Zoophilia Today

We don’t have to reach back to antiquity to find apologists for bestiality. Midas Dekkers begins his Dearest Pet with some musings that blur the difference between human sex and bestiality: 

“Back at the boys’ school girls seemed like beings from another planet, so different were they in our eyes. They were strange creatures, aliens, the girls’ school a few streets away was very like a zoo. The thought of making love one day to such a being had the alarming quality of bestiality. Nowadays, with the proliferation of mixed schools, the difference may seem less, but there is still a yawning gulf, widened still further by lipstick and leather jackets. Sex is something that by definition you have with another being, whether of the same or a different sex, someone of the same race or a more exotic choice. Every sexual encounter is a breaking of bound, an intrusion into an alien realm, every sexual encounter retains a whiff of bestiality. What use is the other person if they are not different? You find true satisfaction only when you let yourself go” (3).

He ends the book with the observation that “Never before and in no other place has there been so much love-talk and love-making with dogs, cats and mice as here and now.” The only rivals are “the latter days of Egypt and the decline of Rome,” which leads him to ponder the possibility that bestiality is “a sign of decadence” (189).

But he takes some comfort in the fact that other animals show affection across species (baboons have been known to care for kittens). He closes philosophically, “we see that love takes every new and unexpected forms. Those who are surprised by this are surprised about themselves. And rightly so, since no one will ever be able to explain the source of that feeling that comes from deep inside, when you look a woman or a man or a cat or a rabbit in the eyes and say, ‘I love you’” (191).

Dekkers’s book may not be exactly a defense of bestiality. But Dekkers isn’t exactly full of moral indignation either.