History of zoophilia

This article covers the historical and cultural aspects of zoophilia (also known as bestiality), from prehistory onwards.

Prehistory

Depictions of human sexual activity with animals appear infrequently in prehistoric art. Possibly the oldest depiction, and the only known example from the Palaeolithic (prior to the domestication of animals), is found in the Vale do Côa in Portugal. It shows a man with an exaggerated, erect penis juxtaposed with a goat. However, there is some doubt that the two figures are contemporary; while the goat is depicted in characteristic palaeolithic style, the scene may have been altered in a later period with the insertion of the human figure.

From the Neolithic onwards, images of zoophilia are slightly more common. Examples are found at Coren del Valento, a cave in Val Camonica, Italy, containing rock art dating from 10,000 BCE to as late as the Middle Ages, one depicting a man penetrating a horse, and Sagaholm, a Bronze Age cairn in Sweden where there are several petroglyphs with similar scenes.

Classical antiquity

Leda and the Swan

Several Greek myths include the God Zeus seducing or abducting favoured mortals while in the form of an animal: Europa and the bull, Ganymede and the eagle, and Leda and the Swan. Only the latter legend includes actual copulation between Lena and Zeus in his animal form, but depictions of this act, fairly uncommon in antiquity, became a popular motif in classicising Renaissance art, contributing to a lasting prominence in Western culture.

Various classical writers recorded that bestiality was common in other cultures. Herodotus was followed by Pindar, Strabo and Plutarch in alleging that Egyptian women engaged in sexual relations with goats for religious and magical purposes - the animal aspects of Egyptian deities being particularly alien to the Greco–Roman world. Conversely, Plutarch and Virgil make similar accusations of the Greeks, with Plutarch writing in his Discourse on the Reason of Beasts that they committed "very frequently and in many places great outrages, disorders and scandals against nature, in the matter of this pleasure of love; for there are men who have loved she-goats, sows and mares."

Martial and other writers state that in Roman times, women sometimes inserted snakes into their vaginas. This is reported to have been both for sexual purposes and also as a means of keeping cool and deodorizing in the heat of summer. Lucian comments that snakes were taught to suckle on women's nipples. Juvenal writes in the Mysteries of the Bona Dea, that "if... men are wanting, she does not delay to submit her buttocks to a young ass placed over her." Roman society had around 12 formal categories of prostitute, the lower of whom performed with animals.

Despite their place in mythology and literature, actual acts of bestiality was probably as uncommon in antiquity as they are today. Roman civil law, however, made no mention of it. The explicit prohibition of and strict penalties for zoophilia universal in later European legal systems were derived from Jewish and Christian tradition. The Hebrew Bible imposes the death penalty on both the human and animal parties involved in an act of bestiality: "if a man has sexual relations with an animal, he shall be put to death; and you shall kill the animal." The Synod of Ancyra in 313–316 discussed the position of the church with regard to bestiality at length and two of the resulting twenty-five canons addressed it: the sixteenth canon described the penance and level of restrictions to be applied to various age groups for committing bestiality; the seventeenth canon prohibited all lepers from praying inside church if they had committed bestiality while they suffered from leprosy.

Europe: Middle Ages

In the Church-oriented culture of the Middle Ages, zoosexual activity was met with execution, typically burning, and death to the animals involved either the same way or by hanging. Masters comments that:

"Theologians, bowing to Biblical prohibitions and basing their judgements on the conception of man as a spiritual being and of the animal as a merely carnal one, have regarded the same phenomenon as both a violation of Biblical edicts and a degradation of man, with the result that the act of bestiality has been castigated and anathematized [...]"

In 1468, Jean Beisse, accused of bestiality with a cow on one occasion and a goat on another, was first hanged, then burned. The animals involved were also burned. In 1539, Guillaume Garnier, charged with intercourse with a female dog (described as "sodomy"), was ordered strangled after he confessed under torture. The dog was burned, along with the trial records which were "too horrible and potentially dangerous to be permitted to exist" (Masters). In 1601, Claudine de Culam, a young girl of sixteen, was convicted of copulating with a dog. Both the girl and the dog were first hanged, then strangled, and finally burned. In 1735, Francois Borniche was charged with sexual intercourse with animals. It was greatly feared that "his infamous debauches may corrupt the young men." He was imprisoned. There is no record of his release.

On the other hand, other accounts are more possibly fictitious, such as Pietro Damiani's, who in his "De bono religiosi status et variorum animatium tropologia" (11th Century) tells of a Count Gulielmus whose pet ape became his wife's lover. One day the ape became "mad with jealousy" on seeing the count lying with his wife that it fatally attacked him. Damain claims he was told about this incident by Pope Alexander II and shown an offspring claimed to be that of the ape and woman. (Illustrated Book of Sexual Records)

Clergyman and chronicler Gerald of Wales claimed to have witnessed a man having intercourse with a horse as part of a pagan ritual in Ireland.

Although thousands of female witches were accused of having sex with animals, usually said to be the Devil in animal form or their familiars, court records available in Europe and the United States, dating back to the 14th century and continuing into the 20th century, nearly always show males, rather than females, as the human parties in court cases. (Encyclopedia of human sexuality, Humboldt University)

Further information: Demons and animals and Animal trial

c.1700 - 1950

The Age of Enlightenment took much that had been under the field of religion, and brought it under the field of science. As with homosexuality a variety of mixed views resulted which persisted through until around 1950, when researchers such as Kinsey followed by Masters began researching zoophilia on its own terms.

The view of this era might broadly be described as objectified. Sciences such as anthropology and study of the psyche were in their infancy, and classical belief, categorization, and the subject-object viewpoint of study had not yet been upset by 20th century thinkers. Subjects were often studied by describing the objects of study in detail, and categorizing them into hierarchies and families. Such categories and viewpoints were often subjectively based upon writers' impressions, rather than being as objective as their authors imagined them to be (this issue impacted other fields of human study too). Zoosexuality was no longer for the most part punished by religious execution; rather, like homosexuality, it was broadly treated as a sickness or deficiency in a person, or analysed as a behavior of a social class of person. Some early researchers made the intellectual leap of considering it as a sexual variation rather than a deficiency, but these were a minority. Psychology had not yet emerged as a field in its own right, so psychological fields were subsumed within Medicine, and zoosexuality was documented by scientists as a medical phenomenon associated with more primitive or lower class people and races. Those who were neither were assumed to be examples of rare perversion or degeneracy. The clinical viewpoint by the early 20th century was oriented around early psychology's concept of non-sexual acts as symbolic or substitutional, after Freud. Both human and animal behavior (including sexuality) were seen psychologically through the twin light of behaviorism (John Watson's influential view that science should reject the use of introspection in favor of stimulus-response as an explanation, and that the understanding of the conscious mind was not a valid goal of experimental psychology) and determinism (the view that there was no such thing as free-will in behavior).

Thus, in 1927, when British sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote Studies in the psychology of sex, science was still in the stage of describing and categorizing unusual sexual activities, largely according to researchers' preconceived notions or behaviorist observations, under a thin guise of objectivity:

Havelock-Ellis referenced Kraft-Ebbing's work Psychopathia Sexualis (1894) which recognized zoophilic voyeurism (watching animals mate), as "fall[ing] within the range of normal variation". He identified touch and emotional closeness producing "sexual excitement or gratification" as "a sexual fetishism" termed "erotic zoophilia". Kraft-Ebbing then divides zoosexual activity into "two divisions: one in which the individual is fairly normal, but belongs to a low grade of culture, the other in which he may belong to a more refined social class, but is affected by a deep degree of degeneration," (Kraft-Ebbing named these "bestiality" and "zooerasty" respectively, stating they were different in kind from erotic zoophilia). Havelock-Ellis' view was that:

"Bestiality and zooerastia merely present in a more marked and profoundly perverted form a further degree of the same phenomenon which we meet with in erotic zoophilia; the difference is that they occur either in more insensitive or in more markedly degenerate persons [...] In seeking to comprehend this perversion it is necessary to divest ourselves of the attitude toward animals which is the inevitable outcome of refined civilization and urban life. Most sexual perversions, if not in large measure the actual outcome of civilized life, easily adjust themselves to it. Bestiality [with one exception] is, on the other hand, the sexual perversion of dull, insensitive and unfastidious persons. It flourishes among primitive peoples and among peasants. It is the vice of the clodhopper, unattractive to women..."

• The UK Offences Against The Person Act 1861 (repealed) brought the act within the realm of the criminal law, stating: "Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or with any animal, shall be liable ... to be kept in penal servitude for life ...." (In this law, the crossover from religious to civic law can be seen; the characterization as "abominable" being a term carried over from Canonical law and Leviticus 18)
• Mirabeau, in the 18th century, stated, on the evidence of Basque priests, that "all the shepherds in the Pyrenees practice bestiality". Mantegazza records (Gli Amori degli Uomini, ch. V) that a young Apennine goatherd believed his dyspepsia and nervous symptoms stemmed from sexual congress with his animals. In 18th century South Italy, Sardinia and Sicily, "bestiality among goatherds and peasants is said to be almost a national custom by Bayle" (Dictionary, Bathyllus, cited by Havelock-Ellis as note 50). Warton was informed that in Sardinia and Sicily priests in confession used to habitually inquired of shepherds if they had anything to do with their sheep. In Normandy priests were advised to ask similar questions.
• Jonas Liliequist, a social historian at the University of Umeå in Sweden, who has studied bestiality in Swedish history, observed the abundance of bestiality cases in Swedish courts during the 17th and 18th centuries (more than 1500), and the scarcity of cases of homosexual acts (appr. 20). He raises the question of whether this discrepancy had been because of a more tolerant attitude towards same sex intercourse than to intercourse between man and animal, or if it had been due to an even more severe taboo against homosexual acts.

See also

• Anthrozoology
• History of sex

Further reading

• Marie-Christine Anest: Zoophilie, homosexualite, rites de passage et initiation masculine dans la Greece contemporaine (Zoophilia, homosexuality, rites of passage and male initiation in contemporary Greece) (1994), ISBN 2738421466
• Dubois-Dessaule: Etude Sur la Bestiality au point de Vue Historique (The Study of Bestiality from the Historical, Medical and Legal Viewpoint) (Paris, 1905)
• Gaston Dubois-Desaulle: Bestiality: An Historical, Medical, Legal, and Literary Study, University Press of the Pacific (November 1, 2003), ISBN 1-4102-0947-4 (Paperback Ed.)
• Hans Hentig Ph.D.: Soziologie der Zoophilen Neigung (Sociology of the Zoophile Preference) (1962)
• Bronisław Malinowski:
  The Trobriand Islands (1915)
  The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929)
• Robson, Bestiality and Bestial Rape in Greek Myth, 1997, S. Deacy and K. F. Pearce (edd.), Rape in Antiquity, Duckworth, 65-96
• Voget, F. W. (1961) Sex life of the American Indians, in Ellis, A. & Abarbanel, A. (Eds.) The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Behavior, Volume 1. London: W. Heinemann, p90-109