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Rethinking Bestiality: For a Nonspeciest View of Rights Dr. Piers Beirne I feel very honoured indeed to have been asked to take part in the ceremonies for the inauguration of the new Criminology Programme here, and I want to thank Sandy in particular for being such an extraordinary hospitable host - you have been wonderful, thank you. I was of two minds, and I still am actually, I haven't quite decided what I am going to talk about today. I think the first part of the title of my talk is to do with bestiality and the other half of it after the compulsory colon is for a nonspeciest approach to rights. Given that coming here and blasting the concept of human rights would be, for its failure to extend recognition in the moral community to the larger body of animals, if I came along and blasted that notion it would be somewhat biting the hand that fed me today. I will largely talk about bestiality and smuggle in through the back door criticisms of human rights, gentle ones. I want to just tell you a little bit about where I live. For my sins I live in the United States and have done for quite a long time now. I live in a very nice part of it, Maine, just south of here, on a splendid body of water called Merimeeting Bay. I believe its the second largest, largely fresh water bay on the East Coast of North America. I actually look out onto it. Its nine miles long and two and a half miles wide, and it flows through, when the tide is going out, through a very narrow straight called Chops Point where the water swells tremendously. Actually, six rivers flow into this bay and when the tide is going out all the water flows through Chops at tremendous pressure. Now you can imagine when the sea is coming back up towards Chops that it is much more power than the combined force of these six rivers wanting to go through. The ocean actually forces these largely fresh water rivers backwards and creates severe tides. Now one of the consequences of that is that there is an extraordinary variety of wildlife where I live. About seven years ago, quite a lot of major changes happened in my life - domestic, physical and intellectual - and it occurred to me communing in a way with the natural elements as I do pretty well everyday where I live, there is very written about animals and virtually nothing at all in the enormous body literature in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and in Francophone criminology about animals, about the abuse of animals. I began actually to try and write a book about naturalism rather foolishly. One chapter for example that I finished was on Snapping Turtles, sometimes called Alligator Turtles, are those seemingly rather danger creatures that come out of the water in June and can snap broom handles in half as legend goes. Another is on mud season, that peculiar time, in Maine it is approximately from the middle of March to middle of April and it is almost impossible to get vehicles out of one's driveway as the mud is so deep. I have never finished that and I perhaps never will because I am faced with bread and butter questions sort of and getting back to my own disciplinary origins now in sociology of law and criminology wanted to write about animal abuse. I began to look around in the field to see what was available for me, and I won't have time to go into the animal rights literature, the theoretical heart of which is sort of given by works of moral philosophers in the early 1980s. Let me tell you very briefly that concern with animal abuse is not in the literature in criminology and sociology. Animals are present actually all over the discipline in odd ways. They are present for example in the remarkably good and influential work of Douglas Hay on poaching near Birmingham in the 17th and 18th Centuries; and the class and cultural struggles that took place over sides of venison or the poaching of partridges and deer. They are present Marshall Clinard's work in the early 1950s on white collar crime, the growth of black markets in meat, the soldiers on the front who were given the first rations of meat. They are present in a more antidotal way in the literature on serial murders, but nobody has yet done a systematic study of it, and even if they did I am not sure what the importance of it would be. Most serial murderers seem to have been early on severe violators of animals. There are other areas as well such as lesbian and battering relationships in the course of which, by one partner against another, animals have been used as objects of humiliation, and so on. There are historically important debates in sociology and especially in criminology in the area of socio-biology on the parallels between non-human and human life. So animals do appear in criminology and sociology, but that only appear as one guise only, their scripts are given as objects, they are not sentient-beings in any forms at all. When they enter the discourse of criminology, perhaps even lobster fishing and poaching too, they enter is as objects. They are not regarded as problematic objects in their own right, they are ancillary to the main study, they are wheeled in as vehicles to illustrate the problems between human beings. There are virtually no counter examples to that. Now about two years ago, I began to get a course together for undergraduates on the sociology of animal abuse, which I hope to offer next year. Instead of getting students to think about animal abuse in ways in which nearly everybody will be familiar such as the plight of animals in circuses and zoos - zoos is a really good example because it was worth bad news and good news. On the one hand the animals are caged and taken out of their natural environments, and on the other hand there is the possibility that endangered and often exotic species can survive, and their educational forums and so on. Instead of using things like that or trapping to try and get students to think in a fairly disciplined way about the nature of animal abuse and the sorts of rights of non-human animals might have, I tried to look for something less obvious. In the course of my thinking a student gave me a video. It is an untitled, undated German video probably made in the mid 1980s and its called "Barnyard Love". It is a crudely produced video and in it one can see numerous acts of inter-species sexual relations. There are for example human males that engage in sexual intercourse with cows and hens, and more often given that heterosexual males are the films chief audience, human females who have sexual intercourse with dogs, who insert eels into their vaginas and who perform phalassio on dogs and horses. Even from amateurish perspective and despite the risks of anthropomorphism, I noticed how immensely varied were the filmed reactions of the different non-human animals to attempted sexual union with and initiated by humans. One extreme, the dogs in Barnyard Love who were engaged in sexual activities with women seemed energetically to enjoy such human attention. To me at least it didn't seem possible that their enthusiasm was the product of training off camera. At the opposite extreme, some animals such as eels and hens were obviously unwilling recipients of human sexual advances. Yet in the case of large quadrupeds such as horses and cows depicted in the film, their reactions seemed closer to boredom or perhaps indifference than it did to pain or to bliss - eating, urinating and defecating as they were during intercourse or while their genitalia were being manipulated. Indeed it was unclear to me whether these larger animals were even aware of prolonged sexual relations that human had foisted on them. In their case however, what I saw as animals indifference might actually have been calculated detachment on their part and despite the fact that we will probably never know this with much certainly, a coping strategy for numbing the pain inflicted on them by yet another of the myriad ways in which their lives are routinely invaded, inspected and disposed of by humans. As soon as I saw this video I began to think more seriously about animal abuse. Interesting questions are raised by the video clearly. How should we approach bestiality as it is traditionally called? Is it an outrageous or perhaps perverse act or is the law increasing tolerance of it suggests a relatively benign form of social deviance? Why are sexual relations involving humans and animals been so vociferously condemned and so little studied? I then turned, armed with computer searches and so on, to try and find what had been written in the social sciences on bestiality. There is really very little indeed. There is a wonderful book of 1906 written by the U.S. historian Edward P. Evans which is about the criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals from 1200 - 1800. There are some really interesting cases. For example, a pig or sow is tried for smothering a baby, she is tried in a court of criminal law, she is dressed up in human clothes and because at that time, so ironically, somewhat greater respect for animal rights, she was given benefit, or at least it seems, of defence attorneys. For a week really learned arguments go back and forth about mens rea and culpability, she was actually found guilty and strung up on the giberts. In the course of that book E.P. Evans refers to bestiality prosecutions - two or three of them. In the legal literature they illustrate another point, when in fact bestiality is mentioned in legal discourse it is almost always mentioned within embarrassed chuckles and knowing winks by professors of law when they lecture to first year criminal law students. To illustrate this I have come across an English case in 1834 (Rex v. Cousins) and the facts very briefly were that George Gilbert had been charged with bestiality with a sheep. The act had been witnessed by a farm labourer, Albert Harris who had been called as a witness for the Crown prosecutor. Prosecutor: Mr. Harris on the day in question were you proceeding along a line adjacent to the farm of Mr. Clark? Harris: I was. Prosecutor: Could you describe for His Lordship what you saw? Harris: Well George Gilbert was standing in the doorway of the barn with a sheep. Prosecutor: Yes, and what was he doing? Harris: Well he was, um, um, messing around with the sheep. Prosecutor: By that statement, are we to understand that the accused was having sexual intercourse with the sheep? Harris: Uh, yes. Prosecutor: Mr. Harris, what did you do when you observed this shocking spectacle? Harris: I said "Morning George" You can imagine the witness being coached by the prosecution and that is how it is actually repeated in the law books. There is no fully directed work on bestiality that I had come across. So I did a little bit of a foray, and I began with the social control literature, and there are two or three interesting studies on social control of bestiality. I don't know if you know this, but Sweden which has such a liberal reputation in sexual relations, between 1680 - 1810, eight hundred people were executed for bestiality in Sweden, almost all of them young boys under the age of 15. I don't know the situation in Canada of who has been prosecuted, although I imagine that even if one were to be prosecuted now a days for it, it would not be under a bestiality statute or anti-cruelty statute, it would almost certain be a breach of the peace or public disorder or something like that. The social control literature, such as it is, is not especially helpful for my purposes trying to develop a perspective on animal abuse. Looking at social control in the long run, there has been a tremendous decline in bestiality prosecutions, in England and in colonial New-England which had fierce reputation from its puritan heritage for attacking the "unnatural" sins of the flesh, the sins against nature. In the United States there were only eight people prosecuted for bestiality, and as far as I can find only three people executed - almost exactly the same number as in the 17th century in England. It raises an interesting question, and I certainly don't know how to solve it but it is certainly worth posing, why is the condemnation of bestiality so strong? Why do we laugh at it now? Why are we unable to think of it no longer than five seconds without turning squeamish? And the fact that virtually nobody has been prosecuted - why this juxtaposition? I believe that the decriminalization and the psychiatricization of bestiality, if one is not at all prosecuted bestiality then one is likely to be led to a psychiatrist coach, which is much more likely now a days. I don't believe that these trends are necessarily signs of progress or civilization, and I am not saying at all that I want to re-criminalize a whole category of marginalised and create a whole category of marginalised human beings - I am not saying that at all. I am just saying that the way that it has gone, that the decriminalization and somewhat tolerant attitude towards bestiality now a days, and it is not on the Oprah Winnfrey show but it will be perhaps eventually, are not necessarily progressive events for me. Just thinking back to the Barnyard Love video or thinking to two or three studies only by medical doctors when they examine the physiological consequences of humans of engaging in bestiality and refer also as a matter on the side to the consequences for animals, the physical consequences, and perhaps also (we can debate this if you like) the psychological and emotional trauma for animals of having sexual intercourse with humans, are I think quite enormous, and for small animals often results in death. In principle the attempts to understand bestiality as a form of animal abuse might profitably draw on the perspective and insight of the three major tendencies - the philosophical and theoretical heart of the animal rights movement: utilitarianism, liberal rights theory and feminism. Feminism has actually, interestingly enough, really not examined bestiality. There are four or five pages by the wonderful author Carol Adams who wrote The Sexual Politics of Meat. But this is not a concerted effort by her, and the thrusts of her comments are that bestiality is an abuse of power, typically by human males and that it is to be condemned on those terms. I agree that there is power involved, but in fact if one was to condemn sexual intercourse wherever inequalities of power was involved then virtually all forms of sexual intercourse would have to be forbidden too. The argument that I would like to develop is that bestiality should not be condemned because of religious reasons, for the reasons that lie within the higher archy of Judeo-Christianity where the white male god sits a top humans, and humans astride animals. Bestiality in that context is seen as a violation or a rupture of the natural order and it shouldn't be condemned in those terms at all I believe. I believe, in a nutshell, that bestiality should be condemned, how and why and with what consequences is another story, because it is so similar to the abuse of women by men, and perhaps even more of young children by men and women. Animals are, if you want to follow Carol Adams argument, certainly at the receiving end in a situation of inequality. Animals are absolutely unable to consent in any way at all that we can readily understand to advances made on them by humans, in exactly the same way that we should never condone, allow sexual advances to young children who can't report their abuse to authorities, can't describe what is going on and perhaps don't know what is going on. That sort of reason, I believe, given for me that a great majority of animals are sentient beings, bestiality should be condemned. I want to finish with a few minutes on different forms of bestiality, just trying to think about it further. There are four forms of bestiality as far as I can discover. This of course is topology and has the problems in it that any topology does. First, sexual fixation. It is the form of inter-species sexual assault that occurs when animals are preferred sexual partners of humans. It is hard to believe that this is not the case for example in colonial New England in 1642 when Thomas Granger was indicted with buggery with "a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey". Rare descriptions of sexual fixations with animals are provided by C. Ebbing, the German psychiatrist and some say the founder of psychiatry. There are also accounts which might fall under the rubric of sexual fixation by the U.S. sexologists, a group of sexologists in the late 1940s and 50s who find that "among American farm boys bestiality might be practised as high as 65%". There are all sorts of methodological problems with Kinsey's work. A second form of bestiality or what I would call inter-species sexual assault is commodification. This is the prominent element in inter-species sexual assaults that are packaged as commodities for sale in the market. It often involves a two-foot fold assault. One by a man on a woman who is assaulted and humiliated by being forced to have sex with an animal, and the other on the animal who is coerced, without the possibility of giving genuine consent, into having sex with a human. Examples include live shows of women copulating with animals in bars and sex clubs or depictions of inter-species sexual assaults in pornographic films such as Barn Yard Love and Deep Throat. In the latter, for example Linda Marchiano known as "Linda Lovelace" in Deep Throat is filmed having intercourse with a large dog. During this act and for a long time after it, Marchiano herself wrote in her autobiography that she felt nothing but acute revulsion and she agreed to be filmed in this two hour episode only because her boyfriend and batterer threatened to kill her. Consider also the more problematic case of Dina the stripping chimpanzee given in one of Adams' books. For $100 Dina and her trainer would appear at a social gathering during which Dina would perform a strip tease act for the party goers. Is this inter-species sexual assault? Clearly this case is one that combines comodification with aspects of sexual objectification. The chimp had been trained to perform like a human female stripper, a marketable action that it could not have freely chosen to do and whose social context it could not possibly have fully understood. It is true that sexual abuse does not necessarily involve actual physical contact, and perhaps this particular act should be understood less as sexual assault then as an assault to animals right to dignity. The third category is adolescent sexual experimentation, and it seems to be typically practised in rural areas by young males. Although I need to think more about the significance of the change over in so many modern economies, the decline of agriculture and the rise in pet-keeping. For the moment it is typically practised in rural areas by young males with easy access to animals. It is probably the most common form of inter-species sexual assault as shown by quite disparate studies of 17th and 18th Century Sweden and mid 20th Century rural America. Precisely what the practice of adolescent sexual experimentation with animals represents symbolically and culturally and how it contributes to gender socialization varies from one social context to another. Obviously it could be performed either alone or with other adolescents who either watch or else participate. In a group context, some boys of necessity teach how it is done while others learn. It can be performed for a variety of reasons including curiosity, cruelty, showing off for other boys and acquiring the techniques of intercourse for later use on girls. An anonymous colleague has told me, for example, that when she was doing anthropological field work in rural Algeria, in Northern Africa, she and a co-worker witnessed a very nervous young male on the night before his wedding practising sexual intercourse with a donkey for the explicit purpose of not appearing hopelessly unskilled with his wife the following night. Presumably too there is some point towards the end of their adolescence when young males desist from their experimental sexual activities with animals because such practices are regarded as unmanly or perhaps perverse. And finally, there is a category which I call aggravated cruelty. It is reasonably to suppose given the great predominance in sexual experimentation with animals that young males also disproportionately engage in aggravated cruelty during acts of inter-species sexual assault. For example, a level of cruelty over and above that already presented in most such acts. It is true that no specific pattern of aggravated cruelty has yet been uncovered among young males who engage in inter-species sexual assault, but this is so perhaps only because this pattern has not yet been researched. Psychologists have shown that children and adolescents who assault animals appear to be overwhelmingly young males of normal intelligence who are often sexually abused at home and whose family situation also often contains spousal abuse. Quite apart from the currents of cruelty during adolescent sexual experimentation, aggravated cruelty can be a major element in inter-species sexual assault in other ways. In mid 19th Century England for example one case was reported where two feet long knotted sticks were thrust into mares wombs and another where the penises of cart horses and donkeys were excised. Multiple cases of such atrocities were confirmed in several English counties in 1993. In New Bedford, Massachusetts at a Zoo in 1991 a deer was found with fatal wounds that included a fractured jaw and extensive bleeding from the rectum and vagina. Sometimes aggravated cruelty against animals takes place in conjunction with the humiliation of women. This has been documented both in Nazi concentration camps and in the book Battering Within Lesbian Partner Relationships. I just want to end with a brief comment that one of the difficulties for me with human rights is that it does not extend recognition of rights to the wider moral community which includes non-human animals. Another problem that rights are individual acts, and even if created in law and in principle and they may not be enforced, recognized and practised. And that to me is a great difficulty to me with the extension of rights to animals. Even if animals do have or are somehow granted rights in a paternalistic or other way then there are other counter veiling cultural and legal powers that will tend to undermine the importance of those rights. For example, the right to privacy and the right to property. It is a great unfortunate fact that the history of Anglo-American and I assume Canadian laws in relation to animals, particularly the development of anti-cruelty statutes for animals, first and fundamentally animals are seen as property. It is in that context that people are often prosecuted. Thank you.
Question: Hello Piers. I would like to ask you a few questions, I have many, many. As a radical feminist I am interested in bodily oppression that of course is the first corner stone of sexual assault of any form. It doesn't surprise me at all from the literature I have read the extent of bestiality, and I would assume actually that it is even greater then we might imagine, that the Kinsey studies might unfortunately be accurate. When you look at any of the research on pornography and from feminist readings, the extent of objectification of numerous grounds of inanimate objects as well as animals is incredible. I am looking at the moment on the relationship between the body and the law and what fascinates me is these young men. What is going in their heads, what is it about sexuality that requires objectification to begin with, how does that objectification get transferred to humans, animals, inanimate objects, and my more direct question is what is this like cross-culturally? We have in North America an incredible obsession with sex, deviant and otherwise. Dr. Beirne: You know that I can't possibly answer your question. I really can't for a couple of reasons. One is that there is virtually no work being done on bestiality so anything that I could add would be probably be worthless, sheer conjecture. I do know just trying to understand the information that float into the Kinsey report where there are some sections on bestiality, trying to understand that and trying to understand the evidence given in the Swedish bestiality trials in the 18th century where the great majority of the defendants, and almost all of those executed were boys under the age 15, also trying to understand the language and evidence of the indictments in colonial Massachusetts in Essex, England that the nature of the relationship between young boys and animals probably varies. In other words patterns of gender socialization and the role that animals play in that varies. I know for example that according to a Swedish scholar one of the reasons why so many of the young boys were prosecuted in Sweden at that time is that young boys were almost always those exclusively responsible for being shepherds, for being out on the mountain ranges and looking after sheep in particular. It is not a satisfactory explanation as it seems to be that it is proximity. This particular piece of research, which is on social control and animals are not important or subjects here, with the answer that it is proximity that is the key factor in Sweden, and second that the Lutheran church in Sweden was far more aggressive than other churches in prosecuting those, and this just doesn't seem to be true to me. Certainly in prosecuting but not in terms of language, the often hysterical religious language that comes from the bully pulpits in attacking those sexual practices. The interesting question is why they were so heavily prosecuted in Sweden and not elsewhere. I am beginning to flander. I don't know what the answer to your question is and it is a really important one, and if you have some I would love to hear it. Question: I don't know if I have an answer as I have more questions Opportunity theory theoretically in criminology, we have bashed that to pieces. I would exercise a caution I guess on using that theoretical framework to explain bestiality. I guess having grown up in a rural area I have a right to be defensive about the proliferation of bestiality in rural areas. I can understand it in terms of that kind of context, but I would caution again as someone who grew up in a rural area, most of the readings that I have done display an incredible ignorance of rural life period. One thing I would argue is that there is an incredible rate of animal cruelty in rural life. My father was a municipal politician in Cape Breton, and when ever he made an unpopular decision we lost a pet, we found a shot pet or a strangled pet or a hung pet somewhere in the woods. That is rough justice often in rural areas, and that doesn't get talked about in criminological terms anyway. The question that I have in terms of law specifically, what I tell my students all the time is that criminal law by definition and design is not designed to deal with victims very well any ways. It is to protect the rights of the accused, for all the reasons we can argue for and against that premise, but that is the purpose of criminal law. Given that premise doesn't protect human victims very well, how would you then argue that law in any form, be it tribunal form or be it codified form, could in fact protect animals? I guess what I am asking you what we can we do about this and what are your ideas on where we should go legally? Dr. Beirne: I don't know. It is not that I never thought about law, I just don't know what the answer is. Existing laws are utterly useless for cruelty to animals. For example, the American Model Penal Code of early 1950s explicitly states in the preamble to section on animal cruelty that the reason to prosecute cruelty to animals is because it offends the sensibilities of the community. I feel like some old, old hippy anarchist, what ever I am about to say feels like "oh no the anarchist in me is coming out", but I don't know what can be done in law, I don't know of any examples where animals have been usefully protected. It is one thing to have good animal cruelty statutes in law, but on the other hand, in the very last words I said, they are going to be undermined, especially for example in the United States by counter veiling powers - the right of privacy. People do not want others to interfere in their relationships with their own animals. I feel rather pessimistic. And I guess I would have to say that if I was to contribute to that then I would have to be less of a coward than I am, and I would have to work harder for animal rights and think much more about what animal cruelty means. Is it my leather shoes, is it eating hamburgers and hotdogs, pigs flesh on bun, and you just have to start relating to non-human animals in a completely different way according them the respect they deserve as sentient beings. I don't know. Comment: Maybe regulations around poaching. We have a dignified hunt so to speak, where the animal is cleanly shot, but poaching often the animal is chopped up. Dr. Beirne: I agree with you, but agin there are a couple of problems with that. One is that it is only the heavy "exotic" species where law enforcement monies is put into stopping poaching. The other is that again the problem of cracking down on poaching of trout or deer is again the existence of counter veiling powers and lengthy traditions where it is regarded as a sort of inalienable right of people in the rural areas to that. And it is not poaching it is dam law enforcement and wildlife people interfering in their life. How does one do that is the question for me. Question: I have a question which is maybe a touch viciscious but at the same time very serious. I can see why you take a lot from feminist literature because of many abusive relationships which exist, see or acknowledgment that inequality is present in virtually any sexual relationship. My question is are there any cases where bestiality would not be abusive? Dr. Beirne: Given the extraordinary imbalance of power between all non-human animals and humans, where non-human animal have the same level of power as infants do, I can't conceive of any situation where what is usually called bestiality is OK. It is absolutely impossible for animals to give consent in any way that we can understand. The situation is riddled with coercion from start to end. It just seems to me that for exactly for the same reasons why it is wrong for us to force our sexual attention on babies or young children, animals must be in the same category. There are also interesting questions also as to what counts as inter-species sexual assault and I have not referred to that at all. For example, somebody suggested to me a few months ago, she is a farmer, one of the things she did is electronically stimulate bulls to get their semen. Is that inter-species sexual assault? I don't know about that, I am not sure about that. Another example, a woman in Canada that I have email correspondence with told me that when she was five or six years old she used to lie with a female dog in the household, she used to suck on its nipples. That seems to me to be quite innocent. But there are border line cases, and I am not sure exactly what it is. It is not a case of recognizing it when you see it. I guess it depends partly on one's intentions not just the objective situations. It is interesting to me, partly I have been so surprised that criminologists haven't studied this because of the Anglo-social control where the prosecution of it has been vociferous, and we still don't think or talk about it. I don't know how many of you have thought about it bestiality, but I bet not many of you thought about it for longer than 5 seconds at a time. It is difficult to think about. You should try seeing this German video, its horrendous. I am debating at the moment myself if I can show it to an undergraduate class, not only the morality of that but also whether I am likely to end up in jail for doing it. Question: My question comes out of that sort of reaction. It seems in criminology right now you have this rights based discourse that is emerging. When one looks at the recent history of the women's movement on e sees that entering the rights-based discourse always leads to resistances, counter veiling discourses. I have read some of your stuff and I know your grand understanding of history, so I am surprised I suppose, and I suppose this is where I want clarification, to hear you talking these kinds of rights, and I am wondering whether you are talking in terms of strategic understanding, knowing that once you enter this into a discourse you understand that this is going to be taken and changed and be reworded and rearticulated. One of the things I understand about any sort of liberal rights is that they are always very ahistorical and what I can't get is your historical understanding from some other stuff that I have read. This understanding seems to be not to historisize it, not context it, and what I was looking for was some historical context, and it is not and you go much more toward an ahistorical liberalism. I guess I was wondering whether that was a strategic decision on your part, so I all I am asking for is a clarification on your part on that issue. Dr. Beirne: To begin with, I have talked on bestiality for several months at a few places and I am always ready for two forms of attack. One is from conservative opponents of environmental movement, the animal rights movement and the other is from feminists who might argue that in advocating and talking about animal rights that I am somehow diverting attention of the more important work on human female abuse. The context of the thirty minute talk today is actually that, thirty minutes. I was faced with getting a tremendous amount of ideas over and so what I chose to do is just a little bit of everything. On the one hand I suppose the starting point for this is and would be an historical understanding of the development of rights and various attempts to grant non-human animals rights and criticisms of it. On the other the plea that I have only just started thinking about this, and I am not worked out enough yet to think of what others are going to do with this and how are they going to transform it and work with it, I haven't got that far yet. I am starting with a historical approach to rights and the animal rights movement and I am very conscious of its limitations of both. I don't quite know what to do with this at the moment and that is the honest answer. I wish I could give you a nice pre-packaged answer, but I don't. What do you think? Comment: I am surprised that with your historical understanding that you would take this rights approach because it seems to me that many criminologists work have been to sort of look at the material basis which underlies the discourses of rights. What I am surprised is that we don't learn from that and reinject that into our theoretical apparatus for studying contemporary problems. There is always that temptation to go the "rights" route. Dr. Beirne: I am not altogether sure that I have gone a rights route actually. I wasn't aware that I had and I have obviously made a mistake in getting it over today if you thought that. No, I am more confused than that. I can see a number of ways in which one can argue that bestiality should be condemned. There are at least four of them and none of them are satisfactory to me. The best is the very small amount of work done in the feminist tradition where feminists such as Carol Adams or Josephine Donovan have looked at the relations between women and animals, and I suppose ultimately that is a form of rights discourse. I wasn't particularly putting that forward, I don't quite know where I am going to go yet. I am aware of the problems with rights, and I know that. Question: Just curious. In the examination of the literature is there any evidence that human beings have fear of animals, that there is some kind of argument that can be made that part of the explanation about bestiality is how fear is socially constructed around animals. Dr. Beirne: I don't think that Cat Massacre was about a fear of animals, I am rapidly trying to re-think that now. It was more just forty apprentices pissed off at the Madame giving her cats the same food as the apprentices. It appeared to be as simple as that. Although, the cultural practices, the symbolic practices were actually quite complicated, and why they chose to hang cats rather than pee on her wall - they are quite complicated aren't they. Fear of animals? Again I would be led back to the governing religious discourse and consequent condemnation of animals, that we should not mix with categories that are not of our own sort. There is work looking at puritan condemnation of sexuality in the 17th Century in colonial America where wild animals are equated with wilderness, and where mixing with wild animals is mixing with categories that are unknown or foreign or alien or strange to us, and all of which we should not mix. I don't know. I have sure been given a lot to think about here. It is within the religious discourse and lately psychiatric discourse where people who engage in bestiality are defined as simpletons and is listed by the American Physiatric Association as a recognized mental disease, mental defect. We seem to be afraid of people who have sexual intercourse with animals as much as the animals themselves.
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