Zoophilia And Moral Judgement

Link of the day: What it’s like to date a horse

This is an interview with a man who talks unusually open about his love affair with a horse. It’s not a light read, if you are not up for that. But I found it a very interesting one. The relationship he has with the horse is characterized as quite a lot more tender and respectful than what people think of when they hear the terms ‘zoophilia’ or ‘bestiality’. This implicitly exposes quite a bit of societal double-standards. Germany, for example has banned bestiality in recent years. While arguments of course involved animal welfare, this is not the main reasoning behind the new law: Germany has quite strong legal protections and harming animals in any way is already punishable. The newly punishable offense is not ‘harming the animal’, but ‘having sex’ with it. It is easy to ban, because not a lot of people are zoophiles. I have mixed feelings about this law. I don’t know enough to attempt a judgement whether consensual sex between humans and animals is possible and I have no idea what those encounters typically look like. But I can point out the hypocrisy of a society that allows factory farming and bans sex with animals. We allow the industrial torture and killing of millions of animals every year and ban a very small amount of sexual encounters on the grounds that animals cannot consent. The combination of these two things doesn’t seem right to me.

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