You Sexy Animal, You

It's back. It's hot. It's bestiality.

We have at the moment one of those confluences that drive the cultural chit-chat agenda. One new book details a circus trainer's allegedly orgasmic relationship with her tiger. Another book surveys bestiality through the ages. Meanwhile, a famous ethicist kicks up a media fuss by asking us to rethink our aversion to livestock lust. This as moviegoers flock to "The Animal," a comedy about a man, his genes faultily engineered, who veers towards wild kingdom sex.

Which invites two perfectly natural questions. 1) Yeah, sex with animals. What's up with that? And 2) Is nothing sacred? Why is it that so much of our public discourse is ruled by frenzied bouts of taboo grappling, and what good, if any, comes of it?

Let's start with the first. The news about bestiality, as it turns out, is pretty old, having lurked in the human imagination at least since the Bronze Age, when someone in Sweden made a rock drawing of a man copulating with a four-legged something. Imagery of people getting it on with the hooved or the tentacled adorns a 2500-year-old Greek vase, a seventeenth century Indian miniature, an eighteenth century European engraving, a nineteenth century Japanese drawing. Bear, one of the great Canadian novels, is Marion Engels' tale of a gentlewoman who prefers bruins.

It's hard to get a bead on how many people actually follow through these days. Dr. Alfred Kinsey asked Americans in the 1940s. Eight percent of males and 3.5 percent of females reported interspecies congress, as did half of men living in rural areas, according to Kinsey's widely cited, but disputed, data. As to partners of choice, Kinsey found that women tended towards pleasuring dogs with hand jobs or having the dogs pleasure them by licking. Austrian court records of the last century reveal that rural men prosecuted for bestiality were far more likely to have had intercourse with a cow than with whatever else was available in the barnyard.

This all by way of Dearest Pet: On Bestiality by Dutch author Midas Dekkers, which was published last year to quiet notice -- until Peter Singer got a hold of it. Singer holds a prestigious chair in bioethics at Princeton University, for which he was championed by Princeton President Harold Shapiro, who chairs a U.S. Presidential Commission mulling the rights and wrongs of everything from fetal-tissue research to human cloning. He's a noted animal liberationist, and he has drawn huge fire for concluding that in some cases infanticide and euthanasia are justifiable. So his enemies were paying attention when he took up "the love that dare not bark its name," as some wags have termed it.

Singer gave them plenty of ammo. His review for the erotic on-line magazine Nerve started off by noting that other historical sexual taboos, from sex without procreation to homosexuality to masturbation and sodomy are no longer viewed widely as perversions in this society. He goes on to say that bestiality is not only no new thing, in certain circumstances it's no big thing either. His view springs from an Aristotelian view of the world that sees humans as smartest of all animals, but nevertheless part of the continuum of nature. Plato, by contrast, worked hard to prove that humans, by virtue of consciousness and conscience, are separate from nature -- a view reflected in the Judeo-Christian teachings that only humans possess a soul and are made in the image of God.

Galloping further down the trail of Aristotle than even the Greek sage dared go, Singer does identify certain sex with animals as clearly out of bounds. The bizarre practice of copulating with a chicken and then lopping the bird's head off to enhance the sensations, for example, "is cruelty, clear and simple."