Animals Blamed for Seducing Humans?

... the strange background of zoophiles and bestiality in America.



For Slate, Jesse Bering writes:

Now, I’ve written before about the fascinating research underway on the phenomenon of zoophilia and the reported 1 percent of the human population that feels a primary erotic attraction to other species. Yet I’d absolutely no idea about the brutal oppression that not only zoophiles faced in centuries prior, but also the animals themselves that had been involved in their sordid affairs. Today, I think, most people would feel sympathy for an animal that had been violated by a human being, but in the past, they were seen as being just as morally culpable as their sexual partners. And while today’s zoophiles continue to face, as they always have, irreparable stigma for acts of bestiality—along with perhaps some jail time and fines—the “buggers” of the past were burned alive. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this period of our history, however, is the paranoia over human-animal sex. Indeed, a panic over porking pigs grew so intense in Colonial New England that it became, for a time, the “other” witch-hunt.-Read a lot more: In early America, farm animals took the blame for zoophilic sex

Any SE readers out there want to confess?