First, I have to assure you that Duluth is nowhere near Morris. It’s 240 miles away, on the other side of the state. Besides, the guy is from Wisconsin.
Second, to answer the question raised, I don’t think it should be illegal to have sex with a dead animal. It’s sick and disgusting, but no one is being harmed. Just please, I’d rather not spend any time with the pathetic little slug.
This is a great opening for PETA and such animal rights extremists. Anyone eating rocky mountain oysters will now be open to arrest.
I don’t think sex with dead animals should be illegal, and neither should sex with living animals if they aren’t being harmed in the process, but killing an animal specifically to have sex with it is slightly over the line, I think.
I’m fine with killing animals for food, though, so maybe he should’ve eaten the horse afterwards.
If he combines the bestiality and necrophilia with BDSM is he flogging a dead horse?
You have no idea how refreshing it is to finally meet someone else with a sane perspective on the matter–that is, people who apply the “ickiness shouldn’t be illegal” principle even to things they find REALLY icky. I’ve noticed that sexual “perversions” are one of the topics where most people’s rationalism breaks down rapidlyb (almost as bad as kids and media censorship), and been frustrated to no end. (Yes, I am aware that these are emotional issues for people. What I am not aware of is how we go from “I feel strongly about this” to “*beep* control transfer to midbrain complete; shutting down cerebrum in 3…2…1…”)
*waits for one of the midbrains mentioned above to interpret this comment as an endorsement of, or personal expression of interest in, bestiality/necrophilia/whatever* well? Get on with it.
What if he killed it, had sex with it, then ate it?
Oops, looks like I was beaten to that comment.
But seriously, I agree about the “icky = illegal” thing. We mistreat millions of animals all the time, then slaughter and eat them, but then one dude fucks a sheep or something (ok it’s much grosser when it’s dead but still) and it’s illegal? I think it’s obvious what this is really about.
Yup, pretty much.
I always thought it was funny that sex with dogs was automatically considered abuse, given that at least half the dogs I’ve ever met have actively tried to solicit sex with a human. Dogs think they’re low-status people, after all–getting lucky with a human for them must be like nailing a celebrity.
A dead deer you didn’t even kill…well, you’re not going to get invited to many parties, but I don’t see anything inherently wrong with that.
You know, consent is the thing. A dead person can’t consent. An animal can’t consent. That’s why I don’t engage in necrophilia, bestiality, or dendrophilia.
Animals don’t have a recognized right to control their own bodies, so I don’t know what the consent thing comes from.
It’s about cruelty or it’s about ickiness.
‘Where’, not ‘what’.
actually that’s a good point – if they’re not granted any self-control, how can they be expected to give consent?
As callous as that probably sounds on first reading, Numad’s right. After all, if we made animals’ consent to sex an issue we’d pretty much have to give up selective breeding (since the mating behaviors of many mammal species in particular are a poor fit with human notions of “consent”).
A sock can’t give consent either, and its just as alive as a dead animal is.
Consent is only applicable to living things. The sex act with a dead animal is not a crime. If he killed the animal to have sex with it, well then I think he is crossing the line, but the only applicable crime would be the death of the animal (which could be tricky as we kill animals all the time).
I personally think killing animals for sex is probably crossing the line, but that doesn’t seem to be the common complaint.
Was the animal the same sex? That’s the biggie you know–if it was a deer of the opposite sex, then it’s OK. But if it had been a buck, then it’s a crime against God.
It’s in the bible, somewhere after the part about not having sex with shellfish. Or something.
(Can we go back to Mr. Blob?)
As others mentioned, we don’t worry about animal consent a lot of the time–with artifical insemination, for instance. But beyond that, animals are perfectly capable of consenting or withholding consent. And lots of them have teeth, claws, horns or hooves with which to make their consent or lack of same very very clear.
Although I suppose if you’re making sweet love to a sponge, the signals can be fairly ambiguous.
I’m fine with killing animals for food, though, so maybe he should’ve eaten the horse afterwards.
He should have just eaten the horse beforehand.
There. ;-)
I don’t have the actual quote at hand (and no-one would likely recognize the person, anyway) but I do remember the gist: If you are someone who loves (‘knows’?), say, dogs, then you probably know when a dog loves (wants to ‘know’) you; and if you don’t love dogs, what are you doing screwing one?
But dead dogs love no-one… and chase no tails.
And I suddenly have Oingo Boingo’s “Why’d We Come All This Way?” stuck in my head.
Having sex with a dead animal needs to be illegal, and this creep showed us why: if it’s illegal to have sex with a live animal, but legal to have sex with a dead one, then a bestiality-minded weirdo takes the logically necessary step- he kills the animal in order to have sex with it.
But then, shouldn’t it be illegal to just kill an animal? We already have anti-animal abuse statutes on the books.
what’s next, outlawing sex with really ugly people? get a life. it ain’t no different than screwing meatloaf. except leviticus says to burn him and the dog.
Speaking of which, has anyone ever come up with a story where the term pyrobovinecrophilia is used?
Only once, when my uncle got really, really, really drunk at the family barbeque.
My mother can’t look at ribs and ranch dressing the same.
Ever again.
Is it just me, or do the people who defend bestiality seem to have a, um, very personal interest in it? I’m remembering a comment thread on Pandagon that got way out of control and told me WAY more about some people’s kinks than I ever wanted to know.
Yes, I find bestiality “icky” and think that the people who engage in it are perverted freaks. Too fucking bad.
I think we missed an obvious. It appears to me, just colbertesque gut feelings, that most if not all the bestialists live in “blue” counties.
As for the animal victims, it’s obvious that most are. However once a companion rabbit decided I was her mate and would dance around me and flash her behind to me. Alas, I turned down my one chance in life to ‘intercourse’ like a bunny.
There is nothing new under the Sun. A while ago I was obliged to write a note about the bull sessions we had in 1961 when I was — of course — a sophomore, about the guy who knows where the nuclear bomb is planted and about to go off, and do you torture him. And now this.
Couple of years after that, my roommate had a book about all sorts of perverted stuff, including the guy who was caught in a graveyard in Paris being naughty with one of the new residents; when hauled before a judge, he scandalized the court by saying, “What would you have? Everyone to his taste. Mine is for corpses.”
BTW, take the subject of defilement, sexual or otherwise, of corpses, and feed that into your “icky ?= illegal” calculator. I don’t know what you’ll get.
Anyway, given the unexamined heteronormative thinking of the time, sometimes even grading into homophobia, it was natural that we agreed on the improvement, “Everyone to his taste. Mine is for dead young male animals.” I don’t know which of us put the “young” in there, but he had true prophetic powers, being even ahead of a Pharyngula thread in the next millennium.
But in the present Anton Mates surely gets the perspicacity prize for the comment about a dog scoring with a human overlord. Who ever thought of that? Or would want to?
Oh, and while we’re dealing with animals and consent, can it be that no one remembers the IgNobel prize of a year or two for the first documented case of homosexual rape of and by a duck?
-Ali
Having known several “bestiality-minded weirdos” (albeit none of whom acted on their fantasies) and done some actual reading on the topic, I question the usefulness or appropriateness of the cavalier and caricatured assumptions of the motives and mentality of “bestiality-minded weirdos” which this comment implies in a civil or intellectual debate. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing, but I don’t see this caricature of one kind of “pervert” (specifically, assuming a total lack of morality and a willingness to do virtually anything for sexual pleasure) as enormously different from similar caricatures of other groups labeled “perverts.” (In particular, I suspect that female zoophiles would find that sex with a dead animal leaves them, pardon the pun, cold).
It’s just you. Nice…well, what’s the label for this particular fallacy? Someone help me out here. But I’ve noticed that this is a common tactic among the irrational; realizing that they cannot defeat their opponents’ arguments with reason, they attempt to undermine their opponents’ credibility by claiming that their opponents are only advocating the position because its adoption would aid their own interests, rather than because they actually find the arguments in favor of that position objectively convincing.
-Mnemosyne
*sighs, reactivates Mnemosyne’s cerebrum*
(Do I actually need to point out that I realize that you’re entitled to your opinion? Well, I’d better anyway.) I also tend to consider bestiality rather “icky” (though I can at least sort of understand why some people might not) but I find your opinion as expressed above rather juvenile. I furthermore sincerely hope that you are not advocating the creation or perpetuation of legal restrictions on the basis of what you have described above, because you have, by any reasonable standard, completely and utterly failed to make a convincing case–no matter how strongly you feel about the matter. What you have provided is not substantively different from the arguments conservatives tend to make in favor of outlawing homosexual behavior. If you feel that there are meaningful differences between bestiality and homosexuality that would justify outlawing the former while permitting the latter (and there may well be), please, by all means, enumerate them. Explain, in detail, why permitting sexual contact between humans and animals (at least within certain limits, such as restricting contact which results in physical harm to the animal) would be detrimental to anything other than your gag reflex. And do try to refrain from ad hominem/well poisoning type arguments (or would you seriously contend that the blanket claim that people who argue in favor of, or, apparently, even critically analyze the arguments against, legalizing bestiality, does not fall into this category?) This is kind of the bare minimum to be taken seriously in an intellectual debate.
If bestiality were deemed acceptable, Rick Santorum might marry his dog.
Case closed, I think.
It’s just you. If I had a personal interest in every kink I defend as morally acceptable, I’d never have time to leave the house….
-Frank Brill
Good call on turning her down; you would probably have killed her on the way in. That would qualify as “animal cruelty” even though she was apparently willing, and she would definitely be a victim. However, I’d be interested in seeing you support the contention that “it’s obvious most are” victims. Not that I’m necessarily disputing that, but what are you basing the conclusion on?
-llewelly
Oh, come on now. There’s really nothing THAT unusual about a man marrying a female who’s a lot like his mother, is there? :P
Porlock Junior: I sure do
can it be that no one remembers the IgNobel prize of a year or two for the first documented case of homosexual rape of and by a duck?
I have it bookmarked. Kees Moeliker (the curator of birds at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum, BTW), showed up to collect his prize with the duck (stuffed and, erm, mounted), and he and the duck returned the next year to present the IgNobel in biology to the team that showed that herrings communicate by farting.
There’s really nothing THAT unusual about a man marrying a female who’s a lot like his mother, is there
You slander dogs.
What if someone buys a steak from the grocery store (steak is part of a dead cow) and uses it to pleasure them self? That is nearly indistinguishable from what this man did.
He found an animal that someone else had killed, and took it somewhere private (sort of) and did what he wanted to do. Is it less gross if it is just part of an animal instead of the whole thing?
It’s just you. I know it’s hard for someone like you to accept, but some people actually consider principles worth defending.
Oh, the complications of modern life. Don’t you just long for the good old days when things were simple. Like Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, wait…
Meanwhile reaility continue to amaze.
Legal or illegal, anyone trys to stick it to my dog and I kill them. Sorry, but she’s a part of my immediate family and that’s just wrong. She may be a 95 pound Rottweiler mix, but I’ve also strongly conditioned her not to hurt people, so saying that if she didn’t like it she could just fight back really doesn’t cut it for me.
I think all animals should be treated with dignity, alive or dead regardless of whether you’re going to be eating it or not. To me saying that you’re just going to be eating it anyway does not exempt you from treating a living being (or their remains) with dignity. Just because we have bigger brains doesn’t mean that people are better than animals, just that we should know better and have more responsiblity if you ask me.
It’s always a bad sign when I find myself hoping someone is inconsistent in applying their reasoning as stated. Or that he isn’t a parent; either works, really.
I agree, but unless you’re contending that sex is undignified, this line of argument is kind of irrelevant.
Yes, sex with a living being or its remins without concent is disrespectful and not treating being with dignity.
I am not a parent, but am curious as to why that even came up.
Wookie, the issue of parenting came up because this
could just as easily be this
Sorry, that comment should have been:
Wookie, the issue of parenting came up because this
could just as easily be this
I think there’s been too much blogging about purity balls.
Yeah, but a daughter would be capable of giving consent where a dog or corpse (of a daughter or dog) can’t. Besides that it was hyperbole. I’m a pacifist first and foremost, not that any of you would know that of course.
Regarding comment #8 on dendrophillia. You are incorrect that trees cannot provide consent. Everytree I’ve had an encounter with, with the exception of one, did in fact provide consent. And I don’t feel good about the one.