a chipped tooth or a broken leg) or in diving down into deep pools to fetch weighted balls (despite the risk of drowning)—activities that bring so much joy into the lives of the dog, the owner, and all the people watching on TikTok.[58] To highlight the point to the fullest extent, many who reject bestiality wholesale on consent grounds eat animals—yes, even though one of the deepest drives, that of self-preservation, makes animals dissent to the highest degree that could ever be expressed in the biological world whenever their lives are endangered. People who kill and eat animals and yet who reject all bestiality on consent grounds are just flapping at the lips, groping to say anything—even flagrant hypocrisies—to preserve the cherished taboos protecting (through mere delusion) their insecure sense of specialness. Most of us think, I imagine, that humans have moral obligations toward animals. But if—and despite the slap-in-the-cow-face fact that nonanimal sources of protein and iron and vitamin B12 are accessible—we are not violating moral obligations by killing cows (killing them for food, say, rather than out of malice), then surely we are not violating such moral obligations by allowing—here too out of no malice—the dog of its own accord to take us from behind. Mutual respect for wellbeing and for one another’s interests are honored in the latter case but seemingly not in the former case.
(5) As we have seen, we do not think consent is required when making use of animals in various ways we consider morally permissible—yes, even in ways that involve their torture and death. You know what makes this even more perplexing? If a sober adult human verbally consents (repeatedly over years) to having done to him the sorts of things routinely done to clearly-dissenting animals (eating them, say), many legal codes and ethicists would say the consent here—despite being informed and verbal—does not matter: the activity (the killing and eating) is still a crime and immoral.[59] A common explanation why people think consent is not required when making use of animals—indeed, why the same people who think that it is immoral to eat a consenting human think at the same time that it is not immoral to eat a dissenting animal—is that animals do not have the same level of consciousness as humans and so do not enjoy the same rights. But if the opponent of bestiality were to adopt such an explanation, then he would have simply jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. For that explanation would clearly apply to bestiality too. In fact, for reasons already stated, bestiality is less problematic than killing for food—less even in many of the immoral cases (see Case 2), but way less when conducted in a manner that respects animal wellbeing and (by a mutual exchange of benefits) that do not involve treating animals as mere means. It is certainly less problematic than slaughter of the factory-farmed variety. It avoids, as least in the benign cases, the torture and death of the animal and respects the sentience and the dignity of the animal, exposing it neither to strain nor humiliation. Perhaps it might also be relevant to add that it comes neither with the hefty environmental impacts (deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution) nor the health concerns of eating animal flesh (heart disease, diabetes, and cancers).[60]
(6) So many of us endorse the following triad: (a) animals can never consent; (b) animal consent need not be obtained in order for nonsexual engagement with humans to be permissible; (c) animal consent must be obtained in order for sexual engagement with humans to be permissible. One problem with holding these three positions is that it renders impermissible many of the sexual practices involved in animal husbandry: masturbating animals, fingering their anuses, playing with their testicles, tying their penises closed to prevent ejaculate from leaking, inseminating them, and so on. If one insists that such human assistance should not count as sexual activity (which sounds quite ridiculous), then the bigger problem—namely, the seeming impossibility of reconciling claim-b and claim-c (that is, the seeming impossibility of laying out an ethical principle according to which animal-consent matters when it comes to sexual interactions but does not matter when it comes to nonsexual interactions)—only becomes more difficult to address. What ethically-relevant justification could there ever be, after all, for saying that, whereas lack of consent renders masturbating a pig for sexual purposes immoral, lack of consent does not render masturbating a pig for nonsexual purposes immoral? Yes, it might be (say, for human-wellbeing issues I discuss in the next section) that masturbating a pig for sexual purposes is immoral whereas doing so for nonsexual reasons is not. But that is not the point here. The point is how mere lack of consent can render the former action immoral while not rendering the latter action immoral.
(7) Doing something to someone without their consent does not automatically render that something immoral anyway, so it might be relevant to remember. We kiss our babies—yes, even though they might grow up to hate us and hate that we kissed them. We put antibiotics in our fish tanks. We put our dogs on leashes. We hold a door open for someone behind us. We greet people with a hug or handshake without asking first. We take photographs of horses even when they keep turning away from our electro gaze. We trim the cat’s claws so it will not scratch the furniture and clip the bird’s wings so it will not fly away from its captivity. We organize surprise birthday parties. We give someone advice without their asking. We make small talk with people in an elevator. We choose the educational paths and schools of our children. We send our dogs to training schools and board them in kennels and lock them in bedrooms when guests are over even if they resist. We have children despite their having no say in the matter and even though they have a future of radically advanced socio-cognitive awareness in which there is—whether because of the mental and physical suffering inherent to life, or because of concerns with overpopulation and resource depletion and environmental cataclysm, or because of angst about life having no ultimate point anyway—a decent likelihood (especially in our doom-and-gloom epoch of rapidly-growing antinatalism) that they will prefer never to have been born. What, then, is wrong with the girl in Case 4, slated to die after a short life into which she was thrown, getting off in her own private world on the back of the horse without its consent?
Third, and tied up with the issue of consent, it is said that animals do not understand the implications of sexual acts. But to use this as grounds to say ultimately that bestiality is morally impermissible is suspect.
(1) Let us be careful about crowding the diversity of animals into one monolithic cage, as if what goes for an insect on this matter goes for creatures like dolphins (who use baby talk around their children to whom they even transmit cultural practices like tool use). Higher-order mammals make informed choices and know the implications of their sexual activity, as is made clear after a few minutes on TikTok watching bonobos and dolphins masturbating and fornicating in the cleverest ways. Case 8 is a perfect example. Both the dolphin and the swimmer understand that each intends to use the other as a means to their own ends—although not, even though the dolphin is persistent to the point of aggression, as a mere means (so let us assume). Both aware of the implications of the sexual activity, they enter a sort of mutual agreement where one another’s autonomy is respected, which in many cases is not something we can say of our supposedly “innocuous” sex-based interactions with animals: castrating them, inseminating them (again and again in the case of cows in order to ensure a steady flow of supermarket milk), fondling them to be more receptive to semen, tying them to breeding racks, roping up their penises so none of their ejaculate will leak, and so on. And even if I admit against my better judgment that smarter mammals like horses and dolphins and bonobos do not know the implications to the requisite degree (whatever that might be), then it would seem to follow (all other things being equal) that it is immoral for dolphins to grind sexually on other dolphins (or many of the other creatures they grind upon). Surely that is going too far.
(2) For animals where it is less obvious that they understand the implications, what matter really is that fact so long as their welfare is being honored in the various ways I discussed? Surely it is not morally impermissible for them to have sex with their own kind even if they lack the mental firepower to tease out the implications. So all other safeguards in place (which is more than these animals can expect in sexual relations with most other animals), what relevance does their not knowing the implications have when involved in sex with humans? What matter is it, for example, if the tween girl in Case 4 gets off from the horse gyrations? The horse is no more the wiser than the sofa arm on which the girl also grinds. Aside from the small difference in intent and the rider’s added pleasure, what morally relevant difference is there from just simply riding the horse but not getting off? The horse’s autonomy and welfare and status as a morally worthy entity is being respected either way.
(3) A turtle has no idea what is happening when we take its picture. And yet it is, presumably, morally okay for us to do so. If it is morally okay to take its picture even though it lacks a relevantly-robust understanding of the picture-taking practice (which it has no power to want, or to allow, or to resist), then the turtle’s not knowing the implication of the man’s ejaculating on its shell in Case 6 does not render the action impermissible.
(4) If you insist that an animal’s not knowing the implication of sexual activity with a human renders that activity impermissible, then you better not hold that it is morally okay to take pictures of horses and dogs or castrate them. After all, horses and dogs could be said to understand the implications of neutering and picture taking (practices that are a relatively new human design) even less than the implications of fornicating (a practice, common to human and beast alike, more ancient than the nervous system).
Fourth, and also tied up with the issue of consent, it is said that animals have less power than humans. But to use this as grounds to say ultimately that bestiality is morally impermissible is suspect.
(1) The animals involved in bestiality need not be domesticated or dependent on humans. Male chimpanzees have been known to attempt to mount human females. Male dolphins and walruses and sea lions have been known to attempt to mount human swimmers.
(2) It does not seem to matter even if the animals are dependent on humans for food and shelter. Many human housewives were in a similar position in the last century, and yet their sexual relations with their husbands are not generally seen as morally problematic.
(3) Many of the animals we geld and mate and ride and cage and slaughter are dependent on humans for their livelihoods too, and yet these activities—at least some of them—are considered morally unproblematic. Whereas grinding out a clitoral orgasm on the back of the horse means nothing traumatic to the horse, and whereas letting the dog lick your vagina means—unlike with heady humans in their symbolic worlds—nothing traumatic to the dog (and, in fact, can be as fun and bonding as playing fetch), their castration does mean something traumatic to them. It is a heavy event. Their castration involves taking advantage of their inability to resist. For the sake of the argument at least, I might even go so far as to say that the person who beholds another cut off the testicles of a horse has an inner sense (echoed perhaps in the fact that genital mutilation is considered an abhorrent practice in the case of humans)—an inner sense, a moral conscience, that tells him he is witnessing an action of the highest orders of immorality. On the other hand, I would add that a person beholding a dog lick a woman’s vagina has an inner sense—however drowned out by societal disgust—that tells him this action is permissible (if not blessed).
(4) It need not matter that the human is smarter and more cognitively equipped. So long as the animal is consenting in its own way and is free to dissent (as opposed, say, to being held in place), then the disparity in intellectual ability is irrelevant (as it is in the case of a genius human having sex with a regular human from the block).
(5) As for physicality rather than intelligence, there need not be a human-leaning imbalance in power (see Cases 4, 7, 8, 11, and 12). The horse in Case 11, for example, has much more physical power than the man slurping at her vulva and can move away at any time.
(6) Whether there is a physical imbalance does not seem to matter anyway. Power imbalances exist in various unproblematic relationships. What matters is whether no coercion is happening and whether all consenting partners are free to dissent at any time. We do not find a problem with a giant man having sex with a woman with dwarfism who—lacking legs, to boot—cannot effectively resist if the man does not want her too. The deciding factor is not whether the physically-weaker party can effectively resist the other, but rather whether the physically-stronger party is willing and able to back down if the other wants him to. The same goes in the case of those animal-to-human sexual interactions. The issue is whether the human is willing and able to back down if the animal does not want the sexual activity or, in cases where the animal does not know what is happening (see Cases 4-6), that the human does not hurt the animal or interfere with its interests and goals.
(7) Of course, one might say that the physical imbalance in the case of human-to-human sexual activity is not a problem since there is a social network to protect the physically-weaker party. But just as prostitutes can enjoy more protection when prostitution is decriminalized and destigmatized, animals can enjoy more protections when bestiality is decriminalized and destigmatized. Of course, the turtle cannot call the police if it is being forced into unwilling situations. But this applies to any of our interactions with turtles, even the most uncontroversial ones: petting it, lifting it, cleaning it. The best we can do, then, is let the animal speak on its own terms. If it does not want to be under the heat lamp, it will move. To demand that it would have to be able to contact the police in some way in order for sexual interaction with it to be permissible would be an unreasonably high standard, a standard rendering even its interaction with other turtles impermissible.
Fifth, it is said that we can never be sure that the animal is fully willing to engage in sexual activities with a human. But to use this as grounds to say ultimately that bestiality is morally impermissible is suspect.
(1) By extrapolating from our own wants and interests and behaviors, we can understand the wants and interests and behaviors of animals (higher-order mammals, in particular). We can empathize with the hummingbird’s elaborate dance in front of a female: we ourselves engage in such courtship rituals—using elaborate displays (vibrant clothing, shiny accessories, confident body language, dance moves) as well as being persistent in our courting attempts (thereby showcasing both our discipline and the sincerity of our desire). We can empathize with the moose mother who chases down, despite the danger, the bear that attacked her child: we ourselves are possessed of this drive to protect our loved ones. We can empathize with wolves hunting in packs, and ants working together to build complex colonies, and orcas coordinating their efforts to catch prey: we ourselves reap the benefits of working together toward shared objectives. We can empathize with lion cubs chasing one another and wrestling as their parents laze about in the shade: we ourselves were largely the same way as children and are now largely the same way as adults, envious of the boundless energy of the young. We can empathize with dolphin mothers passing down to their offspring the tradition of using sea sponges to protect their snouts while foraging on the sea floor: we ourselves transmit so many techniques to our young, as in when we teach them to use chopsticks to pickup food or to identify poisonous snakes or so on. Our empathetic grasp of what is going on with animals is especially true when it comes to our pets. In such bonded proximity, animal and human start becoming more like one another, enough perhaps even to blur species boundaries (if only metaphorically). We start to become more like our dogs, for example: becoming more attuned to certain smells and sounds and nonverbal cues; empathizing, in general, with the doggy point of view (as in when outdoor spots good for taking a pee start standing out to us). Our dogs, on the other hand, start to become more like us: learning the meanings of words; increasing their problem-solving skills and cognitive abilities to much greater levels than their wild counterparts; eating human foods on a human schedule; vocalizing to music and humming and singing like their owners. Since we can largely understand the wants and needs of animals, we surely can in regards to sex—sex being, unlike computer programming or poetry writing, a practice (along with eating and sleeping) in which we become virtually one with animals.
(2) It might be said that we can never be sure the animal is fully willing to engage in sexual activities because, as we know with humans (especially in the case of rape), body language is one thing and wanting to go through with a sexual act is another. But that gap is not so extreme in the case of animals. Unlike a human who might put on a smile façade but really be angry inside, it is extremely unlikely that a dog is not truly feeling affection toward you despite overwhelming you with affection signals: nuzzling, licking, jumping on you with tail-wagging excitement, exposing its underbelly for reciprocal rubs, and so forth. The same goes when it comes to sexual behavior. However much a person who has sex with animals is revolting embarrassment to humankind, much more of a revolting embarrassment is the person who says, on the one hand, “We can never know if animals really want to engage in sex,” and yet who says, on the other hand, (in light of the kisses and cuddles) “My dog loves when I take him to the park!” or (in light of the torn up shoes and scratches at the door) “My dog hates when I leave for work.” The gap, by any ordinary measure, completely closes in cases when the unconditioned animal is the aggressor of the sexual activity the whole way through (see Cases 7-9). And even in cases where the human is the initiator, priority can be given to the animal steering the interaction. That would be a reasonable gauge as to whether the animal really is down. Case 10 is a good example. The man does not restrict the dog from stopping the fellatio and yet the dog stays put, wiggling to heighten the experience. This is unlike the case described, and approvingly so, by Temple Grandin, where the farm boars—although fondled in ways sensitive to their individual turn-ons—presumably cannot evade the sexual stimulation or the money-making mounting it is meant to incite.
Each boar had his own little perversion the [farmer] had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen. Some of them were just things like the boar wanted to have his dandruff scratched while they were collecting him. . . . The other things the man had to do were a lot more intimate. He might have to hold the boar’s penis in exactly the right way that the boar liked, and he had to masturbate some of them in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he told me, who wanted to have his butt hole played with. ‘I have to stick my finger in his butt, he just really loves that,’ he told me. . . . [H]e’s one of the best in the business.[61]
(3) If my opponent insists, in spite of all this, that we can never be sure the animal is fully willing to engage in sexual activities even in the case where animals are clearly and effectively consenting (see Case 7-12), then presumably this is because—for what else could be the reason at this point?—we cannot get inside the animal’s head. But the same can be said in the case of consensual-seeming sex with a fellow human. Some firecracker can mount me, but I can never be sure if she is fully willing to engage since I do not have access to her first-person point of view. She might not even be conscious, a philosophical zombie, for all I know. This is, of course, the “problem of other minds.” If the problem of other minds in the former case renders bestiality immoral, then the problem of other minds in the latter case renders run-of-the-mill sexual activities between humans immoral too. Surely this is an unwelcome result.
Sixth, if someone—despite all I have said—remains concerned about sexual interactions between humans and animals even in radically innocuous cases (like Case 4 or Cases 8-11), there is a technical solution—one I think, however, is often excessive and degrading while also practically difficult: the presence of a third-party animal-welfare advocate who, as an ethicist and expert on the communication styles of all parties involved, could ensure that no abuse occurs and that dignity is respected. The third-party referee—not only knowledgeable about the animal’s capabilities and level of interest and signs (especially of distress), but also driven by a vocational desire to ensure animal safety and sexual enjoyment—would keep in mind the context of the sexual interaction to ensure that no coercion or exploitation or cruelty takes place and that the animal is genuinely enjoying the activity. The man in Case 10, for example, can have a dog-welfare advocate present before any fellatio occurs. Any additional measures to safeguard the animal’s welfare can be worked into the example. And if not, then quite frankly the demand is too high. The demand is high enough, I suspect, to come at the price of rendering even heterosexual interactions between married humans, and sexual interactions between animals of the same species, impermissible. That would be going too far, I gather most would agree.
6.3. Conclusion
Engaging in sexual interactions with animals presents ethical concerns that extend beyond consent and into consideration of the animal’s sexual autonomy, bodily integrity, and inherent rights (issues addressed in this section). That said, consent might very well be the major issue to tackle when focusing on the morality of bestiality. After all, if one ever is stupid enough to question the legitimacy of our taboo against bestiality (as I did on that fated playdate), one is most likely going to hear right away—in a tone of how-stupid-can-you-be righteousness (a tone somehow made even more pathetic by its roboticism)—“Animals can’t consent!”
Let me end, then, with an argument that serves to rope together some of the nuances surrounding the issue of bestiality and consent.
1. Either an animal can in some sense consent or an animal cannot in any sense consent.
2. If an animal can in some sense consent, then sexual activity with that animal is morally permissible so long as the human (a) respects the sort of consent they can give, while also (b) making sure—perhaps in part by honoring the principle that the lesser one’s power to consent the more control one should have in the interaction—that the animal is never doing what it does not want to do, that it is not in pain, and that it is not the sort of creature whose powers of consent will advance radically enough for it to be reasonable to wait until that time.
3. If an animal cannot in any sense consent (neither at a different time nor even in the most trivial way of an amoeba’s advancing toward food or retreating from danger), then one need not worry about consent when engaging in sexual activity with the animal any more than one need worry about a candle’s consent when sticking it up our butts, in which case sexual activity with such an animal is morally permissible so long as, of course, the animal is not harmed or disrupted in their goal pursuits (or whatever other conditions are morally relevant here: such as—in case onlooker feelings are morally relevant—that the sexual activity is carried out in private so no one is triggered).
Therefore, sexual activity with animals can be morally permissible (whether or not the animal can give any degree of consent).
7. Human-Wellbeing Case
7.1. Argument
Bestiality is morally impermissible, so some argue, because it is detrimental to the wellbeing of humans. Not only does engaging in sexual activity pose physical and psychological and emotional risks to humans, it also threatens to alienate them from society (if not from the very essence of being human).
The core reasoning here should be clear.
1. If bestiality violates the wellbeing of humans, then bestiality is morally impermissible.
2. Bestiality violates the wellbeing of humans.
Therefore, bestiality is morally impermissible.
This human-centered strategy seems to be the only viable one left for justifying the impermissibility of bestiality.[62] If not that it negatively impacts human wellbeing in some fashion, what other grounds for rejecting bestiality can there be aside from the ones already explored? Besides (and as might be expected considering that most of what we deem morally right or morally wrong reflects what is conducive to human survival and flourishing), it seems clear that—whatever animal-centered language we might use—the real issue with bestiality centers around us. Think about it. As far as most of us are concerned at least, what makes bestiality wrong cannot be—to cite a common benchmark for rape among humans—something as simple as unwanted penetration (of “sexual regions,” in particular). On top of the fact that bestiality need not involve any penetration whatsoever (see Cases 4 and 6), so many of the standard husbandry and research practices supported by rejecters of bestiality involve unwanted penetration (catheter insertion, vaginal massage, anal electrocution, and so on)—penetration, in fact, that can be quite painful and damaging, which is why those new to inseminating cows are recommended to work only upon those both thoroughly restrained and slated for slaughter soon after. If these animal-victimizing practices are kosher—yes, even when they are overtly sexual (as in when the forearm-cramping farmer fingers boar buttholes to enliven boar erections)—then where else to turn but to the human, how the human is affected, as justification for our moral proscription against bestiality? That it is really all about us makes so much sense. By some magic similar to what we see in performative speech acts (the “I do” of marriage ceremonies or the “I hereby name this vessel ‘Charlotte’” of boat christenings), merely the addition of human intent and arousal changes the fisting of a horse or the fingering of a pig from a kosher farmhand procedure to the epitome of moral depravity.[63] That it is really all about us makes so much sense when we consider the flagrant arbitrariness by which we decide, to give an independent example, which animals are friends and which are food—so full of ourselves on the matter that we scream in protest with our Burger-King breath at how any one could eat dog or cat or horse or guinea pig or bonobo or elephant or dolphin (even when such creatures have died of old age). We are the ones who say it is okay to train a dog to do this trick (catch a potentially tooth-chipping frisbee), but not okay to train it to do that trick (lick a vagina—indeed, not okay even when the animal does it out of untrained desire).[64] Clearly it is all about us. And that is the power of the argument at hand.
So the crux of the matter comes down to whether premise 2 is true. Cases like 6 and 9 seem to show that it is not. But the opponent of bestiality might offer the following cumulative rationale.
First, engaging in sex with animals increases the likelihood of spreading zoonotic diseases. The viruses and bacteria and funguses and parasites common to nonhuman animals could pose a terrible threat to human health. And we are not just talking about the single human who engages in bestiality becoming ill or disabled or worse. The disease can spread to other humans, leading to outbreaks. Humans have contracted several zoonotic diseases from animals. Q fever and leptospirosis are two bacterial examples. HIV, a viral example, is one of the most devastating. The consensus is that HIV originated from a type of chimp in central Africa. Interspecies sexual activity is a leading explanation for how it spread to humans (another being that tribal hunters came into close contact with infected blood while butchering chimps for meat). For all we know, animals might carry diseases that have even stranger and more torturous consequences. Just as not wearing a mask at the time of an airborne pandemic is immoral (so at least one might say), engaging in sex with animals is too.[65]
Second, engaging in sex with animals increases the likelihood of physical injury. To say nothing of the physical harm that humans could inflict on animals, humans who engage in bestiality face the risk of allergic reactions and injuries. More often than one would think hospitals see patients suffering from genitalia bites and rectal injuries from sexual encounters with animals.[66] The risk of injury was brought to wide public attention by the documentary Zoo, which recounts with rather graphic footage the tale of Kenneth Pinyan. Pinyan died from a perforated colon as a result of a deep thrust from a horse at a Washington farm (a pound town, so to say, where authorities seized hundreds of hours of bestiality video).
Third, engaging in sex with animals increases the likelihood of entrenching destructive habits and attitudes within humans. If we engage in sex with animals, then it is easier to slip into engaging in sex with noncompliant animals. And if we engage in sex with noncompliant animals, then then it is easier to slip into engaging in sex with noncompliant humans. Therefore, if we engage in sex with animals, then it is easier to slip into engaging in what is obviously immoral: namely, rape of humans. Or look at it this way. If we engage in sex with animals, then it is easier to slip into using them as a means to our own ends. And if we use them as a means to our own ends, then it is easier to slip into using our fellow humans as a means to our own ends.[67] It is worth noting that empirical evidence links bestiality and various forms of criminal conduct, especially of a sexual nature: public masturbation, rape, necrophilia, child molestation. The link between bestiality and human-to-human predation, reflected in several studies showing the significant number of prisoners who have had sexual interactions with animals, is a major reason behind the legal crackdown on bestiality in recent years.[68] We all know anecdotally that serial killers, Dahmer comes to mind, often start out as animal abusers.
Fourth, engaging in sex with animals is antisocial. On top of not being evolutionarily advantageous, it is extremely weird and fails to create meaningful connections between humans. It violates the deepest of our norms and values regarding appropriate sexual conduct, undermining societal health and cohesion. On top of debilitating feelings of shame and devastating internal conflict disruptive of one’s very sense of self, those who engage in bestiality will be targets of law enforcement, as well as of distressing ridicule and persecution, to which career-loss isolation even from friends and family is the chief solution. The situation is only heightened in our current epoch. If merely assigning Mark Twain in a college class, or citing a statistic that does not harmonize with the “lived experience” of a student from a “vulnerable population,” can get the professor “canceled” from his source of livelihood and subjected to mob ridicule and violence, what the hell will become of someone who engages in sexual activity with an animal—especially if that person already has the white optics of an oppressor? Humans need social networks. Bestiality is clearly immoral.[69]
Fifth, engaging in sex with animals threatens to alienate us from our human identity.[70] A car can be a type of thing distinct from every other type of thing only so long as there are limits beyond which its changes—say, being melted down to liquid metal and plastic—would render it no longer a car. It is important, likewise, that there be limits beyond which a human cannot cross without becoming nonhuman. One of those limits is sexual activity beyond our species. Look at it this way. Imagine the animal lover is as conscientious as can be: she ensures the animal’s welfare is honored; she uses condoms or perhaps merely engages in heavy petting to be on the safe side; she allows the interaction to take place only if there is instrumental value for each party; she allows the animal to lead the way; and so on. Even so, the animal lover will always know deep down that she is a sexual pervert.[71] The human, unable to shake memory of past depravity, will be daily damaged by guilty reminders. She will know she does not belong to the human community.
7.2. Response
As Cases 4, 6, and 9 especially show, bestiality need not negatively impact human wellbeing. What reason is there, then, to get into the weeds of addressing the above points? But in case my strong views on this matter have clouded my judgment, I will respond to each.
First, it is said that bestiality is immoral because it poses a risk of transmission of zoonotic disease. There are several problems with this line of reasoning.
(1) Just because an activity comes with risk of disease transmission does not in itself make it morally wrong. Engaging in sexual activities with other humans, after all, poses such a risk. But that does not make human-to-human sexual relationships wrong. Indeed, one of the reasons why HIV and other STDs have higher rates of transmission among male homosexual populations is because, in addition to the fact that male homosexual populations are statistically more likely to engage in unprotected sex with multiple partners, the rectal canal is more susceptible to tearing compared to the vaginal canal. We do not condemn—indeed, we see it as barbaric to condemn—male homosexual sex on such grounds, though. We do not even find it immoral for a man with HIV to have sex with a man who does not have HIV—so long as everyone is informed and consenting.
(2) It is possible for humans to engage in safe sex with animals. Hygienic practices and precautionary measures can go a long way. Instead of raw thrusts into the anal cavity of a dog clammed up in resistance to what it does not want done to it, a human—on top of proceeding only when the dog is accepting and showing positive signs of interest (such as self-initiated cuddling and rubbing) and uncoerced and free to opt out and the like—can wear a condom, can sanitize the relevant genital areas, can enter the vaginal canal (as opposed to the more fragile anal canal), can make sure the animal gets veterinary tests before and after. Going through such a checklist would reduce transmission chances to less than that of what exists in sexual interactions between humans. Besides, the human could aways be extra safe and not penetrate at all!
(3) Especially when we consider indirect forms of sexual engagement (Cases 4, 6, and 9), the risk of disease transmission through bestiality might not be higher than other forms of human-to-animal interactions we accept as morally permissible: helping to guide the horse penis into the semen-collection tube, or fondling the sow to be more receptive to insemination, or helping the pig give birth, or pulling the lodged plug of feces from the anus of the constipated elephant (despite the flood of pent-up fecal-staph juice), or allowing the dog (despite the risk of illness spread by its fleas and ticks) to sleep in our beds and lick our faces out of love. Any contact with animals—sexual or not—poses a risk of disease transmission. We get diseases from them all the time, sometimes just by being in their vicinity.[72] That does not make our interaction with them immoral. And what about our consumption of animal flesh: red meat, dairy, shellfish?[73] Consumption of animal products is responsible for some of the biggest threats to human health: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. But even here we do not say that such consumption is immoral. In fact, the majority of us in the US regard a plant-based diet as something extreme.[74]
Second, it is said that bestiality is immoral because it increases the likelihood of humans being injured. There are several problems with this line of reasoning.
(1) Not all instances of bestiality pose a significant risk for physical injury. Cases 4 and 6, where the risk is minimal (if not nonexistent), make this clear. Even in more hardcore scenarios, humans can take precautions to protect themselves. That is what humans do in human-to-human interaction where physical risks are present: telling a friend where one is, carrying mace, or so on.
(2) Risk of injury alone does not make an activity immoral. Many of us admire skydivers, mountain climbers, Alaskan crab fisherman, MMA fighters, astronauts, and so forth. If individuals are allowed to assume risk of physical harm in other contexts, the risk of physical harm should not stand in the way of their freedom to engage in bestiality.
Third, it is said that bestiality is immoral because it increases the likelihood of entrenching destructive habits and attitudes within humans. There are several problems with this line of reasoning.
(1) Saying that to engage in sex with animals increases the probability of engaging in animal rape, which then increases the probability of engaging in human rape, is a clear slippery-slope fallacy. The argument fails to consider other factors that might block the cascade into depravity. How can it be that engaging in sex with compliant animals need not lead to engaging in sex with noncompliant animals? We can easily imagine a world—close to, if not the same as, our own—where people have a strong desire to ensure that sexual activity occurs only between compliant parties. In such a world, engaging in sex with compliant animals would increase the likelihood of engaging in sex with noncompliant animals no more significantly than engaging in sex with compliant humans would increase the likelihood of engaging in sex with noncompliant humans.[75]
(2) Saying that to engage in sex with animals increases the probability of treating animals as a mere means, which then increases the probability of treating fellow humans as a mere means, is another slippery-slope fallacy. Consider the following two points.
(a) While there are cases where humans violently subordinate animals to sentient sex toys (see Case 1-3), there are cases where humans go to the opposite extreme: not only do they refrain from cruelty and harm while ensuring that the animal is consenting and experiencing pleasure and having its goals respected, they also regard the sex as a way to form interspecies companionship based upon trust and compassion. Using the slippery-slope logic of the objection at hand, then, such forms of bestiality would actually decrease the likelihood that these humans would treat fellow humans as mere tools and increase the likelihood that these humans would treat fellow humans more compassionately and with greater respect for their goals.[76]
(b) Even if bestiality in every case involved treating animals as mere tools, that need not mean that those who practice bestiality will be more likely to treat fellow humans as mere tools. Factory farmers do not seem more likely to treat fellow humans as mere tools, even though factory farming is presumably a case where one treats animals as mere tools. And most of us, as consumers of factory-farmed meat, do not feel a greater urge to treat fellow humans as mere tools just because we knowingly consume factory-farmed meat. We do not feel a greater urge even though we laugh at Chick-fil-A commercials where cows beg us, in a plea for mercy made more twisted by its lighthearted delivery, to “Eat mor chikin”—laugh as hard as we once did at licorice advertisements showing gators chasing “dainty morsels” in the form of “tar-brushed” infants. Just as humans are capable of—if not inclined toward—speech-code switching in different social contexts (nightclubs, family dinners, workday offices), humans are capable of—if not inclined toward—ethics-code switching in different moral contexts.
(3) Studies have provoked worry about the link—correlation, not causation—between bestiality and human-to-human sexual cruelty: rape, molestation, and the like. But these studies should be approached with caution. One problem is that they routinely fail to distinguish between different forms of bestiality, lumping the wicked and disgusting forms right in with the benign and lovely. Saying that there is a link between bestiality and interpersonal violence among humans, in this case, is like saying there is a link between zany beliefs and interpersonal violence among humans. Just as we need to clarify whether we are talking about zany beliefs of the happy sort (like that everyone must share, cooperate, and help others in order to achieve ultimate union with the supreme care bear that literally is the Andromeda galaxy) or whether we are talking about zany beliefs of the toxic sort (like that Jews are the scum of the earth and need to be obliterated as bullhorns of Ezra Pound reading his Canto 45 pump throughout the death camps), we must clarify whether we are talking about the sweet or the cruel forms of bestiality.[77] Those who rebuke—let us say at the most visceral level—the abusive sorts of bestiality we see in Cases 1-3, and who also make it a point to engage exclusively (and as a point of pride) in cruelty-free and mutually-voluntary forms where animal welfare is prioritized, will not be more likely to rape other humans or engage in other sexually-immoral activities. At least this seems reasonable to presume, especially if these people (unlike those in the studies, for all we know) do not have the features of which cruel bestiality might in most cases simply be a downstream effect—features that provide deeper grounds for the link the studies seem to establish: having been abused as a child, or having a psychopathic lack of empathy, or so on. So yes, immoral bestiality (the kind marked by coercion, suffering, and perhaps even death of the animal) might be a reliable predictor of predatory behavior of a sexual nature among humans. But moral bestiality (the kind marked by respect for the autonomy and desire and interest of the animal) is not going to be a reliable predictor of that. The link, I imagine, would go the other way: engaging in care-oriented sexual activity with animals is a reliable predictor of human-to-human prosocial behavior—behavior that promotes the well-being, happiness, and positive development of other humans.
(4) It might be prudent for society to regard bestiality as a red flag. Given the aforementioned correlation, perhaps its presence should put us on guard—the way the presence of young men with an “urban look,” for example, should perhaps put a store clerk on guard. But even if it was so much of a red flag that it makes sense to criminalize it for pragmatic purposes, that still does not make bestiality immoral. Look at it this way. Social isolation is correlated with negative consequences to society at large. Same with drinking alcohol. Same with anal sex (especially in homosexual communities). Same perhaps even with zany beliefs. But that does not make those things immoral.
Fourth, it is said that bestiality is immoral because it is fundamentally antisocial behavior. There are several problems with this line of reasoning.
(1) As was once true of homosexuality, bestiality is illegal and extremely weird. But even though engaging in sexual activity with animals—just like wearing sneakers on one’s hands or snorting one’s father’s ashes (as Keith Richards apparently did)—threatens the conceptual distinctions we use to organize and navigate our world, that does not necessitate its immorality. I am not saying that disruption of the conceptual schemes by which we make sense of reality and our place in it is no big deal. But just because an activity shakes up the established order, as miscegenation surely did at one point in the US, that does not make it morally wrong. And for whatever it is worth to add, the shaking effects over time might stop after we become accustomed to interacting with uncloseted animal lovers. But change of societal norms and values often requires the bravery of those first few waves of people willing to face the ridicule and violence of the old guard.
(2) Bookbinding, however much a niche activity nowadays, unites people. This goes for bestiality, as is evident by the many online groups (one thinks of bestiality forums) and the many offline groups (one thinks of pound-town ranches in Washington as well as pro-bestiality marches in Germany). Since bestiality is so bizarre (bizarre enough that those who engage in the practice are likely to conceal their behavior from society at large),[78] members of these small groups—as was true for the ancient Israelites—lean harder on one another than they would if they did not feel so vulnerable to persecution. People in bestiality communities are likely to be more conscious about defending themselves and articulating where they stand compared to the mainstream culture whose antagonism poses an existential threat—a situation that no doubt fosters a highly-cognizant ideological bond. The issue about bestiality failing to forge human communion needs to be put aside, then. Yes, the communities are small and hidden, as homosexual communities once were. But this need not be the case if one day we become more welcoming.
(3) It might be said that, even if it creates Pentateuch-level solidarity between humans, bestiality remains antisocial in that it (like incest) disrupts traditional attitudes and practices on which social order depends, thereby leading to estrangement (and all the emotional and physical difficulties associated). But the same was once said about homosexuality.[79] And yet surely it seems barbaric, at least from where we stand now, to say that a good reason for homosexuality’s impermissibility was because homosexual practices, in violating social taboos, alienated us from friends and family while—if only to add insult to injury—serving no direct role in perpetuating our species. Once we become more tolerant, there will be no such effect.
(4) Bestiality could be kept hidden, as homosexuality long was, even in the most intolerant of times. Bestiality, then, need not result in ostracism any more than would watching midget porn or using goliath dildos in the privacy of one’s home. It is logically possible, as has often enough been actually practiced, for a woman to do everything the same as a normal woman except that instead of using a vibrator at night she lets her dog lick her. Surely we can imagine that everything else would remain relevantly the same in such a possible world.
(5) It might be said that bestiality is still antisocial in that time spent with an animal is time away from humans. But that sets the bar too high on permissible action. We do not condemn the artist for recoiling from society a bit more than usual in the pursuit of her passion. We do not tend to say that a widow who lives only with her dog and who does not get out much is living an immoral life. We do not say that anchorites, ascetics many of us revere as saintly, are doing something wrong by literally allowing themselves to be walled away from direct human contact. One might insist that a practice that results in too little time developing intimate bonds with fellow humans makes that practice immoral. As an admirer of Thoreau’s withdrawal from society into (somewhat) secluded life at Walden Pond, I am not convinced. I am willing to grant it for the sake of the argument, however. For we can easily imagine that the practitioner of bestiality has an otherwise regular life, socially balanced enough to satisfy Aristotle even on his most stringent days: a life of attending afterschool playdates and opera performances as well as of playing pickup basketball games and coaching little league. This person need not be exclusively into animals or primarily spend time with animals. He could very well have rich human interactions.
Fifth, it is said that bestiality is immoral because it is threatens to alienate us in some sense from our human identity as separate from animals. There are several problems with this line of reasoning.
(1) If only to set the context for points to come, it might be important to remember that the radical difference traditionally drawn between humans and animals—where humans are conceived as belonging to a self-governing kingdom cut off from nature (rather than as being as much a bloom of nature as a literal flower)—has largely been discredited. Putting aside the most powerful evidence (namely, the arguments for everything that any creature on Earth does and thinks and desires being ultimately a function of the remote past before any of those creatures were around),[80] we now know (a) that all living organisms, from humans to ants, share a common ancestor as well as common genetic material and we know (b) that various animals have complex cognitive abilities, social structures, and emotional experiences that were once thought to be exclusive to humans.
(2) Even in a world where bestiality is accepted, several human features would suffice—and individually, at that—to perform the job of holding our human identity intact (which makes sense, of course, especially given the many bestiality-friendly cultures throughout history that saw themselves as human). There is our power to make wild leaps of creativity and to think abstractly (even about hypothetical matters of logic and ethics). There is our love for art and science. There is our capacity for deep empathy and connection through literature and community involvement. There is our desire for contemplation and self-awareness and self-improvement (as indicated in all our creative productions and therapy sessions, our incessant journaling and meditating and exercising and practicing). There is our passion for learning—often enough just for its own sake. There is our skill at inventing complex tools and culture (music, art, religion, sport). In light of these distinguishing marks, it is hard—at least when we look at things rationally—to see bestiality as jeopardizing our humanity. The person who connects at a spiritual level with his dolphin partner could be human—all-too-human—in every other way. Especially when we assume that no other human knows about the interspecies romance, especially when we assume that the human brings human-level ethical conscientiousness to bear in the interaction, it seems strange to say that his sexual activity threatens to render him nonhuman.
(3) The same could have been said about homosexuality: those who engage in homosexuality are removing themselves, or at least putting themselves in danger of being removed, from the human race. In times before it became a socially-acceptable matter of personal morality (which resulted in it being taken out of the DSM as a mental illness), homosexuality itself threatened the established notion of what it means to be human.[81] Haunted by an intractable feeling that what they were doing was horrible, many homosexuals organized their lives to keep hidden—faking marriages, for example, in fear of social ostracism. In a time when being labeled a “homosexual” could spell career ruin and estrangement from family, some even turned to drugs to tamp down their sexual feelings. And too many turned to self-violence and suicide. But still, surely it seems barbaric, at least from where we stand now, to say that a good reason for the immorality of homosexuality was because homosexual practices put our notion of what it is to be human at risk. Look at it from another angle. Today we dress up our pets, talk to them like humans, cuddle them under the blankets, kiss them on the mouth, and have connections with them sometimes more intensely emotional and longer-lasting than with our human partners. It is easy to imagine people saying, especially in times of greater cultural anxiety about preserving the mistaken sense of our radical difference from animals, that such behavior—such displays of love between human and animal—so elevates the animal into the human realm (and thereby blurs the human-animal boundary) that those who do such things are nonhuman.
(4) This last point brings up an important question. How do we distinguish sexual activity with our pets from other activities we engage in with our pets (often in the course of developing meaningful bonds with them)—activities like kissing and cuddling? Rudy makes this point well. “[W]ithout a coherent and agreed upon definition of sex (which queer theory persuasively argues is impossible), the line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is nonexistent. How do we know beforehand whether loving them constitutes ‘sex’ . . . ?”[82]
(5) What is a human, anyway, evolves—like a language—in light of historical factors. Perhaps our notion of being human will expand wide enough to tolerate sexual openness to all creatures, just as our notion of being human has expanded wide enough to tolerate openness to the same-sex sexual encounters that have been occurring just as long. Such expansion need not conflict, by the way, with the various human features that individually suffice to keep our human identity intact, features I listed above.
(6) There are elements common to living organisms, interspecies sex—like homosexual sex—being one of them. Bestiality ought not threaten our link to the human community anymore than does drinking and eating and dying—things we also share with a variety of living organisms. Humans, as I said at the outset, have in addition to these common behaviors more distinguishing features like the ability to make tools and reason abstractly and draw improbable connections and make unlikely leaps in creativity.
(7) Even if those who engage in bestiality find it harder to see themselves as humans and even if regular humans find it harder to see those who engage in bestiality as humans, that seems to have no bearing on whether bestiality is immoral.
7.3. Conclusion
When we scrutinize the legitimacy of the taboo on bestiality, again and again—despite the animal-centered language we like to use now—it becomes clear that what matters mainly is how the interaction affects humans. But need every case of bestiality negatively impact humans? From what I have argued in this section, the answer is no: humans need not be hurt or alienated or stripped of their humanity. The answer is no even according to the most inappropriately catholic standards of what it means to respect human wellbeing, the standards we see employed more and more in universities where professors are terminated merely for engaging in the “violence” of exposing students to traumatizing words or to viewpoints that do not accord with their—what is that authoritarian slogan?—“lived experience.” For even if one says, ridiculously, that the wellbeing of certain humans is violated just hearing about an act of bestiality, we can imagine a world were such humans need not hear about any such act.
8. Concluding Remarks
The taboo on bestiality is one of the most fundamental, crucial as it has been—like a hellfire sermon against gays by a closeted evangelical—to sustaining the illusion of human exceptionalism against the hard truth of our becoming so blurred with animals in the heights of sexual activity that, as Dekkers puts it, “every sexual encounter retains a whiff of bestiality.”[83] The taboo on bestiality is so fundamental, in fact, that we slander our intellectual consciences, again and again, to keep it in place: castrating horses without any qualms and yet apoplectic about hearing some “sicko” even mention the idea of letting the pining dog take her up the butt.
I have argued, nevertheless, that bestiality is morally permissible in certain situations. Let me conclude with a more direct argument that ropes together the entire discussion. Although the rationales of its premises allude to the various anti-bestiality grounds covered in this paper, I frame the argument around what I regard as the decisive factor: namely, whether bestiality respects the moral worth of animals.
1. Either animals have no moral worth or they have at least some moral worth.
2. If animals have no moral worth, then bestiality is morally permissible in certain situations.
Rationale.—If animals have no moral worth and so in themselves deserve no more consideration of their wellbeing than a rock, then we are morally permitted to use them however we please—unless, of course, there is some reason beyond the consideration of the animal that morally forbids us. As discussed in this paper, however, the core extra-animal reasons—namely, that bestiality violates intuition (section 3) or God’s will (section 4) or nature (section 5) or human wellbeing (section 7)—fail, ultimately for being irrelevant or being false or being inconsistent with other moral beliefs and practices, to render bestiality immoral in all situations. Therefore, if animals have no moral worth, then bestiality is morally permissible in certain situations (perhaps even, yes, in zoosadistic Cases 1-3).
3. If animals have at least some moral worth, then bestiality is morally permissible in certain situations.
Rationale.—Sexual activity between humans and animals need not involve disrespect for the animal’s moral worth (see sections 2 and 6). Especially when the human participant prioritizes animal wellbeing (yes, perhaps even if that means waiting, so I might raise the bar to unreasonable heights, for the developmentally-mature animal to pursue him), sexual interaction between humans and animals can be more respectful and comfortable and consent-honoring and empathetic and hygienic and bond-building and beneficial and autonomy-preserving than many of the qualm-free ways we treat animals: eating them, poisoning them so they do not enter our homes, grooming them to be our tools and playthings, training them to do potentially injurious tricks, crating them in claustrophobic cages, castrating them, sterilizing them, dissecting them for science, performing medical tests on them, forcing them to mate with other animals so that we get another round of servants and food. Sexual interaction between humans and animals can be more conducive to animal wellbeing, so it should be specifically highlighted, than many of the practices that, despite being for the most part outwardly indiscernible from bestiality, are a cultural mainstay: such as not only kissing them on the mouth when they snuggle in bed with us, but also bringing them to orgasm to collect their semen—doing so, of course, with a clinical hand (or, as is not uncommon, with a prostate-stimulating electric rod) that allows us, although I do wonder what plethysmographs might reveal, both to duck the law and to tell ourselves in sleep-tight conscience that we never veered into the bedrock of sin.[84] Since sexual activity between humans and animals need not involve disrespect for the animal’s moral worth, the only ground for the immorality of bestiality would have to transcend consideration of the animal. But the core extra-animal reasons on offer—namely, that bestiality violates intuition or God or nature or human wellbeing—fail, even when taken jointly, to render bestiality immoral in all situations. Therefore, if animals have moral worth, then bestiality is morally permissible in certain situations (at least in Case 4 and Cases 7-9).
Therefore, bestiality is morally permissible in certain situations.
It should go without saying that the cumulative case I have made in this paper does not depend upon the truth of some narrow ethical view. Yes, bestiality’s occasional permissibility follows straightforwardly from the main consequentialist angles in ethics. According to utilitarianism, for example, an act of bestiality can easily be regarded as permissible, especially if it results in a significant increase in reality’s net wellbeing (or happiness, or satisfaction of preference, or however the particular form of utilitarianism is spelled out).[85] The same goes in the case of ethical egoism, especially if the act of bestiality results in a significant increase in my net wellbeing. As this paper makes clear, however, bestiality can be permissible even assuming that the wellbeing of animals ought to be respected regardless of the downstream consequences of so doing. Aside from a relativist who (when trying to figure out the morality of an action) appeals to the say-so of some entity (a society, a God, a person) that rejects bestiality, my argument should appeal to a broad range of ethical frameworks. It should appeal, in fact, to the most committed human exceptionalists and speciesists, as well as to the most committed animal-rights activists and protectionists.
And that is how it should be. For whether bestiality can ever be morally permissible is a question, however emotionally complicated, that is rationally uncomplicated. In a cosmos of countless suns and reams of death, how terribly smallminded and progress-impeding—on par with thinking that God stopped the rain just to protect your hairdo—to think the orangutan’s licking in Case 7 or the human’s licking in Case 11 are some of the worst moral horrors, rather than what they really amount to: uncontroversial enjoyment of earthly beings thrown into this, like this, with such a transient lifespan.
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Notes
[1] Dekkers 1994, 149.
[2] It is common to distinguish bestiality from zoophilia (see Miletski 2001). Whereas in bestiality the nonhuman animal (hereafter simply “animal”) is used as a mere prop for sexual gratification, in zoophilia the animal is treated as an independent agent worthy of respect (Haynes 2014, 127n31; Richard 2001; Maratea 2011, 926; Wilcox et al. 2005, 205:307; Rudy 2012, 606). In this paper, however, I use the term “bestiality” to refer to any sexual interaction between human and animal—fondling, teasing, penetrating, or any other contact of a “sexual nature” (whatever that exactly means)—whether caring and conscientious or cold and careless; whether born of some entrenched paraphilia or simply a matter of exploration or religious ritual.
[3] See Haynes 2014, 124n14; Holoyda 2022; Grandin and Johnson 2005, 103.
[4] See Beirne 2000, 314; Beirne 2002, 195; Ferreday 2003, 284; Adler and Adler 2006; Maratea 2011; Valcuende del Rio and Caceres-Feria 2020, section 4.
[5] See Wisch 2008; Haynes 2014, 123-124n13. Wisconsin’s broad statute makes it a crime even to “transmit obscene material depicting a person engaged in sexual contact with an animal” (see Holoyda 2022).
[6] See Thomas 2011, 159; Miletski 2005; Masters 1966.
[7] Miletski 2005; Masters 1966. A common way such avisodomy was performed in the Parisian brothels of the eighteenth century was that the prostitute locks the turkey’s neck between her thighs and she cuts the throat for the man during his climax.
[8] The practice of using the suckling reflect of calves for sexual pleasure goes back to before there was any such thing as Kansas, of course. A better name, although this too fails to capture both the age and the ubiquity of the act, is “Mangabe milking” since, in addition to being alliterative, it reflects the fact that the Mangabe people of Madagascar have been observed by anthropologists openly engaging in this practice (see Miletski 2005).
[9] This case is very similar to a story that Robert Yerkes, a psychologist, told about a gorilla named “Congo”: “throwing herself on her back she pressed her external genitalia against my feet and repeatedly and determinedly tried to pull me upon her. . . . In this activity she was markedly and vigorously aggressive, and it required considerable adroitness and strength of resistance on my part to withstand her attack . . . because of her enormous strength” (Yerkes 1928, 68-69).
[10] See Rudy 2012, 607.
[11] Miletski 2005.
[12] See Kass 1997; Hamilton 2008. Hamilton, following Schopenhauer, argues that our intrinsic visceral disgust points to the fact that bestiality is an offense to the metaphysical differences between species. The idea is that we feel an abstract pain even to hear about cases of bestiality because platonic categories, set in the stone of eternity, are being muddied in such cases. The problem, of course, is that people could give—and, indeed, have given—“explanations” like this for why, say, miscegenation is wrong.
[13] Haynes puts the point well. “The refusal to give consideration to whether an animal consents to other uses suggests that the consent argument may be a cover for unreflective disgust—an effort to disallow sex with animals while still permitting more popularly considered “important and innocuous” uses of animals, like hunting, raising them for food, and using them for transportation” (2014, 130n44).
[14] See Holoyda 2022; Valcuende del Rio and Caceres-Feria 2020, section 3; Miletski 2005.
[15] Liliequist 1991, 394; Miletski 2005. To be sure, these people—although countless—are all in the minority, so at least I presume. That said, we might be surprised by what we see when we stick a plethysmograph on the genitalia of the most vanilla of us while we read of Catherine the Great’s purported exploits with horses.
[16] Miletski 2005; Masters 1966.
[17] Miletski 2005; Masters 1966.
[18] See Holoyda 2022; Masters 1966 One explanation for why horse and mule are okay is that they can be corralled and so, unlike with dogs and pigs, kept clean.
[19] Dawkins 2006, 248. In response to Dawkin’s disgust (which I share) that the animals alongside their human rapists are to be put to death, biblical scholars explain that it is largely a matter of pragmatics to put the animal down. The idea is that it would be morally and even physically dangerous to have animals walking among humans tempting them just by being there or even, having developed twisted fetishes like we see sometimes in the case of human rape victims, trying to grind upon humans. Clay Jones, a Christian apologist at Biola, puts the point nicely when discussing why God orders the ancient Israelites to kill every single one of the animals in Canaan, a bestiality hotspot (see Deuteronomy 13:15; 20:16). “Consider how disgusting it would be to have dogs, sheep, and who knows what trying to mount the unsuspecting, not to mention how disgusting and dangerous it would be to have horses, oxen, and great apes trying to do so! . . . Animals that are used to having sex with humans [(as many were in Canaan)] have to die just like animals used to killing humans have to die. It’s not that the animals deserved to die. They didn’t deserve to die because they hadn’t done anything wrong. But only the depraved would want to live around sexualized animals so they had to go. Now the objection could be made that some of the animals may not have been subject to such abuse, but that’s not something that an Israelite would be able to know. Thus they all had to die. Major takeaway: sometimes beings innocent of committing sin can be harmed and corrupted by others who misuse their free will, as seems to be the case with animals involved in bestiality. It is a tragedy that these animals had to be killed but that’s one of the big lessons about sin: Sinful beings can hurt the innocent sometimes permanently” (Jones 2015).
[20] Beetz 2004, 5; Masters 1966.
[21] Carr 2016, 423; Holoyda 2022; Miletski 2005; Masters 1966.
[22] No wonder, then, that when indicted for sex with a female dog in 1595, George Dawson was said neither to have “God before his eyes” nor to respect “the dignity of human nature” (Thomas 2011, 159).
[23] Thomas 2011, 152.
[24] Thomas 2011, 158.
[25] In the Old Testament, in addition to passages like Genesis 9:20–27 and Genesis 19:1–11, we get “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death” (Leviticus 20:13). And in the New Testament, on top of passages like 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 and Romans 1:26–27, we get homosexuality described as “sexually immoral” and “contrary to the sound doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:10).
[26] Let me explain in case it is not obvious. If claim-a is true, then that opens the door to arguing that the biblical passages against bestiality are not condemning bestiality wholesale—a rejection of premise 2, in effect. After all, just as the Bible never specifically forbids two neurotypical adult men engaging in dry humping with one another (something that those who hold that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality wholesale might say), the Bible never specifically forbids a bonobo and a woman engaging in cruelty-free and mutually-enjoyable cunnilingus with one another (something that a person who holds that the Bible does not condemn bestiality wholesale might say). If, on the other hand, claim-b is true, then it seems fair game to adjust the biblical proscription against bestiality to the new times. After all, just as homosexuality was deemed immoral for a reason that no longer applies (namely, that the ancient Israelites were desperate to keep their numbers against the incessant barrage of oppressive forces), bestiality was deemed immoral for a reason that no longer apples (namely, the same reason against homosexuality, the same reason why the God of the Hebrew Bible, in fact, kills people who ejaculate anywhere outside of the vagina of their wives) (see Masters 1966). In this case, just as a group of men performing bukkake on a consenting man no longer violates God’s command, presumably a man shooting a load on the back of turtle (as in Case 6) no longer violates God’s command.
[27] Romans 1:26-27, if not simply condemning homosexuality altogether, at least condemns anal sex. The first sentence, although traditionally taken as a clear rejection of any form of lesbian sex, simply reads: “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.” As should be clear, the passage could just be referring to women engaging in anal sex with their husbands. Now, the immediately following sentence does clearly have in mind man-man homosexuality: “And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.” However, if the unnatural behavior of women in the first sentence is merely referring to taking it in the backdoor, then the second sentence might simply be referring to men who engage with other men through the backdoor as well. Whatever the case might be, though, the main point still stands. Anal sex is not immoral in truth, so at least I think it is safe to assume.
[28] Leibniz 1988, 71.
[29] For more on this conception of God, see Istvan 2021b.
[30] Perhaps this strategy would be something that both Pufendorf and Leibniz would accept, thereby reconciling the disagreement on the issue of theological voluntarism.
[31] Thomas 2011, 164.
[32] Carr 2016, 420-421
[33] See Holoyda 2022.
[34] See Soble 2003, section 3. Aquinas held that bestiality, by the way, was the most sinful of the four main types of unnatural vices: bestiality, homosexuality, non-missionary sex, and masturbation. This provides an interesting contrast to some Muslim cultures that put bestiality lower on this list if not off the list completely—a point reflected in the longstanding practice in Arab cultures of encouraging boys to have sex with goats and sheep and camels and donkeys instead of reducing oneself to masturbation as well as perhaps in the popular Arab saying: “The pilgrimage to Mecca is not complete without copulating with the camel” (Masters 1966; see Miletski 2005).
[35] See Balderi n.d.
[36] Personally, I hold that everything is natural. Everything is ultimately a function of what is given by nature (there are, that is, no contributions that come ultimately from beyond nature that influence how nature unfolds), in which case even nuclear reactors are as natural as beaver dams (see Istvan 2021a).
[37] See Miletski 2005; Masters 1966; Maratea 2011, 925; Salisbury 1994, 84; Beetz 2004, 2-5.
[38] See Maratea 2011, 925; Salisbury 1994, 84; Miletski 2005; Masters 1966; Beetz 2004, 2-5; Singer 2001. Human–animal sexual activity is practiced across cultures and is not restricted to certain genders or sexual orientations or ethnicities or geographical regions (see Navarro and Tewksbury 2015, 873). It has not been rare in the Western world over the past few hundred years, especially among rural people in communities where marriage is put off until after the high-hormonal period of sexual curiosity (see Thomas 2011, 149-150). Whereas according to the Kinsey studies only eight percent of males (and close to four percent of females) report sexual relations with animals (cows and calves especially), close to fifty percent of rural males reported such contact (Kinsey 1953)—a number that, on the one hand, has gone down as rural populations have declined (Miletski 2005) but, on the other hand, is likely higher than revealed in studies given the fact that people, fearing stigmatization and prosecution, tend not to be forthcoming about their sexual actions with animals (Maratea 2011, 926).
[39] Let us consider, for example, rural youths of a few centuries back in communities where (a) marriage is put off until later in life and where (b) masturbation is highly condemned. Prior to taking a wife, and while in the highly hormonal throes of youth, it is easy to imagine these boys feeling less inhibition about partaking, if only once or twice, in the sex they see animals engaging in each day.
[40] See Navarro and Tewksbury 2015, 870.
[41] Kant uses the same reasoning to conclude that homosexuality and masturbation brings humans to a level even lower than that of animals (see Soble 2003, section 3).
[42] See Salisbury 1994, 84. Just the other day I opened TikTok, for example, and saw a dog getting a blowjob from a suckling calf.
[43] See Soble 2003, section 3.
[44] Francione makes this distinction between animal welfare and animal rights, where the former concerns treating animals humanely (however we might use them as our tools) and where the latter concerns respecting the fact that animals are moral agents and so cannot just be used as our tools (2000, xxiii-xxix).
[45] Beirne 2000, 332; see Otto 2005. The notion that bestiality is animal rape is reflected in the legal codes of certain states. California and Oregon, for example, classify bestiality as sexual assault (See Barwick 2022).
[46] Belliotti 1993, 232.
[47] Beirne 2000, 331; Beirne 2009, 116; see Belliotti 1993, 230; Ascione 2008, 77-78.
[48] Baldari n.d.
[49] Beirne 2000, 326; Beirne 2009.
[50] MacKinnon 2004, 267; Bolliger and Goetschel 2005, 23, 40.
[51] See Linzey 2009, 34. Andrea Datz, a horse rehabilitation specialist, puts the point well. “Every horse has the capacity to clearly convey how they feel about what we ask of them. We have the capacity to offer connection with our horses in a way that fosters mutuality. Both horse and human getting our needs met in the partnership. Offering choices, and looking for signs that our horse accepts our offer, giving us consent to proceed with what we have in mind” (2020).
[52] See Haynes 2014, 129n36.
[53] Hertha James, a horse trainer, summarizes these points well. “It is not hard to recognize horses communicating loudly when they don’t want to do something. . . . The concept of waiting for a horse to give permission or consent for us to carry on with a task may be a novel idea for some people. . . . When it becomes the horse’s idea to initiate their handler’s next action, the horse begins to share ‘ownership’ of the behavior we are working with. Such a feeling of ownership alleviates the anxiety and tension that arise if the horse is constrained and forced to accept what is being done to him” (2008).
[54] This objection is apparent in Beirne 2000, 326, 331.
[55] See Levy 2003, 447. Adopting all four conditions would result in me having to say that Case 5, despite what I claimed in section 2, is not a case of permissible bestiality. The calf, after all, is not hormonally mature and so fails the first condition (although not the fourth since the adult cow’s state of awareness is not relevantly different from a calf’s). I am not a fan of the first condition anyway. Imagine someone who, because of some hormone problem, only gets nonsexual erections. If all the other conditions are met in his case (no strong likelihood that later he would take back his assent to the fellatio happening to him, no strong likelihood that he would later feel traumatized by it, and he is largely in his most developed state of awareness), it seems that this person can consent in the fullest extent even if he does not meet the first condition. Since my goal in this paper is simply to argue that some cases of bestiality are morally permissible, however, I am fine with retaining the first condition and thereby with taking back my claim that Case 5 is morally permissible.
[56] At this point, one might wonder what I might say about a toddler who is guaranteed to be stuck in its developmental state forever. Well, if the first condition is to be upheld, then sexual activity with the toddler is impermissible (since he has not the hormones for sexual desire). However, if the first condition is to be rejected (and I think it should be), then I do admit that sexual activity with the toddler could be permissible in certain situations. If it were guaranteed that the toddler would be stuck in its state of development forever (and so is already at its full cognitive capacity, unable to be affected by messages from society that repeat “You have been victimized in the worst way”), and if it was also the case that either no one would find out about the activity or the toddler’s caretakers (and perhaps anyone else who might know about the activity) were okay with the activity, then certain sexual scenarios—letting, say, the toddler suck on the adult’s clitoris the way it does the nipple—would be morally permissible as far as I am concerned. Of course, I am assuming here that all the safeguards to the child’s wellbeing are in place, and are so out of a conscious desire to protect the most vulnerable: being careful to inflict no injury, using measures to avoid disease transmission, letting the toddler lead the way. Such safeguards might also include having the blessing, or perhaps even the presence, of a welfare advocate.
[57] See Haynes 2014, 125n18, 125n20, 134n67.
[58] The moral permissibility of Case 11, for example, is especially clear in that it falls perfectly in line with the model of attentive and trustful and consent-based horse interaction that Hertha James lays out. “Horses use distinct body language. . . . ‘Okay Signals’ are initiated by the horse to let us know that they feel okay for us to repeat what we are doing or to carry on with a procedure that involves a variety of things. When I’m walking on the road with Boots, I’ve become aware of her need to stop and assess things such as cows moving in the distance, a vehicle in an unusual place or something that has changed in the environment since we last passed by. If I stop with her and wait, paying attention to what has caught her attention, we are ‘on the same page’. . . . Eventually Boots will lower her head and bring her attention back to me, which tells me that she has satisfied her need to notice and is ready to walk on. This is the most basic ‘okay’ signal for us to watch out for” (2018).
[59] See Haynes 2014, 131-132.
[60] One might say that riding and castrating and eating them are more important to us than our sexual use of them and that that explains why, on the one hand, lack of animal consent makes it wrong to engage in sexual activity with animals but why, on the other hand, lack of animal consent does not make it wrong to ride animals and castrate them and eat them. But two things should be said. First, we do not need to eat them in a time of the impossible burger. So the importance of sex with them and the eating of them is on a par. In this case, if lack of consent rules out the permissibility of having sex with animals, then it also rules out the permissibility of eating them. (2) Who gets to decide what is most important? Presumably it is the human. But presumably there are humans—vegan humans—who find sex with animals more important than eating them, which undercuts the explanation at hand. Perhaps more importantly, those who do not get to decide what is important are left vulnerable to abuse. Haynes put the point well.
But the argument that our supposedly innocuous uses of animals are more important than any sexual uses of animals is really a nonstarter. To allow the necessity of consent to vary with the aggressor’s perception of a practice’s importance would produce a disrespectful, self-centered culture in which the dignitary interests of society’s weakest members are routinely undervalued. Precisely because we perceive some practices as more important, the potential for abuse and ignoring the relevance of consent is at its apex” (2014, 130n44).
[61] Grandin and Johnson 2005, 103.
[62] There is one further option: some might take the immorality of bestiality to be a brute fact. The problem with such a maneuver should be clear. Since the predicate “is immoral” is presumably not baked into the subject “bestiality” (as is suggested by the apparent conceivability of cases where bestiality is not immoral), this ethical fact would be brute not in the sense of providing the full explanation for its own truth but rather brute in the sense of having objectively no reason whatsoever why it is true—an absolute given regardless of the circumstances or mitigating factors; regardless as to whether the animal is being harmed; regardless as to what the Bible says; regardless as to whether the animal is consenting; regardless as to whether the sexual activity is in alignment with the animal’s goals and purposes; regardless as to whether we find it disgusting; regardless as to whether human safety is threatened; and so forth. But by saying that something is true for no reason whatsoever we have transcended the possibility of rational discussion. Furthermore, one can imagine someone who thinks miscegenation is immoral saying the same thing. Set in this context, the brute-fact approach looks vile. It can be used to “justify” any stance, even ones we find morally repugnant. Lastly, there is pretty much no truth more secure (at least as far as I am concerned) than the principle of sufficient reason, which effectively says that you cannot get something from nothing. Even if we do not know and could never know the explanation for something, everything has an explanation. Otherwise we would be saying, in effect, that something can come from nothing. But it is absurd to say that x—an event or a fact or whatever—can have reality even though reality (yes, reality all-things-considered) is ultimately not enough for x to have reality. See Istvan 2021a for more on this last point.
[63] See Barwick 2022.
[64] Let me pause on the topic of training. Some say that training an animal to accept sexual activity with humans violates the animal’s sexual integrity and for that reason is immoral. I am not convinced. Training happens through the animal kingdom and the human private and public spheres. We are fine, specifically, with training animals to be our pets and helpers—yes, even when that training engenders strong dependency. So long as loving techniques are used and safe measures are put in place and the creature in question is not stunted from achieving the level of flourishing it is slated to achieve by virtue of being a member of the species to which it belongs, and so forth—saying that an animal has been trained to do such and such sexual activity does not in itself render the sexual activity immoral.
[65] See Balderi n.d.; Belliotti 1993, 232.
[66] See Ascione 2005, 120, 126. Masters nicely describes the threat that a dog poses to humans nicely. “[T]he dog's penis . . . has a massive ball or knot near its midpoint. Once the dog's phallus has been inserted into either vagina or anus, and the ball has become engorged, painless withdrawal is almost impossible until after the dog ejaculates, when shrinkage and flaccidity of both ball and penis occur. . . . [M]ost human injuries resulting from intercourse with canines occur when the participants are surprised or startled and a forced withdrawal of the dog's erect organ is attempted. In one case, a woman was surprised in Washington copulating with a large English mastiff, and when the terrified couple endeavored to hastily sever the connection, the dog's phallus was so forcefully removed as to bring about a fatal hemorrhage in the woman. In another case, at Omaha, Nebraska, a sixteen-year-old boy had himself sodomized by a dog and when the separation was attempted the dog ‘tore through the sphincter and an inch into the gluteus muscles’” (Masters 1966).
[67] See Cassidy 2009, 105. Kant might have put the point as follows. “Just as cruelty toward animals must be condemned because it suggests a lack of sympathy and makes easier cruelty toward people, bestiality must be abhorred because we . . . cannot embrace the sexual use of animals without weakening our opposition to all coercive or unequal sexual relationships” (Denis 1999, 241).
[68] See Holoyda 2022; Haynes 2014, 139.
[69] Cassidy 2009, 91, 95.
[70] See Wigmore 2021; Morriss 1997, 271; Levy 2003, 454. Levy does not use this argument, however, to claim that bestiality is immoral. Instead, he uses it to show that there are rational reasons for it remaining taboo even if it is sometimes not immoral.
[71] See Baldari n.d.
[72] See Haynes 2014, 143.
[73] Red meat, for example, has been linked to an increased risk of colorectal cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. High-fat dairy products have been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer, including prostate cancer. Raw or undercooked oysters, clams, and mussels, can carry harmful bacteria or viruses that have lead to more or less significant illness—including death.
[74] See Haynes 2014, 143.
[75] Studies have shown a correlation between those who abuse animals and those who abuse humans. But on top of the fact that there also a correction between those who are abused by humans and those who abuse animals, that is a different issue than the one we are discussing. We are discussing whether nonabusive treatment of animals makes more likely abusive treatment of animals which makes more likely abusive treatment of humans.
[76] Haynes makes the point well. “Sex between humans and animals can occur without cruelty or demonstrable harm to the animal. Indeed, if we assume that the human seeks to emphasize ‘positive reactions from the animal, such as approaching the person, cuddling, rubbing against the person, not trying to move away, and displaying sexual excitement,’ then bestiality might encourage understanding sexual partners as emotive beings, not objects. . . . Perhaps it is true that violence toward animals may lead to violence toward humans, but then compassion toward animals would seem to lead to compassion toward humans (2014, 138).
[77] These studies are more accurately described as justifying worry about the link between human-to-animal sexual cruelty and human-to-human sexual cruelty. And technically, if criticism of these studies are correct (see Holoyda 2022), these studies are most accurately described as justifying some worry about the link between human-to-animal sexual cruelty and other harmful sexual interests—interests that pose a risk to humans.
[78] Bolliger and Goetschel 2005, 25–26.
[79] Let me specifically address the incest-bestiality connection. Whereas incest is potentially burdensome on society in that its reproductive products are more likely to be mutated for the worse (which can, one might say, drag down the gene pool), bestiality poses no such threat. And whereas incest might disrupt traditional bonds and practices on which social order depends (as in when the son becomes less likely to take care of his mother in old age since their romantic strife resulted in them not talking to one another), bestiality mainly does so because of the taboo on the act (which might result in the son, for example, being excommunicated from the family if it is found out he has a relationship with a cow). In this regard, bestiality seems closer to homosexuality than to incest when considering its negative impact on our society. That is especially the case when we keep in mind that our society systematically tortures animals anyway!
[80] See Istvan 2021a.
[81] See Haynes 2014, 146n142.
[82] Rudy 2012, 611.
[83] Dekkers 1994, 3. Levy nicely articulates the point. “Nowhere does our claim to be essentially different from other animals look weaker than with regard to sexuality [since we copulate as they do and have the same parts]. . . . Sex across the species line had to be prohibited, because it threatened to demonstrate how hollow are our claims to fundamental difference” (Levy 2003, 450).
[84] See Otto 2005, 149. Intent is the difference-maker between standard practice and crime, according to many legal codes. In Delaware, for example, what turns even the overtly sexual practices standard in animal husbandry into bestiality is when the contact is “for purposes of sexual gratification” (see Barwick 2022).
[85] See Chivers 2021; Singer 2001.
Indirect influence:
well done
Disgusting