Carl Isley - Dog show girl

"Bestiality", "violation of animals", "monstrous and revolting to mankind". Krafft-Ebing used these words to introduce the subject of sex between humans and animals in his monumental nineteenth century study of perverse sexuality, Psychopathia Sexualis. The public attitude toward many deviant sex practices has eased since those harsh Victorian times but the very idea of bestiality seems as "monstrous and revolting" as ever to most people today.

The Old Testament, source of most of our basic behavioral taboos, is clear on the subject. In Leviticus 18:23 Lord lays down the law to Moses, "Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith; neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion."

The Bible not only forbade bestiality but prescribed stern penalties both for the human and the animal participants, each apparently being presumed equally guilty in the affair. Thus Leviticus tells us, "If a man lie with a beast he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall stay the beast."

In the Middle Ages in Europe surviving court records show that the Biblical penalties were carried out to the letter. In France one man was hanged and then burned for fornicating with a cow and a goat, and then both animals were also burned. Two centuries later, a sixteen-year-old girl was found guilty of having had sexual relations with a dog, and both dog and girl were hanged and burned.

Most states today have no law on their books specifically forbidding bestiality, but it is usually considered to fall under the general category of sodomy offenses, which include everything from sucking a twat to screwing a turkey, from buggering your wife's rectum to fucking a corpse on a morgue slab, from jerking off in company with a friend to having your cunt licked by a cocker spaniel. It's all sodomy in the eyes of the law, although the sodomy statutes are seldom enforced these days except against homosexuals.

Anyway, Biblical interdictions and harsh penalties in the law codes never have prevented bestial practices. As with all other varieties of sexual behavior, people have always done pretty much as they pleased in the privacy of their own boudoirs and barns.

Although records of specific incidents of bestiality down through the years are scarce, there is ample evidence that it has been widely practiced in all centuries by all peoples. There are many reports by travelers and explorers of prevalent bestiality among the depraved citizens of other, less-enlightened lands. Sanctimonious observers from the western world found it running rampant among the pagans of the far east, Europeans observed it with horror among the Arabs and black Africans, Arabs declared it to be common among the perfidious Turks.

But there was plenty of beastly buggering going on among our own ancestors in western Europe as well, the best evidence being that bestiality as a crime is constantly mentioned both in church and civil law, century after century, with ever more drastic punishments being laid down for the culprits. It would hardly have been such a constant concern of the lawmakers unless it had been a widespread habit.

In the Middle Ages, when penalties against it were the most severe, all the evidence indicates that bestiality as an adjunct to witchcraft revelries and as a casual barn-yard pastime ran a neck-and-neck race with incest as the favorite sport among the peasantry.

In the prim and proper nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing regretfully reported that violation of animals was none too infrequent, and in the modern day Doctor Kinsey's more extensive and enlightened research discovered that forty to fifty percent of farm boys he interviewed had had some kind of sex relations with animals at one time or another in their young lives.

A good indication of the way bestial sex has obsessed man's fancy through all the ages is the frequency with which it turns up in popular literature and mythology. The ancient myths and fairy tales are full of creatures half-human and half-beast such as centaurs, sphinxes and mermaids, and human and animal love affairs wherein the beast usually is a God or prince temporarily transformed.

In our own time we continue to thrill over popular entertainments wherein bestiality is suggested if not specifically portrayed. Jungle adventures in which young lovelies are carried off by giant apes, presumably to satisfy their bestial lust, have always been popular with matinee audiences.

As many writers, including Freud have suggested, where bestiality has persisted so in men's fantasies, there certainly must have been widespread practice of the actual deed, for men's dreams are reflective of their real-life desires.

In the free-and-easy climate of today, bestiality is not only common on a pastime basis as ever, but many of those who practice it are quite willing to spill their guts about it for publication without shame or fear. There is a spirit of adventure in the practice of sex today, a reaching out for new sensual experiences of every kind, and an unabashed readiness to share the fruits of those experiments and spread the joyful word to the hesitant, still-puritanical masses. So I had surprisingly little difficulty in finding a variety of persons of all ages and both sexes who quite willingly 'told all' about their bestial habits for this book. I have compiled from the resulting taped conversations the case reports in the following pages. Only the names and places have been disguised in some instances, in light of the sodomy laws, but the broad picture these cases give of bestiality as it is practiced in our twentieth century world is a true one.

In the course of history, bestial practices have been not only a private pastime but in various places and times have played a part in religious rituals, witchcraft rites, and public spectacles for the titillation of the masses.

It is hardly surprising that the ancient Romans who made an arena spectacle out of everything from costume dramas to gladiatorial warfare found sadistic delight in bestial sex exhibitions on the grand scale. An amazing variety of animals were trained to perform sexually in the arena, most often committing rape on helpless, spread-eagled young maidens. Zebras, cheetahs, even giraffes reportedly were involved in this kind of bizarre sport.

According to R.E.L. Masters, the diligent sex-researcher and writer, on one infamous occasion in the Coliseum a hundred golden-haired young girls were raped in unison by a hundred rampaging baboons, a girl-show spectacular beyond anything ever dreamed of by Busby Berkeley.

On other occasions, to add an extra zest to the performance, wild apes would not only rape the unfortunate girls but devour their bodies afterwards for an encore.

Since those pagan times bestial sex-shows have never again reached such heights of production lavishness or played to such arena-sized audiences. In recent centuries and down to the present day virtually the only public performances of the kind have been whorehouse exhibitions, usually involving a prostitute and either a large dog or it small horse.

Krafft-Ebing noted such an exhibition a hundred years ago, an 'example of the moral depravity in large cities', in which 'a Parisian female showed herself in the sexual act with a trained bulldog to a secret circle of roues at ten francs a head'.

Since the old-fashioned garden-variety whorehouse has become practically extinct in this country, generally one must travel abroad to find such performances today. A few countries of Latin America, Asia and the Arab lands still offer these usually pitiful spectacles as underground tourist attractions.

A New York executive who has spent much time in the Caribbean islands where his firm does a great deal of business tells about an experience of the kind in pre-Castro Cuba.