An Attempt to Understand Zoophilia

little touchy. That's right. If you remember back to two thousand fifteen, we published an episode titled the Science of Necrophilia, in which we set out to explain and demystify a taboo and disturbing practice, and I think we achieved that. In this episode, we're going to explore the topic of

zoophilia with the same goals in mind. Now that being said, again, we want to give listeners fair warning about the topic, even though we'll be tackling it with the same level of tact and a quorum that we apply to other topics of this nature exactly. So, if you just are a subscriber to our show and this is downloaded to your feet and it's auto playing, or something like that. Now is your opportunity to hit pause and wait until you're in a more comfortable situation, or or skip to

the next episode if you want to. Uh So, here we go. This is the zoophilia episode of Stuff to Blow your mind. All right, now we have disclaimers out of the way, let's jump right into it. Was just say, a clinical definition. What are we talking about when we talk about zoophilia? Okay? So, zoophilia is typically defined as recurrent, intense sexual fantasies, urges, and sexual activities with non human animals.

Sometimes viewers and listeners don't like it when we use the term non human animals, but here I think it's especially appropriate. Uh. There are defined variations about this based on species. There's a lot of variations on this. I didn't want to like really like rattle everybody's heads with all the various terminology, but suffice to say there's variations based on dogs, cats, horses, pigs, birds, dolphins, lizards, and insects. Now, the word zoo file is Greek for animal lover. But

today zoophilia is defined as a paraphilia. That means it's an unusual sexual activity that deviates from what is considered normal at a particular time in a particular society, and these are currently classified as psychological disorders that become basically the person's prime means of gratification. It displaces their sexual content with a consenting adult partner. This can include anything

from fantasies to sexual urges to actual behaviors. But in two thousand fourteen a paper was written by Ranger and feder Off, and this was in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law about definitions in regards to this. And I have to admit that until we sat down in did the research for this episode, I was a little murky on the terminology myself. So zoophilia can be confusing, especially when you try to distinguish

it from the term beast. Reality, it's worth reminding ourselves before we get too far into this. Humans are not the only ones who risk misreading sexual interest in other species. There's a lot of evidence we've talked about on the show before, whether it's chimpanzees, dogs, or horses. Okay, yeah, I mean one of the issues here, of course, is that, yeah, we find plenty of examples of sexual violence and other

species as well as cases of interspecies sexual activity. But but humans are the only practitioners who truly possess rationality and consciousness in a in the human sense. Naturally, we've discussed in past episodes, you know, to what degree to other animals have consciousness? To what degree are other animals aware? And you know, you can go back and forth, and there's some tremendous research that's been done in those areas.

But even in cases where there is arguably consciousness, it is a different consciousness, you know, they are just separate mind states at work here. And on top of that, we're the only species that has ethics and laws and a very you know, written down and culturally enforced manner, and we're the only ones to whom consent has a human meaning, right, And this is super important to the topic. But we're actually going to diverge here and we're gonna sort of split the topics so that we can cover

this concisely today. So let's begin by using this distinction. Going forward, for the rest of the episode, we're going to refer to zoophilia as a psychological condition and a psychological condition as well discuss that does not necessarily involve contact with the animal exactly, whereas beast reality is a legal term that is used to describe the act of Okay, Now, if you look at the Diagnostic UH and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder is probably our favorite book on the

show to site UH. It includes zoophilia. It's been in there since the third edition. The current edition defines it as quote recurrent and intense sexual arousal involving animals, But it doesn't differentiate between the sex, age or type of animals, and it doesn't specify what sex acts, if any, actually occur with an animal, and what circumstances maybe, and what the purpose maybe of this zoophilia. So Ranger and Federof

again I turned back to their paper. They make a really good point in that when you compare all of the studies of which we found out, there is a lot of research with this, like so much way more than there was when we did our necrophilia episode. Uh. It turns out that because none of those distinctions are made in the d s M, they aren't really made

in a lot of the papers either. So the terminology that's used to compare and contrast this psychological condition as it's to find is very loose and subsequently they find it to be somewhat meaningless. Essentially that like we need to come up with a better terminology or a better categorization, right, and and that's something we'll get into as well. Somebody

has done that. Yeah. I think what one of the interesting things to come out of the research here is that there is a there is a lot of a lot has been written about zoophilia, and yet there are and so many questions that still remain. There's still there's still so much room for additional research. Yeah, and so most of the studies we looked at, they concentrate on the act of beast reality, and we decided, okay, ground

rules for this episode. First of all, we're gonna try to just stay away from just like sensationalized stories about acts of beast reality, right, We're to focus on the zoophiliac preference for a human to be attracted to another animal. Also, there is so much conversation about legal issues surrounding zoophilia that there's no way we could possibly put it all into this episode as well, it would have to be an entire other episode. So we're leaving out legal and

ethical questions out of our notes. For today's episode. We'll probably circle back around and ask some of those questions again at the end of the episode, and certainly we want to hear from you the audience what comes up for you. In fact, in our discussion module on Facebook, we've already been talking about this and some interesting points about legal and ethical issues have already been brought up.

That's right. Yeah, We've reached out just to see what kind of initial questions and initial levels of understanding of this topic might be there. And I think that's ultimately what this episode is about, an attempt to understand zoophilia to the extent that most of us can. Yeah, all right, So now that we've got like a setup and a framework for the episode, let's let's do this. Let's get into this because there's a lot of interesting information here.

Let's start with the history and myth underpinning zoophilia. So there is a long tradition of it being in mythology, and it usually we chooses animals that have characteristics that symbolize what our human ideals are, right, and if you look, there's prehistoric depictions of zoophilia that have been found in Siberia, Italy, France, and Sweden allegedly, also the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, and

Romans took part in similar activities as well. Okay, there's also evidence that during the Middle Ages, zoophilia was a tolerated practice, and this was up until the sixteenth century. It became religiously and culturally shamed because of a prohibition against all nonreproductive sexual activities. So this is important when we were talking about the definition of it earlier regarding quote deviancy, right, that it entails the rest of society

agreeing upon what deviancy is. And apparently at this point it was not. Uh So today, of course, there is a taboo surrounding it because not just of you know, religious reasons of nonreproductive sexual activities, but also because society has a moral concern about cruelty to animals. Yeah, and that's that's definitely something we're going to come back to again and again here. Now, when we mentioned mythology and zoophilia, I imagine a few examples come to everyone's mind, particularly

as far as Western traditions are concerned. So the Greek god Zeus, for instance, took the form of a bull, a swan, an eagle, to seduce or kidnap or in one case, copulate with a mortal woman. I totally remember reading that as a kid, like reading about Greek myths and being like, wait a minute, like that there was like some it was like there was there was something missing from the narrative explaining how that whole thing worked. Yeah.

I definitely remember reading the myths as well and having having some questions about what was really going on here. Um and and certainly that you know, this is an odd case in and on itself. Just to consider a a humanoid entity such as Zeus taking the form of an animal, uh and then engaging in the sex act

with a human. We again we have we have an inhuman agent, but one that's essentially humanoid in nature, in an original form, and it takes the form of a beast to pursue and only in some tellings engaged sexually with a human female. This is how you can tell that it's taboo in our society now, right, Like imagine, just try to imagine for Ragnarok. I just went and saw that this weekend. It is about similar mythologies, right,

it's a different cultures mythology. But there would never in a million years be a movie where Odin turns into a bowl and goes to Earth and has sex with a human woman that would probably not get past the the sensors. Now, in other myths, it's important to know we have many varieties of this tale. So in some cases, yes, humans or humanoid entities take a page from the Zeus playbook and they masquerade as an animal, and then sometimes

that masquerade results in in sex. But we also have the reversal in which an animal masquerades as a human, and in these cases, certainly the sex isn't physically human, but it kind of presents fifty of the zoophilic essence. I read. I read an article for this title, The Mythology of Masquerading Animals or Best Reality, by Windy Donager

who published in the journal Social Research. In this and she makes some some I think, very interesting points that kind of help illuminate again the mythic underpinnings of what we're talking about here today. So she says that animals, first of all, often stand in as surrogates in our myths, surrogate parents for a royal child, for example, a surrogan victim for a child taken into the woods to be murdered.

We all remember some of the tellings of Snow White, correct, with the UH taking the child into the woods to a murder and bringing back an animal's heart instead. Right, Yeah, so this gets back to the idea of the animal being a symbol for human ethics, human culture, human beliefs. Now, there there are two complementary animal paradigms here, she says, lowly animals standing in for low social classes and regal or high animals standing in for higher human classes or

even the gods. And she points out that some argue that Christianity itself borrows from the Greek tale of Zeus taking the form of a swan to impregnate Lata. The argument here is that instead we get married, and the symbol of the dove is a sort of mythological reverberation of the Greek myth. In either case, we see humans marrying above or beneath their stature. Interesting. Okay, I had not thought of it that way, but yeah, that definitely

makes sense. Yeah, And in the the whole stature question, it's going to come back again and again because I think so much in the zoo zoophilia UH conundrum has to do with what is the level of the human and what is the level of the animal that Like, So this idea is interesting because I think it's somewhat ties into present day language as well. Class is something that's very difficult to discuss even today, Like we have a hard time talking about it in I guess public company, right.

Uh So it seems like in order to get around that these myths used animals as like a substitute for class affiliations. Yeah. Indeed. Now she argues that even non religious stories with human animal sexual interaction have theological ramifications. And I found this very interesting. She she points to the trope of feet betraying the status of an entity.

So we've covered before. One of my favorite topics is succubiny and incubie and uh and and there are stories about how you can identify a succubus because her feet will give her away. Yeah, so she may look like a beautiful woman, but if you look at her feet,

they're like duck feet. Because I believe in the witchcraft treaties that I was reading about this, the argument is that that God would never present, uh you know, a completely um unbeatable challenge that there be for the faithful if you're faithful enough to doubt it and then look at the feet, think it was a way out. And somehow over the years that's turned more into like goat hooves instead of duct feet. Yeah, there's been more more monstrous version of the feet. But I see it come

up to time and time again. Uh. It even came up recently on the Netflix series Big Mouth. I don't know if you're watching risque comedy about puberty, but there's a demon that shows up and its nature is given away by its feet. So, um, this is not only the case with lesser beings, but even in the higher beings. She appoints to the case in Hinduism where the feet of mortals touched the ground while higher beings float quote like a hovercraft, and then they're There are additional examples.

You have the idea of feet of clay, the bruised heel of Eve Christ as quote, the hunted stag whose foot is stained with blood. You have Achilles in his heel as well, which she also points out that he was the son of a goddess with equine qualities and was raised by a centaur. So you get into this this area where where you have to ask why Why the feet? What is it about the feet that gives us some clue to the stature of an animal or

or a being. Probably because they're incredibly vulnerable to write like, like, in terms of human anatomy, I think of feet as being, you know, especially before we built like steel toed boots, they're incredibly vulnerable pieces of anatomy. Well, yeah, I think that's a that's a huge part of it, because to to wear shoes is an act of a sort of a you know, a higher state of humanity. I guess,

I mean we we have more conflicted feelings about that today. Obviously, an idea of like walking barefoot through the park has a certain appeal now that it might not have had previously. Um, but it is a way to pick up parasites or get something stuck in your foot. Uh And And likewise, we get into this area where we consider the legs of an organism, how many legs does it have? And this is often used to determine status. When we see

that in Leviticus, we see that with Aristotle. Uh And the argument here is that a lot of this derives from the fact that hands define humans, and therefore, if you lack a pair of a feat that means that you probably have hands. Uh. And also our ancestors were trackers, they were hunters. This is how we identified other forms of life, tracking their movements. And this is the strategy

we turned to when a strange creature must be identified. Uh. I mean, there's also the sphinx four ft two feet three feet in the riddle of the sphinx, you know the uh of being that is that has a different number of legs in the morning and uh the afternoon in the evening. And the argument here is that tales of transformation, animals turning into people, people turning into animals. It comes down to the same thing. She says, stories about animal lovers present two variants of a single truth.

A human being is really an animal, but the weight of reality is placed differently in different variants, so that when the story ends and the masquerade is over, either there is a human or there is an animal. It does matter. Generally speaking, the forms are distributed as in as in the motif marriage to beast by day man by night, And of course the opposite is uh is true in some cases where the entity is a man by day and a beast by night, but it's going

to be one of these two. And you and I were talking about this before we went into the studio to this is sort of both the constant struggle but also the desires sometimes to give into the feral animal nature of humanity, right, And there's so many examples in the episodes we've done of various cultures trying to attain that state, yeah, without any kind of a zoophilic or more sexual connotation as well, like animal transformations, and it's

it's you know, it goes back into prehistory. So Donator argues, quote the key seems to be that the true form is the one that appears at night, an interesting assertion of the primacy of what is hidden the time of dreaming over what is apparent the time of the workaday world.

So probably wondering, well, what are these myths saying? Well, she argues that on one hand, ancient people live closely with animals, so their forms and their behaviors were natural metaphors for human sexuality, and they also may have employed unconscious symbolism in identifying the animal aspects of themselves. But we're also talking about sexual trickery here, both both the with mythic animals and mythic humanoids. But this is this is really quite in keeping with not only human sexuality,

but the reproductive strategies of countless species. So to what extent are we just you know, using these animals as metaphors to understand it all? And she also points out that animals sometimes mistake us for their mates, uh, often through the process of imprinting. She brings it all to it to a head, I think with this this final quote here, she says animals to have their sexual illusions, Thus they provide us with both basic data and basic

metaphors with which to formulate our own sexual masquerades. For we too are subject to the magic of imprinting when, like those mocking birds, we use animals as mirrors in the construction of our own self deceptive self images. So this actually brings up something for me that is going to come up in the research later, but I want

to just put a pin on it here, right. Uh, Kinsey did some research into this, and we'll talk about that data later, but it ties in very closely with what she's saying about early humans living closely with animals, right, and Kinsey's research touched upon that that. Uh. In fact, according to his research, and it's been since been disputed that rural farm communities are more likely to have instances

of zoophilia than like urban ones where there's less animals. Now, I will say this, I think that one of the tame comes from all this is that we can't just look at myths and religious treatments as near literal invocations of beast reality, Like can't say, well, zeus turn into a swan and copulated with a woman. Therefore, this is proof positive that that beast reality and zoophilia were were

common and accepted. But at the same time, I feel like there's a there's a lot of truth in her statement about quote we about us using animals as mirrors, because I think I think it not only explains a lot about what's going on in mythic zoophilia, but it might just tie into some of the pathological aspects of the topic that we're discussing here. Yeah, yeah, I tend

to agree. I think my position on this, after looking at all the research, is somewhere around that we as human beings are not very good at understanding feelings of strong emotion and and like we sometimes confuse those. But also there's lots of evidence to that this. There's no confusion going on here right as we're going to discuss. So yeah, I don't know, let's keep going. This is

a this is a weird one for us. It's hard to come down on any particular add on this, but well, I mean outside of saying outside of the law, right right, Um, And I'd say it's hard to come down on a position that that clearly explains exactly. Yeah, that's what I meant. So why don't we take a break, will visit a sponsor, and then when we come back, we're going to get

into who exactly zoo files are. Alright, we're back. So yeah, it's one thing to talk about ancient people's and mythological tales, but let's get into the into understanding exactly who zoo files are. Right. So, as I mentioned earlier, and actually I see this now in your note that you made the same Uh made the same comment that I just made earlier. In the nineteen fifties, Dr Alfred Kinsey, everybody remembers that movie with Liam Neeson, right, Uh, published the

Kinsey Reports on the American Sexual Practice. And in that report, it claimed that eight percent of males and four percent of females had had at least one sexual experience with an animal. There was also a high are prevalence for these acts for people who worked on farms. There's according to the that research, it was up to seventeen percent. Mail. Now, Kinsey had a book that came out in nineteen and this was with Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin. It's called

The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. That also reported that fifty percent of the population of male Americans who lived on rural farms claimed to have sexual contact with other species. Subsequently, Kinsey advised clinicians to assure such men if they came to them and you know, they were having some kind of a crises about this, that this was a normal part of being raised in a rural environment. And the reasons why we're one that females were scarce

into that premarital relations were strictly forbidden. This is somewhat unfortunate as we find the sort of the history of studying zoophilia move forward to present day, because it caused most people to assume that zoo files were male, woman deprived, rural and poorly educated. So it going back to our discussion of class I mean, it turns into a purely class issue, like this is a a working class, lower class conundrum. This is what essentially, this is what poor

uneducated people do. Yeah. And in fact, in some of the later research that we'll talk about in here, you'll find that one of the first qualifiers that's added to any of the anonymous case studies is just so you know, this person has like a real job, like this person is a doctor, or this person is a lawyer. You know,

they they feel the need to qualify it somehow like that. Now, along with zoophilia, psychologist John Money has studied paraphilia extensively, and he claims to have identified about forty variant behaviors of paraphilia. Money was actually world renowned in the nineteen seventies and he claimed that zoophilic behavior was actually transitory when there were no other sexual outlets available to people.

Uh In a n T study that found that males ranked quote sexual expressiveness as the highest motivating factor for their zoophilia and emotional involvement as the lowest, it subsequently was reversed where female zoo files reported that emotional involvement was their highest motivating factor and sexual expressiveness was their

lowest motivating factor. So okay, we're already beginning to see why there needs to be categorization difference both between the gender of the humans involved but also the gender of the animals involved. Right then, in the two thousands, further research found all that stuff to be false. While there are case reports of individuals who seek treatment for this as an unusual sexual preference, many like minded people are coming together on the Internet in forums that are dedicated

to zoo file communities. This is something that came up in our discussion module. People we're mentioning like there's certain areas of Reddit, I guess or like um. They had mentioned particular websites that you can go to if like this is your interest, right right, And I think I want to if anyone out there is already like god, I don't know if I can keep going to this world.

Right Well, bear in mind, we're going to talk about some of the classifications for zoo files, and again, most of these classifications do not involve contact with the animal with or at least several of them do not. Yeah, yeah, And I think that's an important like thing for trying to understand this better too. And I saw this This is probably important to mention that, like in the literature, there is a lot of comparison to how this is

studied with how pedophilia is studied. And we've actually had people right into us and say, oh, can you guys do an episode on the paraphilia of pedophilia, and we we have not done that yet. We we did get into it a little bit on the the Robot sex spot.

You're right, I forgot about that, and one of the take comes in that, as I recall, was that a great deal of the research into pedophilia was based on studies of criminals, and there was this theory that was put forth that, well, what if there are two types of individuals with these inclinations, those who act upon them and those who have them under control, And it seems that you could make a similar argument for for other

paraphilias as well. Yeah, this is especially interesting to me that that's a similar thing that happened in zoophilia studies

at the beginning. But it's especially interesting to me because I just binged Mine Hunter on Netflix, which is obviously you have as well, and so it's about if you haven't seen it, it's about the early days of the FBI learning how to psychologically profile serial killers, and there's a lot of similarities in how they studied for that and the problems with their methodology that come into these

other psychological profiles for what are defined as criminal acts. Right, Okay, So it should also be noted that most of the published studies on zoophilia use non clinical samples for their data. That means like a lot of it is anonymous data or it's just you know, people that they're they're they're finding, for instance, on these internet sites, the claims that they're making.

The studies find that the majority of self identified zoo files actually don't have sex with animals because there's no other sexual outlet, but because it is actually their sexual preference. So then you get into a complicated thing. They're right where it's it's the same thing as saying, well, if heterosexuality is your sexual preference, then why isn't that defined as a as a deviant disorder? Right? And once again

it comes down to society and ethics and culture. Uh. Now, reasons here include a attraction to animals out of desire and affection, but also be sexual attraction that's based on love for animals. Now, This is a really crucial study in zoophilia. Research came out in two thousand two. It's Dr Hani Miletski, and they surveyed ninety three zoo files for more information. She found the following statistics. Only twelve percent of her sample engaged in sex with animals because

there were no human partners available. Okay, So that seems to automatically disqualify that that idea that Kinsey presented us, the idea of saying, a rural individual who does not have contact with human females and then there four turns to animals. Yeah, exactly seven percent said the reason why was because they were too shy to have sex with humans. So again, that is a very low percentage comparatively to sort of I think the stereotypical understanding. This number is

going to blow you away. A hundred percent of the women said it was because they were sexually attracted to animals. So all of the women that she interviewed said that. Six of the women said that it was because of their love affection for the animals. Of the women also said it was because the animal itself wanted to have sex with them. Now, Letski's sample trended towards dogs and horses. And this is something I think we were finding throughout the literature, right that that those seem to be the

most common. Specially dolphins come up occasionally as well. But let's be honest, how many of us have like ready access to dolphins. Yeah. One of the things we see time and time again is that it tends to concern domesticated animals, and and you and you have to realize that domesticated animals are in and of themselves a rather perverse thing, you know. I mean, it's a very human thing. It's what we've been doing for ages. It's a it's a part of human civilization. But we subjugated animals and

transformed them and and use them as tools. We use them as as you know, beasts of labor. We use them as a as a as a ready food source, we use them to fulfill our desires. And and that is occasionally brought up as an argument in favor of zoophilia, saying, well, look, this is how we use animals elsewhere in our world,

why not for this area as well. Yeah, you know, as many of the listeners know, I'm an animal person who've got two dogs and two cats, and Uh, I think about this a lot, right that like that sort of the negotiation, the deal between us is like they get to live in comfortable domesticity where they're fed and sheltered and everything, but the subsequent expectation is that they

need to follow the human rules of being right. And with my my female pit bulldog that I recently acquired in the last two years, she is uh, what's referred to as a reactive dog. She's very difficult in terms of how she relates to other dogs and like territorial right, uh, And so that's been a challenge for us. We've had to do a lot of training with her. But there's a part of me inside that's like, why am I uh forced her to try to behave in a way

that isn't natural for her? Oh? Yeah. We run into that all the time with our with our cat Mochi, because Mochi is an indoor cat and she's our first purely indoor cat, and so she has all of these natural inclinations to to hunt, mainly that are not met by her indoor life, and so she has to take those impulses out, usually on my feet while I'm trying to walk around the house, he'll attack me. And I feel like I can only get so mad about that because on on one hand, yes, I my feet should

not be hunted for sport. But on the other hand, we're the ones who took a wild creature or you know, by we, I mean humans. We took this wild creature and decided it should live inside of a of an artificial environment. Right, And so then you get to this point with zoophilia, and it's that is an extremeline to draw. That is like, well, as part of the negotiation of domesticity, we have sexual relationships. Um, so I think that that is why a lot of people, ourselves included, have a

really difficult time talking about this. But hey, the show is called Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's I think we felt like we had to tackle this but also do it in you know, a mature conversational way. Yeah, I mean to to chan all the other words of of the Timothy Leary, you know, putting ourselves in that state of vulnerable open mindedness, and uh, it's it can be a very uncomfortable state of open mind. Yeah. Yeah, as long as we all know that we're all uncomfortable together,

I think we're good. Uh. Two more quotes from Honey Militzky study, and these are related. I actually, only eight percent of the males that she interviewed wanted to stop their zoo philip behavior. None of the females that she interviewed did so. Again, so a hundred percent of them said they were a hundred percent of the females she interviewed said they were sexually attracted to animals, and none

of them said they wanted to stop their behavior. Seventy one of all of her subjects considered themselves to be totally well adjusted in their current lives, so the idea of the of the paraphilia being a mental disorder was sort of anathema to them. Huh. Now, I we don't have the data here for this, but I wonder how that matches up with like just the public in general. What percent of just humans consider think that they have

a you know, a well adjusted life. Man. That is a really good question, and I bet it's changed with our generation. Yeah, I mean since obviously, you know, uh Madmen was basically about this. Since like the fifties, the idea of psychological dysfunction in American society has become more and more prevalent. But I feel like our generation is the first one that's really kind of comfortable just sitting in it and saying like, oh, yeah, we're screwed up. Yeah.

And then you know, to what extent are you more likely to express contentment with your life if there is this um, this, this this abnormal aspect to it. You know, it's kind of like you're if you're willing to go down this particular abnormal road far enough, then of course you're going to be okay with it. You're going to wrap it into your understanding of your personal reality. I don't know, that's that's kind of an open question. I

can think of arguments on either side. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, I mean I guess you can see that. And just like behaviors that aren't considered deviant but are just like not necessarily popular. Right. Um, So there's other studies that seem to indicate that zoo files are not suffering from significant distress or impairment as a result of their behavior. Malitsky's study said that most subjects reported being happy and

that they were not interested in altering their behavior. Then, in two thousand two, Christopher Earls and Martin Lamier published a study on a fifty four year old convict. So again we're getting into this where you're you're talking with people who are already imprisoned. But this was a person

who had strong sexual interest in horses. They hooked this person up to a penile pleasmo graph and they showed him nude pictures of a variety of humans in various ages, and then they also showed him slides of cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, and cows. It was only when they showed him images of horses that he responded physically. This seems to suggest that zoophilia, while extraordinarily rare, maybe a sexual orientation instead

of a disorder. But this is this is I think like the huge questions surrounding all the research on this right is how do you define that? And then how do you how do you provide evidence for that? Yeah, yeah, I have to have to say this was definitely a stumbling point for me with this topic, like trying to think about how zoophilia works as an orientation, for instance,

how would it be supported by natural selection? For instance, if you take homosexual behavior that there are numerous evolutionary mechanisms possibly involved there. But I'm I'm having a hard time seeing what what those mechanisms might be. For spiel Leah, I mean, it might be as simple as they're just being no adaptive benefits whatsoever. Uh. And again I wonder if if you could chalk it up to being just a complication of domestication in general, which again, is itself

a fairly unnatural act from a biological perspective. See. I think that is a real interesting approach. And I didn't see that in any of the literature so far, but maybe it's out there. But you're right. I think the idea of domestication in general and like the things that go along with it, maybe so unnatural in and of themselves that they promote this behavior. So Earls and lump Lalomier. Sorry I'm butchering that name. I know, I am. They

revisited the topic again in two thousand nine. Uh. And then this was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. It's another case study. This time it was about a forty seven year old man who was attracted to horses. He described his attempts with women as quote, foreign, distasteful, repulsive, mechanical, forced, and unsuccessful. Now this is the guy I was talking

about earlier. He obtained a medical degree. He married a human woman and they had two children, but their sex life relied on him imagining her to be a horse, so obviously their marriage didn't last. So this is an interesting study in the sense that okay, like again, it

seems to revisit the idea of orientation versus disorder. But then also the way that they slip in the differences between these two guys status is like one of them is a prisoner and the other one is a doctor who's anonymously living happily and has a family, well not happily apparently. So we see we see both the sort of the the example of that would have been expected

by by the earlier model models. We had a lower class, in fact incarcerated individual with criminal tendencies to engage in this, but then also a successful, higher class individual who had who was very wrapped up in this way of thinking as well. So then along comes a familiar figure. This is a guy that we first met, at least I did in our necrophilia episode. Apparently his thing is taking

paraphilias and really trying to categorize them. This is Dr A. Neil Aggrawall, and in two thousand and eleven, he published a comprehensive typology of zoophilia in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. And yet same guy he did the two thousand and nine study on necrophiles that we've previously covered. In fact, we have an entire gallery on stuff to Play your mind dot com based on his previous research

of necrophiles. And I think in both cases this is super useful because it it basically breaks uh, this behavior,

this admorramalavier down to a spectrum. And in doing that you can you can see the different the different levels of sort of commitment or interaction with it, and uh and and and and you you were presented with examples that in some cases are more sympathetic, like they're easier for you to wrap your head around and say, okay, well I could I could see how someone could could think like this and potentially act like this, even if this other place on the spectrum is just very difficult

to wrap my mind around. Yeah, and we're going to go through his taxonomy. I guess you would call it um. I think that you out there, may you know, listen to it and go, well, wait a minute, that doesn't exactly fit everything that I am imagining here, and both of us I think as we're you know, going through it like, well, this could be refined a little bit.

But he he's literally the only person of the other than the DSM to provide any kind of classification, So it seems like there should be more work done here. All right, Well, let's take one more break and when we come back, we will jump into these classifications. Thank alright, we're back, so aggrawall, as we mentioned, his claims for his classification system on zoophilia are based on scientific and clinical literature along with his own theoretical speculation. So let's

get into it like he did with necrophilia. There are ten classifications. We're gonna take some pauses along the way because some of them I think have a little bit more relevance to our discussion here than others. So here we go. The first one is human animal role players. These are people who have never had sex with animals, but they are sexually aroused through wanting to have sex with humans who pretend to be animals. Um. The obvious indication here, and maybe some of you aren't familiar with,

the subculture seems to include include furry fandom. But here's what's interesting. A study was done on furries by a guy named David J. Rust and he found that only two percent of furries were zoo files. Now furries, for anyone who's not familiarly, you can look up pictures of furries fairly safely. Uh. And these are just a lot of times they're just people interacting with each other in big furry fake animal costumes. You know. It's it's like

like sports mascots and sense. And they have conventions that they have a convention here in Atlanta every year they do. In fact, I have an interesting story about that convention. So, uh, my previous employer, we were doing a job search and we were flying candidates in to interview for the job search, and we had set them up at the local Marriott here in town for them to spend the night and then they would come in the next morning, they do

their job presentation and then go back home. Right. It was turned out to be the same day that the furry Convention was in town, and the Marriott wards where the fairy convention was held. So this candidate was like not traumatized, but like kind of like WHOA, what are going on? Like why were there all these people dressed up like stuffed animals. Now you have a more i think clinical explanation of what a fury is in the

notes here. Yeah, so a furry is quote someone who has an interest in fictional anthropomorphic animal characters that have human characteristics and personalities and or mythological that goes back to what we talked about beginning, or imaginary creatures that is as human and or superhuman capabilities. Some furries are

not sexually motivated at all, right, but but some definitely are. Interesting. Fact, I have many times over the past several years turned to Devian Art, the website, which is not all Devian. I don't really know about the history of the website, but there are a lot that's where artists put up their work, and I find it it's a great place to get in touch with an artist, find a particular image and say, hey, we'd love to use this image on our episode. Yeah, there's a lot of really cool

art on there. It's I guess like the best way to describe d V and art if you're not familiar with it, is it's like the Facebook for artists. Yeah, Like it's like a social media platform that lets you share a network and you see, you see a great deal of ariet I mean they're they're professional artists that have Deviant Art pages, and there are you know, very amateur pages, and then you have I have a deviant Art account just so I can contact people, even though

I do not create visual art myself. That but its been anyway. It ties into a zippilia and more importantly, I think into fury culture, because you do see a lot of furry uh related art on that website, and some of it's very innocent and some of it is is more r rated. Yeah. I have to be honest that, like, of all of the sort of subcultural fandoms, I have

the hardest time understanding furry culture. Um I I think most listeners of the show note like, I really try to be open minded about most things and flexible in my beliefs, but that's one that's been tough for me to wrap my head around. And the very first time I encountered it was actually um a story about the work environment, and it was back when I was doing

graphic design. Another graphic designer I knew worked at this company where her coworker was apparently spending all of this time in Adobe illustrator drawing uh, anthropomorphic donkeys and like horse people having sexual relations with cat people, and it was super confusing for them at the time. I don't even think people defined furry as like as as a subculture at that point. This is like very early two

thousand's and that was my first experience with it. I was just like, this person's artwork is amazing, Like they were, they were very good at what they did, but I just couldn't quite wrap my head around it. Yeah, I mean, I guess the important thing to drive them home about about furries especially is that it is it's something that takes place between adults, adult humans, adult consenting humans, and

it may not have a sexual dimension to it at all. Uh. And then likewise, outside of furries, there are there are other areas of of animal role play that that have, you know, erotic dimensions to them that don't involve furry costumes, people pretending to be ponies, people were pretending to be dogs, Andrew Lloyd Webber's cats. Look, let's be honest, like, there's plenty there's plenty of people out there who like fell in love with Mr Musta Files or whatever, right or

or I think for a lot of us. We grew up with superhero films. We watched what Batman? What was the second Batman? Uh, the one that had the Catwoman with the stitches. Yes, we saw Batman returns. And how are you supposed to feel about this? Uh? This this sex figure, this sex icon presented to you dressed and kind of behaving like a cat. Totally fun fact that I just learned. Apparently when they shot that film, Michelle Peiffer really put a live burden her mouth. What yeah, crazy, Yeah,

that's that's a fun aside to shake things up here. Okay, But before we move off of animal role play, I didn't want to drive home again too that there is an entire realm of animal role play that is non sexual and is as old as human culture. Like just the idea of engaging in a ritual where you become an animal or you summon animistic forces. I mean you find that in in in cultures around the world throughout history.

So I feel like this is a great starting place for understanding these inclinations because I feel like this is this is the realm that is that is closest to uh, you know, I guess the quote unquote normal perspective. Yeah, and I think what you said earlier to about consent is what's really important with this particular identification to write is that you know whether or not, like I can

wrap my head around it. I'm perfectly fine with two consenting adults dressing up in these costumes and doing whatever they want to do, because hey, that's their life, right. Yeah, I mean there's a lot there's a lot of stuff that humans do that honestly, I would rather watch it take place with animal costumes. Like what if we can have all of our political debates take place, that would be Yeah, I would enjoy you know what we just

voted here yesterday in the state of Georgia. It would have been a lot nicer if people were wearing uh, animal outfits. Yeah, Okay, let we we spent a lot of time on that first definition. Let's get to the second one. You want to take that, sure, this would be the romantic zoo files, those who who keep animals as pets as a way to get psycho sexually stimulated without actually having any kind of sexual contact with them.

This is what This is an area that seems to me to fall under that area of like like impulse, but no action like someone who's who is able to to keep impulses under control, which would otherwise shoot them into another category here. Then the third category is zoophilic fantasize ers. These are people who fantasize about having sexual

intercourse with animals but never actually do so. Okay, so this is this is even more so so in a way Number two the romantic zoo files that I get a sense that this is this might be something that's almost subconscious, you know. But but with number three, with zoophilic fantasizers, the fantasy is more overt. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

And then number four we have hactile zoo files of those who get sexual excitement from touching, stroking, or fondling the animals or their genitals, but do not actually have sexual intercourse with animals. Okay, the best thing I can come up with this this is a scene from a bad movie. This is the only thing that comes to mind with this. Uh, both Man Hunter and Red Dragon.

There's the scene where the um the blind woman is led by France's Dollar Hide to like a zoo or something like that, and they have a tiger under anesthesia and she starts stroking the tiger, and it's in this weird kind of sexual way that is implied to be sexual towards dollar hide. That's like the closest thing I am coming to with any kind of sort of example this. Yeah, I only vaguely remember that scene from the movie. Maybe I just kind of you might have hacked it out honestly. Yeah. Uh,

they did it again in the Hannibal TV show too well. Actually, uh, number five are fetishistic zoo files, those who keep various animal parts, especially for that are used as erotic stimuli as a crucial part of their sexual activity. Now that this is essentially for fetishism, though, right, I mean, and it's and that's not that different from weather fetishism, and in in and in and and therefore is not really that far I think out of the uh the understanding

of most most humans. I guess um, the terminology various animal parts makes me think though, even though he says, especially for that, you've also got like I don't know,

feet and stuff like that in a freezer or something. Well, um, this is another area where it comes down to like my use of image databases, so I use Getty images a lot for for work, finding images for our our podcast episodes and other bits of content, and you run across a lot of artsy shots of of of men and women, and of course, yeah, you see people with fur, you see people with whether. You also see quite a few images of people posing with antlers, especially women posing

with antlers, so like that would count. That's that's definitely part of an animal's body. Uh, you know, a detachable part. But okay, all right, what's the next one? All right, this is where we get into darker territory. For sure, this is a sadistic be steels those who derive sexual

arousal from torturing animals. They're also this is known as a zoos sadism, but it does it does not involve sexual intercourse with the animals, right, And there's a lot of distinction in the literature again with the terminology zoos Sadism is brought up a lot by self professed zoos sexuals or zoo files and they say, I am not that, Like, I want to make it clear, I do not believe myself to be hurting these animals, but there are people and I think this is the one that like would

really solidly fall under the disorder right area, Uh, then we've got opportunistic zoo sexuals. There was a similar one of these for for necrophiles as well. These are the people who have normal sexual encounters but would have sexual intercourse with animals if the opportunity arose. All right, so so far we haven't had anywhere the there's actual intercourse with animals, Like it's just sort of what we're seeing the spectrum intensify until we get there. That's the last three.

I guess. Okay, yeah, this is where with number eight, this is where we get to regular zoo sexuals, those who perfer sex with animals to sex with humans but are capable of having sex with both, such as zoo files, will engage in a wide variety of sexual activity with animals and love animals on an emotional level. So I guess you could say like that the example that I listed earlier of the anonymous doctor who loved horses but also had a family, he would be a regular zoo sexual.

Then this is this is super dark. I'm even uncomfortable reading this, but we've got to do it. Homicidal beastials. These are people who need to kill animals in order to have sex with them. So this is like a combination of zoophilia and necrophilia. Uh. And although they are capable of having sex with living animals, they have an insatiable desire to have sex with dead animals. I don't

know what to add to that. It's just upsetting. And then number ten again I need a reminder, right Like, the spectrum here has to do with with with contact like from just like very marginally um zoophilic to just zoo feel like, so number ten is exclusive zoo sexuals, those who only have sex with animals to the exclusion of human sexual partners and from from some of the data, especially that survey that was conducted by Militzky, it seems like there are quite a few people like that fall

into that category. Now by quite a few, I mean like when you interview the bad odd spectrum of zoo files, within that there are a number of them. Okay, now that we've gotten the really dark stuff out of the way. Some studies have actually called zoophilia a risk factor for future harm to humans. You would you would think that, especially again, like based on mind Hunter and Serial Killers, right, like,

one of the predictors is harming animals when you're younger. Um, But there's a paper that refutes that and advocates actually for better diagnostic criteria. This is again Ranger and feder Off. They discard zoophilia as a potential risk factor for future violence against humans because of how disparate the various definitions are. So if we look back at at agra walls, you know, out of the ten classifications, only one, two, two of them were outright sadistic and homicidal. And then you get

into the consent issues with a couple of the other ones. Right, So they say, the other problem here is that these arguments don't use peer review evidence. Uh, and that the studies, because they're difficult to conduct, lack control groups, and most of them are correlational. So they use Kinsey's report Actually that whole example of forty of males from farm communities

having sex with an animal at least once. They say, this is an example of that, right, like we this isn't peer reviewed, there isn't a control group, it's pretty correlational. There's no evidence to support that a large proportion of sex offenders come from farm communities, you know. Um. New York Magazine ran an interview by Alexa Sulis ray well, a few years back with an unnamed zoo file uh titled what It's Like to Data horse Um. I touched

on a lot it. It touches on a lot of what we're talking about here, but I don't think it's necessarily content that we we want to discuss on the show. But I'll make sure that we've link to it on the landing page for this episode. Is stuff to blow your mind for anyone who wants to essentially read a self identifying zoo files account. Yeah. Again, like we're trying to in the format of this episode stay away from

specific examples of beast reality. But I will say that the article, though it presents about his sympathetic example of of sexual zoo zoophilia as you can find, and yet I still have severe problems with it. And I think a lot of it comes down to what criminologists and sociologists uh. Piers Burnet points out in the nine paper. He makes three points. One human animal sexual relations almost

always involve coercion. That is a really good point. Yeah, the coercion versus persuasion, right, I mean, you know, coercion is is kind of that's part and partial to so much our interactions with the mesticated animals. Number two, He points out such practices can often cause animals pain or

even death. Uh, and certainly more so in some of these classifications that we looked at on the list, and the other way around too should And then number three, and this one I think is a real sticking point is animals are unable either to communicate consent to us in a form that we can readily understand, or to speak about their abuse. Yeah, so that number three is a big one. We we simply exist in different mind states,

drastically different in some cases. And I feel like in order to justify it, to justify the act, you have to essentially see the animals having a human mind state or convince yourself that you're thinking and acting via the appropriate animal mind state. And the former is impossible. In the later, I mean, it really seems to be an impossible exercise as well. I mean, you can talk about putting yourself in the mind state of a of an animal, but I'm unconvinced you can you can do so in

a way that would would satisfy Uh. This this third charge from Burnet, by the way, in uh in registering our concerns about consent, here Uh, we're exhibiting what is a tree And in the cultural treatment of zoophilia, so past condemnations tended to center around what it did to the status of the human being. You know, you're you're lowering yourself to this act. Uh, whereas we see an

increasing um uh amount of stress put on the animal itself. Uh. You know, we're concerned with the welfare the animal, the suffer the animal, the suffering the animal, the lack of consent for the animal. Uh. So if I think it's interesting to look at that, like, like how the cultural attitude towards this has changed, and or at least how the the cultural objection to it has changed. Yeah, that is a huge shift in consciousness and understanding of our

relationship with animals. I think, Wow, like maybe more than anything with zoophilia, just the historical trajectory that you're outlining, there is something that's kind of interesting, like what what is it about our present industrial state that's brought us to the point where we do care more about the will Now it's fascinating. So let's talk briefly before we

wrap up here about the future of zoophilia. This is where you know, we'll we'll discuss some of the things that were out sort of outside of the format for our discussion in this episode. So many zoo files believe in the future their sexual preference will be seen as a preference and not as a deviancy. Some individuals declare that their sexual attraction to animals is an orientation, and those are the ones that call themselves zoo sexuals instead

of zoo files. Some also want to distinguish themselves, as I mentioned earlier, from zoos sadists. They want to make it clear that they don't see their behavior as uh, taking any pleasure and harming animals. What about ethics here? There's so many questions here were purposely in this episode staying away from the legalities, but it's worth remembering as as Robert outlined, these animals can't give consent, ranger and

federal off. In their paper, they argue that of the future research on zoophilia studies can't always use forensic or prison inmates as sampling of men that are arrested for crimes other than beast reality. We can't make generalized conclusions based on this data. Uh Now, I'm imagining like a spinoff of mind Hunter that's like a whole another group of people that are trying to figure out the particularities

of studying this phenomena. Now, Jesse Bearing had a really good right up on this topic in Scientific American in two thousand ten, and he points out that there are a lot of unanswered questions about zoophilia, even if we are to accept the idea of it being an orientation and not a disorder. So I will propose these here for all of us to think about. Okay, First, what makes some domestic species such as horses and dogs more

common erotic targets for zoo files than others? Second? Do zoo files find particular members of their preferred species is to be more attractive than other individuals from that species? And how are their beauty cues such as facial symmetry? Like, what's going on there? What percentage of homosexual zoo files are there over heterosexual zoo files? So again, like if you go back to the D s M, it has no classification based on the sex or gender of either

the humans or the animals. Another question, how do zoo files differentiate between a consenting animal partner and one who isn't. Now that again obviously seems to be a line of legal boundaries, right, and then an important question too, why are men more likely to be zoo files than women? We know that at least from the research it's available to us, as flawed as it is, it seems like men are more likely to So what's going on there?

All right? So we have a number of questions that still remain open, questions about just the nature zoophilia moving forward, and in you know, we also run into some of the same complications we've we've we discussed on our sex spots episode. When you consider, all right, well, we're getting increasingly into an age where robotic uh similacrums are possible.

Virtual environments are more and more of an option, and you do see a fair amount of I mean, how many how many examples are there out right out there right now of people taking the form of an animal or uh an animal human hybrid in a virtual scenario? Oh totally? Like first example, I think of okay, Skyrim, Oh yeah, they have cat people in those yeah, And I'm like, hey, if I've got the option to be like a cool cat person with claws and stuff, I'm gonna choose that person. Why do I want to role

play as a human being. I am a human being, right,

So yeah, obviously there's lots of avenues available. So as we as we move forward in the future, people with an inclination for the like a virtual or even perhaps robot assisted version and of zoophilia, how are we supposed to feel about that because and certainly in the case of of of pedophilia, you know, there's a lot of concern that well if you if you allow people an unreal avenue to explore these feelings, then you were embolding them towards a real life crimes um in in you know,

a real life physical manifestation of their desires. So is it is there a similar case with zoophilia? So I hope that we have presented this to you in a respectful manner. Obviously it was uncomfortable for us. I imagine the listening experience. Maybe it was a little more uncomfortable for you than some of our usual episodes. It was, it was more uncomfortable for us as well. Yeah, that's true.

But yeah, I hope that we were able to communicate this and that you know, it served the mission of our show and that we were bringing out different ideas and discussion of these topics. So if you're interested in more of this, let us know. Like I said, we we talked a lot of about our necrophilia episode here. You can find that on stuff to blow your Mind dot com. And also, I had previously made a gallery

outlining AGRA walls necrophilia categorization. I don't think I'm going to do that with zoophilia here, but that you can find that unstuff to blow your Mind dot com as well. Yeah, and hey, if you want to reach out to us, you know, you know, most of the people reach out to us, they reach out is with the understanding that we may use what they say on a future listener mail, uh, etcetera.

But if you have something you want to share with us, or just your feelings about the topic and you don't want us to share it with people, uh, you know, feel free to do so and just mention that in the email. Though. Of course, we're we're not mental health professionals and we are not priest, so just bear that in mind when need share content with us. And the ways that you can get in touch with us. We're all over social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter,

we're on tumbler, and we are on Instagram. But of course, if you just want to write us privately, as Robert mentioned, the way to do that is to type out an email to blow the mind. At how stuff works com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com