Introduction
"Bestiality-violation of animals-monstrous and revolting to mankind." Krafft-Ebing used these words to introduce the subject of sex between humans and animals in his monumental nineteenth century study of perverse sexuality, Psychopathia Sexualus. The public attitude toward many deviant sex practices has eased since those harsh Victorian times but the very idea of bestiality seems as "monstrous and revolting" as ever to most people today.
The old testament, source of most of our basic behavorial taboos, is clear on the subject. In Leviticus 18:23 the Lord lays down the law to Moses, Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith; Neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto; it is confusion.
The Bible not only forbade bestiality but prescribed stern penalties both for the human and the animal participants, each apparently being presumed equally guilty in the affair. Thus Leviticus tells us, If a man lie icith a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.
In the Middle Ages in Europe surviving court records show that the Biblical penalties were carried out to the letter. In France one man was hanged and then burned for fornicating with a cow and a goat, and then both animals were also burned. Two centuries later, a sixteen-year-old girl was found guilty of having had sexual relations with a dog, and both dog and girl were hanged and burned.
Most states today have no law on their books specifically forbidding bestiality, but it is usually considered to fall under the category of sodomy offenses, which include everything from sucking a twat to screwing a turkey-from buggering your wife's rectum to fucking a corpse on a morgue slab-from jerking off in company with a friend to having your cunt licked by a cocker spaniel. It's all sodomy in the eyes of the law, although the sodomy statutes are seldom enforced these days except against homosexuals.
In the Middle Ages, when penalties against it were the most severe, all the evidence indicates that bestiality as an adjunct to witchcraft revelries and as a casual barnyard pastime ran a neck-and-neck race with incest as the favorite sport among the peasantry.
In the prim and proper nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing regretfully reported that violation of animals was "none too infrequent," and in the modern day Doctor Kinsey's more extensive and enlightened research discovered that forty to fifty percent of farm boys he interviewed had had some kind of sex relations with animals at one time or another in their young lives.
A good indication of the way bestial sex has obsessed man's imagine through all the ages is the frequency with which it turns up in popular literature and mythology. The ancient myths and fairy tales are full of creatures half-human and half-beast such as centaurs, sphinxes and mermaids, and human and animal love affairs wherein the beast usually is a god or a prince temporarily transformed.
In our own time we continue to thrill over popular entertainments wherein bestiality is suggested if not specifically portrayed. Jungle adventures in which young lovelies are carried off by giant apes, presumably to satisfy their bestial lust, have always been popular with matinee audiences.
As many writers including Freud have suggested, where bestiality has persisted so in men's fantasies, there certainly must have been widespread practice of the actual deed, for men's dreams are reflective of their real-life desires.
In the free-and-easy climate of today, bestiality is not only as common a pastime as ever, but many of those who practice it are quite willing to spill their guts about it for publication without shame or fear. There is a spirit of adventure in the practice of sex today-a reaching out for new sensual experiences of every kind-and an unabashed readiness to share the fruits of those experiments and spread the joyful word to the hesitant, still-puritanical masses. So I had surprisingly little difficulty in finding a variety of persons of all ages and both sexes who quite willingly "told all" about their bestial habits for this book. I have compiled from the resulting taped conversations the case reports in the following pages. Only the names and places have been disguised in some instances, in light of the sodomy laws, but the broad picture these cases give of bestiality as it is practiced in our twentieth century world is a true one.