Dearest Pet: On Bestiality
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Title: Dearest Pet: On Bestiality
Aurthor: Midas Dekkers
ISBN:[1859843107
Published Date:December 1, 2000
Price:$24.00 / Estimated price.
Other: Hardcover, paperback. 208 pages
Summary:People love animals—a stroke here, a pat there, a quick nuzzle in that gorgeous fur … the amount of cuddling they get can make you jealous. In Holland, dogs are caressed more than people. Not as thoroughly, though: that one spot, somewhere down below, generally remains untouched …” Generally, but certainly not always. Kinsey’s research showed that 8 per cent of men and 3.5 per cent of women had had sex with an animal, and that in rural areas the figure for men was closer to 50 per cent. Yet bestiality is almost universally condemned. While our love for animals is extolled as noble and “natural,” all erotic elements in the relationship between humans and other species are vilified and proscribed, thus consigning them to the realm of exotic pornography or crude innuendo.
Even so, something remains of physical love for animals. In different forms, sublimated or occasionally celebrated, its traces can be found throughout art and popular culture: in Leda and the Swan, Beauty and the Beast or the Lorelei; in a lubricious menagerie of satyrs and centaurs, wolfmen and vampires, all the way through to King Kong and Fritz the Cat, pony clubs and amorous dolphins, or even advertisements for luxury catfoods.
Dearest Pet uncovers and explores those traces, illuminating the ambivalence of human attitudes to cross-species sexuality. Its author, the biologist and broadcaster Midas Dekkers, has analysed bestiality in all its aspects—physical, psychological and legal—and examined its representations in religion and mythology, art and literature, pornography and advertising. Beautifully—and sometimes bizarrely—illustrated, his book is neither drily academic nor pruriently trivial, but erudite, witty and challenging: the first history of the last taboo. A book for animal lovers, and for those who are just their good friends.
Expanded Explanation
Dearest Pet is a book about the history of bestiality in culture, in every media from myths and art to stories and song. Author Midas Dekkers does a wonderfully thorough job detailing the intricate details of a very rare and fascinating subject. Holding this book feels like handling forbidden knowledge, and for zoos there will be a thrill of the familiar in finally having a book that details their history.
The very introduction is literally seeping with promise, ending with the words:
Every sexual encounter is a breaking of bounds, an intrusion into an alien real, 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. The book is incredibly rich in detail, describing the penises of swans (one of the only birds to have any penis at all – and a large one at that) to citing the fact that all virgin births occurring in nature result in female offspring (due to the mother’s genetic material containing only X-chromosomes and therefore rendering her unable to asexually produce a son).
Though sometimes the book has a passage that just seems incorrect, at least according to most zoo’s self-reporting, such as when it proclaims:
Human beings are attracted to other human beings. And if they occasionally fall for an animal, they are attracted by the animal’s human features. What attracts the dog lover is not the doggishness of a dog – the fact that it drools and pants and stinks and moults – but its human qualities – faithfulness, gratitude, patience in waiting for its master […] While zoos do indeed like the qualities of a good personality, this does not prevent them from also loving what makes animals themselves – in fact many zoosexuals report that they are physically attracted to the bodies of animals and find their appearance to be as pleasant as that of humans or (for some individuals) the animal may even be considered more visually attractive than a human being!
However the author seems to have understood that this was not entirely the case because in a later chapter he goes on to explain that animals can provide supranormal stimulus- that is, the goat may have larger breasts than a woman, the horse a wider set of hips, and what human could compare to the dramatic penis-to-body size ratio of a donkey?
It could be argued that in these cases animal-stimulus certainly is what the people were attracted by, because they desire features not seen on human beings. Plus you don’t even have to get zoos started on the wonders of an animal’s tail to know they are chasing something other than humanity when they get down in a wild way.
The book goes on to detail human’s relationship with other animals as well as with other humans – they even get into the topic of race relations and how people were once prohibited not only from relations with nonhumans, but also from relations with humans different than themselves.
When the inevitable discussion about dogs humping legs comes up, it is handled tactfully and explained in a very positive and sensible manner, as seen:
It is a pleasant duty for a male dog to service the members of his household from time to time […] On these occasions something pinkish flops out of the abdomen and is rubbed against one’s legs […] Dog lovers maintain that politely rejecting the animal’s advances is a more appropriate response. Unless one really enjoys them, that is. With some adjustment it is not difficult to exchange the leg for a more appropriate part of the body and actual mating can ensue. Some of the comparisons do seem a bit of a stretch (really, comparing milk-drinking and the bites of vampires to bestiality?) but all-in-all this is a solid book which contains a very great amount of information and is varied enough to captivate interest for a sustained period of time.
References
http://beastiality.club/beastiality-club-extreme-animal-sex-content/the-encyclopedia-of-zoophilia/
