"Heavy Petting," by Peter Singer, www.Nerve.com, March 12, 2001.
Dearest Pet: On Bestiality by Midas Dekkers. 2000. London and New
York: Verso. First published 1994.
By Karen Davis, PhD
In March, Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer, the author of
Animal Liberation (1975, 1990), published a startling book review
essay, "Heavy Petting," in the online sex magazine Nerve. Singer's
essay was prompted by Dutch writer Midas Dekkers' controversial book
Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. Dearest Pet takes us on a journey of
human sexual interest in and use of nonhuman animals as documented in
art, literature, court records, personal confessions, veterinary
files, and popular culture through history up to the present. Dekkers
forces us to look at some old things in a new way. He says, for
instance, that since the God of the Christians, like Zeus of the
Olympians, once descended in the form of a bird to know a woman-the
story of Leda and the Swan and the story of the Virgin Mary being
visited by the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove--Christianity "is
founded on bestiality" (9). Of the perennial sexual abuse of farmed
animals, Dekkers says that girls "have less opportunity than boys, if
only because almost all animals are of their own sex: cows, ewes,
sows, chickens, nanny-goats" (137), and that "Since animal abuse has
been institutionalized in our society in the food industry, it cannot
be difficult for sadism to find satisfaction" (147). Dekkers does
not argue that human imposed sex with farmed animals per se is
sadism; however, any sex with small animals such as chickens and
rabbits, he says, "automatically involves sadism" (146). In addition
to sexual abuse of small animals, Dekkers documents severe internal
injuries that have been diagnosed in cows and calves as a result of
their being raped by men using everything from their own bodies to
pitchforks (126). He documents men getting revenge on female farmed
animals who refuse their advances, showing another aspect of the link
between nonconsensual sex and human violence. He cites a French
farmer "who thought that many of his chickens and turkeys were dying
in suspicious circumstances" (126). He persuades us that such
circumstances may not be uncommon.
Even while noting that the sex life of domestic animals is
"completely organized by human beings" (178), raising the question of
whether the consent of a domestic animal is ever possible under any
circumstances, desire notwithstanding, Dekkers says that "as long as
none of those involved suffers pain, no form of sex should be seen as
pathological, bad or mad" (148).
In his essay, Peter Singer is almost as equivocal as Dekkers is,
though both seem to agree that whatever may or may not be wrong with
it, the central issue in any sexual encounter between humans and
other creatures is whether it involves cruelty, meaning coercion
and/or infliction of physical pain and bodily harm, regardless of who
the perpetrator is. Singer's suggestion that interspecies sex,
whether initiated by humans or nonhumans, could conceivably be moral
and mutually satisfying, raised a furor among many animal advocates.
Some insisted that Singer should be exiled from the modern movement
of which he is the "father"; others demanded that he step down as
head of The Great Ape Project. While philosophy professor, Tom Regan,
of North Carolina State University and the author of The Case for
Animal Rights (1983), argued in the Raleigh News & Observer (April 3)
that the morality of bodily contact cannot be reduced to issues of
pain and pleasure alone, as Singer's utilitarian ethics might imply,
the two main grievances advanced by animal advocates on the Internet
were that Singer in publishing his shameless essay discredits our
movement in the eyes of the public, and that nonhuman animals are not
in a position to give informed consent either by virtue of other
species' presumed inherent intellectual inferiority to humans or by
virtue of the built-in constraints of captivity: the limited options,
inability to escape, physical coercion, and psychological pressure
that captivity imposes on a captive individual. I argued the latter
in a letter published in The Village Voice, April 10, p. 6. Not only
is it the height of arrogance to reduce the rest of creation to the
level of planetary idiocy and human childhood; it's absurd. Adult
nonhuman animals, from gorillas to guinea fowl, negotiate complex
environments every day. They form adult relationships with their
peers. They raise and teach their young. They socialize, provide
nurturing, and groom themselves and each other (in birds it's called
preening). As functional adults, nonhuman animals perform a
multiplicity of cognitive acts, including practical decision-making,
that are not exhibited by human children or the mentally impaired.
Fair pleading demands that we stop "defending" other animals from
ourselves by calling them "dumb."
Just as Peter Singer predicted in "Dearest Pet," the primary
mainstream objection to bestiality, and to his essay, if the The New
Republic and National Review Online are representative, is that sex
between humans and nonhumans, regardless of the circumstances in
which it occurs including rape, is "an offence to our status and
dignity as human beings (5)." For Kathryn Lopez of National Review
Online the red flag is any suggestion that "humans ain't nothing
special" ("Peter Singer Strikes Again," March 8). She seemed more
threatened by the prospect of shared speciality and by Singer's use
of four-letter words than by what he had to say about what hens are
put through by the egg industry-the institutionalized assault they
endure so nonvegetarians can eat their eggs--and about the sexual
assaults some hens have been forced to undergo from an animal whose
hands are as big as a hen's entire body. Likewise Peter Berkowitz of
the The New Republic (March 8) complained that for Singer, it
appeared that "the only consideration we need bear in mind in using
animals to satisfy our sexual desire is whether we are causing
cruelty," as if to say that cruelty (or at least cruelty to animals,
like animals themselves in his view) amounts to little more than a
pesky footnote in the ethical account of humanity. Berkowitz seemed
far more aggrieved by the idea that other creatures have a dignity
that links us to them than by the cruelty we impose on them without a
shred of compassion or restraint, which is exactly how hens are
treated by the egg industry in the case that Singer cited to show how
deeply woven into the fabric of human life human obscenity really is.
Most people who "raise" animals and who eat them and the products of
their bodies, including their young, do so with no more remorse
towards their victims than the acknowledged hen rapist feels towards
his victim. This connection makes bestiality a core moral issue. From
animal agriculture to zoos, the core of our relationship with the
animals we use is our invasion of their sexual privacy and our
physical manipulation of their sex, reproductive, and family lives.
Historically, animal agriculture has facilitated bestiality, not
simply because of the proximity of farmed animals, but because
controlling other creatures' bodies invites this extension of a
license that has already been taken. Humans engage in oral
intercourse with unconsenting nonhuman animals every time they put a
piece of an animal's body inside their mouth. Partly as a result of
such eating, people over 50 with enough money in Western culture will
soon be, if they aren't already, walking around with half their
internal organs having been taken by force from creatures they think
it demeaning of our species to have sex with. Instead of trivializing
the case for animal rights or seeking to degrade humans, as some have
asserted, Peter Singer's essay on bestiality helps to make the
banality of what is truly bad as clear as the fact that parents who
know that by feeding their children animal products they are setting
them up for preventable health risks and medical bills are practicing
child abuse.
The taboo that needs to be shattered is not the prohibition against
bestiality, but against caring about nonhuman animals in a
respectful, nonpatronizing, and unapologetic way, and against
starting one's kids off the right way at breakfast, lunch, and
dinner, no matter how much this causes people to talk.
Related links:
United Poultry Concerns.
April 22, 2001
United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
PO Box 150
Machipongo, VA 23405-0150
757-678-7875
FAX: 757-678-5070
www.upc-online.org
(Bestiality: Animal Liberation or Human License? By Karen Davis, PhD)
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