Journal of Controversial Ideas

Sex with animals is a powerful social taboo that exposes its practitioners to utmost indignation and stigma. Zoophilia is one of the few sexual orientations (along with e.g. necrophilia or pedophilia) that remain off-limits and have been left aside from the sexual liberation movement in the past fifty years.1 I would like to argue that this is a mistake. There is in fact nothing wrong with having sex with animals: it is not an inherently problematic sexual practice.

Given the sheer outrage that the mere mention of zoophilia triggers in many people, we might expect the case for its permissibility to be a hard sell and my claims to be modest and tentative. This is not so: not only do I think that zoophilia is morally permissible, but I also think that the case in its favor is rather straightforward, so that it should be the default position within many philosophical quarters. This makes it all the more surprising that no ambitious and explicit defense of it has been published so far.

I start in Section 1 by clarifying what is meant by zoophilia. In Section 2, I introduce the debate over the permissibility of zoophilia. In Section 3 and Section 4, I address the questions of whether zoophilia is harmful and whether animals can consent to sex with humans. In Section 5, I tease out some important implications.

By zoophilia, I mean human engagement in romantic and/or sexual relationships with (non-human2) animals.3 We can distinguish between zoophilic activities – the term “bestiality” being sometimes used to refer to zoophilic sexual activities – and zoophilic orientation, understood as a general attitude of romantic and/or sexual attraction to (some) animals, which disposes one to engage in zoophilic activities. As an orientation (sometimes referred to as zoosexuality), zoophilia can thus be compared with other orientations such as heterosexuality or bisexuality,4 and should accordingly be distinguished from mere fetishes (i.e. sexual interests for specific non-living objects or non-genital body parts).

This basic definition calls for several comments. First, zoophilia covers a variety of romantic and sexual activities.5 The latter are not limited to vaginal or anal penetration, but also include masturbation, oral-genital contact, frottage, zoophilic voyeurism, etc. Second, I leave open the possibility for zoophiles to engage only in non-sexual activities, such as displays of affection or caring behaviors, but it is sexual activities that are usually considered to be morally problematic, so most of my arguments will concern sexual activities. Third, there might be doubts about the possibility of having a romantic relationship with an animal. Humans sometimes do love their pets, and reciprocally pets like dogs can plausibly be attributed attitudes of love toward human beings, but it is true that what is required for love to count as romantic is debated.6 Fourth, zoophilia, as an orientation, comes in different degrees. Zoophiles might have an exclusive attraction for animals or be also attracted to human beings.7

Zoophilia is the object of widespread social ostracism, especially in its – arguably more visible – sexual component.8 We can already find in the Old Testament several passages which portray bestiality as a crime against nature (e.g. Leviticus, xviii 23, xx 15). Various forms of sex with animals (both real interactions and zoopornographic depictions) are currently outlawed in numerous jurisdictions.9 Though increased tolerance and decriminalization have been observed in Western countries in the 20th century, mainly as a collateral effect of sexual liberalization, more recently a significant trend of recriminalization, e.g. in Germany, France, and some US states,10 has taken place, this time under the additional pressure of animal rights activists, who have generally expressed intense hostility to zoophilia.11 Scientific approaches to zoophilia have often been premised on the wrongness of zoophilia. To take just one example, in veterinary science the concept of animal sexual abuse is construed as including “all sexual contact between people and animals,”12 thus effectively taking a stand against all forms of sex with animals. Zoophilia has also been heavily pathologized and treated as a mental disorder. It was introduced as a paraphilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980.

Despite this social consensus against zoophilia, there is evidence of zoophilic practices and representations in many societies.13 Numerous myths and folkloric traditions, for example, contain anthropomorphic characters and depictions of sexual relationships between humans and animals. The prevalence of zoophilia in the general population, however, is difficult to establish due to the paucity of research on the topic.14 Most scientific studies of zoophiles are based on convenience samples of self-identified zoophiles on the Internet or focus on forensic (notably sex offenders) or clinical populations. An inaugural study by Kinsey and colleagues found that 8% of the male and 3.5% of the female US populations had had at least one sexual interaction with an animal in their life, with the percentage exceeding 50% in some rural locations.15 One major factor driving the prevalence of zoophilic activity is simply access to animals. Though the rural population has an easier access to farm animals, the increased number of pets has offered new opportunities for the urban population to engage in sex with animals too, with dogs being by far the most common species that zoophiles have relationships with.16 A more recent survey (N = 1,015) suggests that 2% of the general population find the prospect of having sex with animals sexually arousing,17 while a popular non-academic survey (N = 430,000), probably skewed toward a sex-positive population, finds that around 11% of the male and 7% of the female respondents have some sexual interest in horses and around 18% of the male respondents and 11% of the female respondents express some sexual interest in penetrating an animal.18 The appeal of zoophilia is also reflected in the wealth of zoopornography that can be found on the Internet. Zoophilia, it turns out, is more common than we might think.

Many people who have sex with animals do not strictly speaking have a zoophilic orientation, but use animals as surrogates for human sex partners. In this case, sexual activities with animals often have an experimental dimension and might be a passing phase during teenage years. In contrast, zoophilia does constitute a more full-fledged sexual orientation for other people. With the advent of the Internet, groups of zoophiles have coalesced into a budding social movement, sometimes represented by the Greek letter ζ (Zeta), which puts animal welfare and preferences on center stage and firmly condemns any form of zoosadism and abuse.19 Calling themselves “zoos”, they urge that their orientation be acknowledged as a legitimate sexual identity alongside other already recognized sexual identities.20

The ethics of zoophilia has been subject to little academic attention so far. We might think at first that zoophilia is so obviously wrong that no discussion whatsoever is needed, but this is not the case. Those who have addressed the ethical status of zoophilia sometimes confess that most existing arguments for the wrongness of zoophilia are lacking.21 To my knowledge, only three authors working on ethics have expressed some degree of sympathy with zoophilia. Singer, in his notorious article “Heavy Petting,”22 takes a broadly utilitarian approach to question why sex with animals should be a crime even if the animal is not coerced or harmed. He attributes our hostility to sex with animals to speciesist prejudice. Rudy takes queer theory as her starting point and uses zoophilia to question the demarcation between sex and non-sex.23 Finally, Bourke provides a groundbreaking discussion of various aspects of zoophilia in order to “think through ways of cultivating more kind and caring relationships between different species.”24 All three deny that they are “defending” zoophilia and fall short of claiming that zoophilia is permissible.25

My claim will be more assertive and ambitious. I would like to argue that zoophilia is permissible, i.e. that it is not wrong to engage in zoophilia. To do this, I will take for granted a broadly antispeciesist or non-anthropocentric perspective that rejects human exceptionalism. Such a perspective ascribes some inherent value or rights to animals and refrains from appealing to tradition, status quo, human or animal essence, or God to reason about ethical issues. This allows us to circumvent a number of objections against zoophilia which usually focus on the “human side” of the relationship and take zoophilia to be a vice, a sexual perversion26 or to go against Christian morality27 or human essence.28

This is not to say that zoophilia cannot be defended within anthropocentric approaches. In fact, perhaps the easiest way to conclude that there is nothing wrong with zoophilia is to postulate that humans have a vastly higher moral standing than animals, so that zoophilia is just one instance among many others of permissible use and exploitation of animals for human purposes. Alternately, we might proceed in a comparative manner and argue that if current practices involving animals are not wrong, then zoophilia is not wrong either.29 This is a powerful argument, but I do not want to accept its premise that current practices involving animals, e.g. factory farming, are not wrong. My goal is to assess whether zoophilia lives up to a more demanding moral yardstick.

We mentioned earlier that zoophilia comes in many different forms. This diversity is a problem insofar as not all forms of zoophilia have the same ethical status. It is clear that some instances of zoophilia are wrong. Activities highly harmful to animals, such as most instances of human penetration of chickens, are obviously impermissible. One might take this to contradict my general claim that zoophilia is permissible, but this would be a mistake: that zoophilia is permissible does not mean that all instances of zoophilia are permissible, in the same way that the permissibility of heterosexuality does not mean that all instances of heterosexuality are permissible. What is rather meant is that there is nothing intrinsic (or necessary) to zoophilia, be it in its romantic or sexual aspects, that makes it wrong. Moreover, what makes some instances of zoophilia wrong is the same kind of conditions (such as harm or lack of consent) that make other activities, including sexual activities, wrong. This is what I intend to establish. Now, this result would be of little practical significance if it turned out that all, or nearly all, actual zoophilic activities were impermissible. But I do not think that this is so: a significant proportion of actual zoophilic activities are permissible too.

Consider the following case:

Alice’s story describes a kind of relationship commonly described within the Zeta movement, where there is a reciprocal emotional attachment between the human and the animal and sexual contacts are sexually gratifying to both of them. It is tempting to think that Alice’s relationship illustrates one way in which humans can develop more equal and non-exploitative relationships with animals, that go beyond our negative duties not to harm them.30

What Alice’s story also illustrates is that there is a continuity between zoophilia and affectionate relationships that ordinary people have with their pets. What is it that makes affectionately caressing one’s cat of a different ethical standing than sexually caressing one’s cat? If there is no clear-cut boundary between the ordinary love that pet keepers express and the romantic love that some zoophiles express, then why accept one and not the other?

Before I turn my attention to the objections that have been raised against zoophilia, I should point out that I am not interested here in the psychological and social factors that explain our ordinary aversion toward zoophilia. Though I suspect that such factors permeate most attempts at proving that zoophilia is wrong,31 I leave them to social scientists and psychologists.

Two crucial questions have dominated the ethical discussion around zoophilia. First, does zoophilia harm animals? Second, can animals meaningfully consent to sex with humans? I will discuss each of them in the next sections. In the course of doing so, I will also point out some dubious claims that have underlain most objections to zoophilia.

One important worry is that having sex with animals would harm them. This is a legitimate worry. It is beyond doubt that some sexual practices do harm the animal involved, whether this is the primary intention of the human participant (in the case of zoosadism) or not – any penetrative act on rabbits or chickens is likely to severely harm them. This, however, is not enough to establish that zoophilia is wrong. What critics of zoophilia need to show is that harm is a necessary feature of sex with animals. This is a very demanding claim, which seems patently false at first glance. Many sexual interactions with animals, such as that between Alice and her dog, do not seem to cause any pain, bodily damage, or psychological distress. In fact, there is sometimes positive evidence that the animal is having a pleasant experience.

Insisting that all instances of sex with animals produce an immediate harm appears dubious, but we might still maintain that there are other ways in which it harms them. Perhaps it has negative long-term consequences on their well-being. But what kind of long-term harm would be inflicted when no harm is inflicted during the activity? Human beings might be harmed in the long run by a sexual interaction because it perturbs their subsequent development as persons and alter their psychological make-up, or because they reevaluate through time what they have experienced and its appropriateness. Animals, however, do not have the complex psychological lives of paradigmatic human beings as well as their intricate social norms around sexuality, so that we should be wary of excessive anthropomorphism on this matter. As Bourke notes, “the dog who approaches and voluntarily mounts a human is following his own species-specific ‘meaning’,”32 so he does not incur the risk of future harm that humans might incur.

We might argue that even though no harm is reliably caused by having sex with animals, the risk of harm is enough to make such interactions wrong. This argument – let us call it the argument from ignorance – is premised on a particularly pessimistic view on our knowledge of the inner lives of animals and/or a sweeping precautionary principle. The problem with it is that assessing the well-being of animals is far from an insuperable challenge, especially when it comes to face-to-face interactions with animals. What critics of zoophilia need to establish is that sex with animals is always too risky for the long-term well-being of animals. No such argument to support this has been proposed so far. Moreover, it is unclear why this argument would apply only to sex. If the risk of harm is high enough when having sex with them, would it not be high enough too when engaging in other kinds of interactions with them? I agree that we should treat animals with great caution because it is not easy to understand how they feel – especially when we do not know them well – but it is an overreaction to infer from this that having sex with animals is wrong.

Interestingly, though sex with animals has often been compared to sex with children to suggest that both are wrong for the same reason that it harms them,33 they actually stand in sharp contrast in this respect. We are justified in thinking that having sex with children always imposes a risk of future harm to them even if no immediate harm is caused, which may be a good ground for proscribing it.34 The same argument fails when it comes to zoophilia.35

There are more subtle ways in which zoophilia might harm animals. Pierce claims that having sex with animals is a form of exploitation.36 Unfortunately, she says little to support it, and it seems that unfair conditions of treatment are by no means a pervasive feature of sex with animals. Alternately, we might argue that zoophilia degrades or even violates the animal’s dignity.37 Now, dignity is a notoriously vague normative notion, especially so for animals.38 In fact, it is not clear that animals have a dignity in the first place. Bolliger and Goetschel claim that “one important aspect of the dignity of the animal is its sexual integrity.” By this they mean “unhindered sexual development and sensation, the protection from damaging decision-making by sexual exploitation of dependencies, and the protection from sexual harassment.”39 They fall short, however, of establishing that zoophilia would necessarily degrade the sexual dignity of the animal in this sense. To make their point, they appeal to the argument from ignorance, which I have already rejected, as well as to the notion that zoophilic activities would hinder the “free sexual development of an animal,” which they do not justify in more detail. They presumably think that free sexual development is best displayed in same-species sexual relationships, but why would that be so?40 Overall, we can conclude that more work is needed to get these arguments started.

Consent is widely seen as a necessary condition for non-problematic sexual interactions, one that respects our right to autonomy and might even constitute “the touchstone of morally permissible sex.”41 The second major worry about zoophilia is that the animal would not, or could not, consent to sex with humans.42 To unravel this argument, it is important to be clear on what consent is in the first place. I will then turn to what makes consent ethically valid.43

In its most basic form, consent can be defined as a voluntary (i.e. uncoerced) verbal or behavioral indication of agreement to engage in a specific activity, or the mental attitude signified by this indication.44 Are there activities to which animals can consent in this sense? The answer is clearly positive. Suppose that during a walk in the forest I suddenly see a deer. I happen to have some food in my backpack, so I hand it to him and he comes nearer to eat it. I can safely take this as an indication that the deer consents to being fed by me. We know from the literature on animal communication that a wide range of postures, gestures, sounds, etc., are used by animals to express their needs and intent.45 Most of us have personal experiences of cross-species communication, including for communicating our intentions to engage in some common activity with them. Take play, for example. Dogs have a special posture known as play-bow that signals to a potential playmate their desire to engage in a playful activity.46 Play is a complex activity that requires playmates to abide by certain rules and to fine-tune their behaviors to maintain a playful mood. When it comes to sex, there is also a wide range of species- and individual-dependent cues that indicate consent. There is nothing specific about sexual activities that would make either animals unable to consent to them or humans unable to reliably understand this consent. This is not to say that understanding animals is always easy. But there is a wide range of circumstances in which we can reliably assess their desires and intentions, by paying enough attention to what they try to express.

This basic claim is sometimes met with resistance from authors drawing on some variant of the argument from ignorance. Just as we would be unable to assess whether a sexual interaction harms the animal, we would be at a loss to assess whether the animal consents to it. This might be taken to trace back to a fundamental problem in communicating with animals. Beirne goes so far as to claim that “animals are incapable of genuinely saying 'yes' or 'no' to humans in forms that we can readily understand.”47 Regan, in order to criticize Singer’s position on zoophilia, expresses similar ideas:

Such claims about the impossibility of communicating with animals, which are very common in discourses about zoophilia, strike me as plainly untenable. Their ubiquity, however, might be attributable to a more general and deep-seated tendency to deny any agency to animals. As Bourke reminds us, “humans are positively resistant to treating non-human animals as communicable subjects.” This is also noted by Donaldson and Kymlicka, who write that “there is an unwillingness to recognize the competences of domesticated animals for agency, cooperation, and participation in mixed human–animal settings.”49

It is widely thought that mere uncoerced sign of agreement is not enough for valid consent. Critics of zoophilia might recognize that animals can consent while still arguing that they cannot satisfy one of the additional criteria that are needed for valid consent, and thus that they cannot validly consent.

To start with, valid consent might require that the consented action does not harm the consenting individual. Because I have already argued in the previous section that some instances of sex with animals do not harm them, such a no-harm criterion to valid consent could easily be satisfied.

Second, it might be argued that consent can be valid only if the consenting individual has a specific capacity or status that animals would lack. For example, Belliotti, who takes a contractualist view on what makes sex permissible, states that “[n]o non-human animal is capable of entering into a valid sexual contract with a human.”50 This might also be the criterion that Beirne (1997) and Regan had in mind when denying that animals can consent. There are two problems with this argument. First, it is unclear what this capacity is and why it would be necessary for consent to be valid. We might think that, say, (phenomenal) consciousness or free will are such capacities.51 But the former is shared with many animals and there is much controversy about whether humans themselves have the latter capacity.

Perhaps it is a normative capacity that is required for consent to be valid, such as moral responsibility or the capacity to intentionally waive a right. If we think that animals lack such a capacity, then animals could not validly consent. These are tenable positions in principle, but unless we think that valid consent is required only for sexual activity, the fact that animals lack a crucial capacity for giving valid consent would probably proscribe many kinds of interactions – some widely believed to be permissible – between animals and humans, starting with play. This would make valid consent a dubious standard for regulating our interactions with animals.

The bottom line is that either the required capacity does not threaten the validity of animals’ consent to sex or valid consent is unnecessary when interacting with animals, in which case it does not threaten the permissibility of sex with animals.

Third, valid consent may require that the consenting individual be properly informed about the activity she is consenting to, the identity of the other participants, or its outcomes. Suppose that someone consents to donate an organ based on her understanding that her organ will serve a certain purpose – saving a life – whereas it is actually used for another purpose – training medical students. Though her consent is uncoerced, it is based on a serious misunderstanding and is therefore invalid: using her organ for training medical students would be wrong. Similarly, when it comes to sex ethics, it has been emphasized that misinformation, or even deception, about key features of the sexual interaction, e.g. the identity of the sexual partner, can vitiate one’s consent. In general, it is often thought that misinformation matters when the consenting individual would not have consented had she been properly informed. In these situations, information plays the role of a deal breaker, i.e. it would have changed the decision of the consenting individual.

Is animals’ consent to sex with humans misinformed in such a way? Do animals lack crucial information that would have otherwise made them refuse to engage in sex? I struggle to find any reason to think that such misinformation is a conspicuous feature of human–animal sex. Of course, one difficulty is that there may be aspects of the activity that animals do not have the capacity to understand. The deer who consents to me feeding him does not understand – and does not have the cognitive capacities to understand – my complex motivation to hand him food or the stories that I will later tell to my friends about this unusual encounter. The range of information that animals can learn differs from that of humans. This is not a problem though, because information that we do not have the capacity to grasp cannot constitute a deal breaker.

One particular case of misinformation that we might find problematic concerns animals unaware of the sexual character of the activity. Consider for example the following case:

Bob’s dog may not be aware of the sexual character of the activity he is engaging in, and we might intuitively think that this threatens the validity of his consent. This would be true if the sexual character of his action were a deal breaker. This is perhaps the case, but I would like to point out that it is far from obvious. Of course, if Bob’s dog was instead a human coaxed into licking Bob’s penis – say, Bob told him that this was the only way to relieve an itch – the sexual character of the action would probably be a deal breaker, so the information condition would not be satisfied and the validity of his consent would be undermined. This is so because of the specific ways in which humans typically regard sex. The significance of sex for humans increases the range of potential deal breakers.52 For many animals, however, there is nothing special about sex. In order to avoid anthropocentrism we should be very careful when determining what would be a deal breaker for them, and thereby whether their consent is well-informed. This is recalled by Bourke too:

Fourth, we might argue that valid consent requires equal power. Since in zoophilic activities humans hold more power than animals, the latter’s consent would be invalid. It is true that humans usually exert a pervasive control over the animals’ lives (e.g. on their existence, their living conditions, their conditions of reproduction), especially in the case of pets and farm animals. Most relationships between humans and animals therefore take place within a latent structure of domination. The importance of power balance for valid consent has been theorized by some feminist philosophers and mostly applied to human sexual activities. MacKinnon, for example, emphasizes the importance of entering sexual intercourse as “social equals.”53 This idea can easily be translated to human–animal interactions and it has inspired quite a few authors.54 Haynes, for example, points out that “there is something deeply troubling with sexual relationships of unequal power”55 and he takes this to be a major objection to bestiality.56 The problem with such arguments is that it is clear that power asymmetry, by itself, does not undermine the validity of consent. What is important is rather how it affects consent. This is recalled by MacKinnon herself, who notes that for a sexual interaction to count as rape there must be “exploitation of inequalities,” i.e. the latter must be “deployed as forms of force or coercion in the sexual setting.”57 It is unclear what exploiting power inequalities means exactly, but again it seems unlikely to be a conspicuous feature of sex with animals. In the absence of any convincing argument to this effect, this objection is unsuccessful.

In the end, we can conclude that animals can consent to sex with humans. As for the validity of this consent, the gist of my discussion has been that animals can validly consent according to most conceptions except the most demanding ones, and that the latter turn out either to be unacceptable for other reasons or to make valid consent unnecessary to engage in sex with animals. Given that having sex with animals does not necessarily harm them either (see Section 3), we can conclude that having sex with animals is not wrong and, with that, that zoophilia is not wrong.

If my conclusions are correct, then most people are mistaken about the ethical status of zoophilia, including the majority of the animal rights movement.

One immediate implication seems to be that zoophilia ought to be made legally permissible. This entails decriminalizing it where it is currently outlawed and fighting against the current wave of recriminalization. Going beyond mere legalization, we could argue further that zoophilia ought to be socially normalized too. In this case, the next step in the historical process of sexual liberation might well be to accept zoophilia as a legitimate sexual orientation.

To be clear, finding out the moral status of zoophilia is not the same as finding out its optimal social status, so we might grant that zoophilia is morally permissible while still opposing decriminalization and normalization, perhaps on the grounds that it would ultimately lead to a worse outcome for animals. This may be so because normalization of zoophilia would increase the number of people engaging in harmful or unconsented relationships with animals. Mere decriminalization may not have significant effects on the prevalence of zoophilia, but the effects of a more pervasive social destigmatization are more uncertain. More work would be needed to assess the societal effects of such changes on animals, as well as the potential side-effects on public health and human sociability.

At any rate, to make these potential changes as beneficial as possible, they should certainly be accompanied by a strong emphasis on animal welfare and rights. To achieve this, the animal rights movement as well as a large enough fraction of the general population and decision-makers would have to make an ideological U-turn on zoophilia and move away from seeing it as a sexual deviance. However, because of the sheer amount of moral outrage around this topic, advocating for zoophilia should be done with great caution to avoid undermining the broader agenda of the animal rights movement and other social justice movements. There are obvious pragmatic considerations to downplay the plea for decriminalizing zoophilia, and even more so for including it within the LGBT+ umbrella.

Before I conclude, I should note that even if I take my general claim to be robust, I did not have the ambition to map out in detail the boundaries between permissible and impermissible instances of sex with animals. Creating social institutions where animals open to sex are prostituted or selectively bred and raised for zoophiles seems objectionable even granted that no harm is caused and that animals validly consent, as it commodifies the lives of animals. Animals that are intentionally conditioned, through reinforcement learning, to prepare for or perform specific sexual acts might raise specific objections that I have not touched on. When characterizing consent, there might also be controversy about passive consent, where no positive behavioral indication of agreement is given and animals appear indifferent to the sexual activity, thus offering at best an implicit or tacit consent. This contradicts the affirmative or enthusiastic consent sometimes considered to be the only ethically relevant one. I leave these borderline or more controversial cases, as well as many others, to future research on the topic.

The case for zoophilia being permissible is fairly robust, and commonly raised objections fall flat or are insufficiently backed up. In the course of reviewing them, it has become apparent that they are often imbued with anthropocentrism, dubious appeals to naturalness, overly pessimistic views on what we can know, as well as untenable standards for interacting with animals. Critics of zoophilia need more than outrage, they need better arguments. I suggest that the permissibility of zoophilia should now be taken as the default position, with the burden of proof belonging to its critics.

The practical implications of this conclusion remain fairly open, though ensuring that people have the legal right to engage in zoophilia seems to be a straightforward next step to discuss. The stringent crackdown on all forms of zoophilia that has accompanied the improvement in the legal status of animals in the last decades may turn out to be a mistake. At any rate, it is time for philosophers, animal rights activists, and decision-makers to reconsider their view on zoophilia. Hopefully, this article can contribute to opening this overdue discussion.