Even the word itself is a taboo! Most people think bestiality is some rare perversion in the darkest corners of the Internet. But what if bestiality is actually a part of your everyday life? Bestiality is a topic so taboo, the word alone is enough to elicit reactions ranging from discomfort and disgust to moral outrage and ethical condemnation.
Despite its relevancy within a wide range of fields, bestiality is largely absent from public discourse. Additionally, you can find detailed citations to everything I state, as well as a bibliography and loads of additional resources at the end of this article.
Bestiality may seem like a pretty black and white matter: sex with animals is wrong, end of story. But such a quick dismissal, hastened no doubt by the discomfort of the subject, neglects to account for the cultural permeation of bestiality throughout history and our everyday lives. Ancient mythology is rife with gods taking the form of animals in order to copulate with humans, among many other bestial themes [2] we readily teach children in middle school.
But were a teacher to hand out a story involving sex between humans and animals written in the modern-day, suddenly a cultured appreciation of the Classics would become a potentially criminal distribution of pornography. If we attempt to evaluate these examples objectively, which the subject matter admittedly makes challenging if not impossible, the division between the educational and the immoral or criminal becomes largely a matter of cultural context. Which begs the question: what, exactly, is so bad about bestiality?
Astoundingly enough, bestiality remained punishable by death throughout the early modern period, with Sweden executing up to people between and , along with the non-human animals involved, [9] and the last known hanging for bestiality in the United States carried out by order of The Connecticut Superior Court in January of In , Denmark was the last northern European country to ban bestiality, [11] leaving Finland, Romania and Hungary as the only holdouts in the European Union.
