Portal:Zoophilia
Portal maintenance status: (October 2018)
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Introduction
Zoophilia is a paraphilia involving a sexual fixation on non-human animals. Bestiality is cross-species sexual activity between human and non-human animals. The terms are often used interchangeably, but some researchers make a distinction between the attraction (zoophilia) and the act (bestiality).
Although sex with animals is not outlawed in some countries, in most countries, bestiality is illegal under animal abuse laws or laws dealing with buggery or crimes against nature.
Selected general articles
- Anthropocentrism (/ˌænθroʊpoʊˈsɛntrɪzəm/; from Greek Ancient Greek: ἄνθρωπος, ánthrōpos, "human being"; and Ancient Greek: κέντρον, kéntron, "center") is the belief that human beings are the most important entity in the universe. Anthropocentrism interprets or regards the world in terms of human values and experiences. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. Anthropocentrism is considered to be profoundly embedded in many modern human cultures and conscious acts. It is a major concept in the field of environmental ethics and environmental philosophy, where it is often considered to be the root cause of problems created by human action within the ecosphere.
However, many proponents of anthropocentrism state that this is not necessarily the case: they argue that a sound long-term view acknowledges that a healthy, sustainable environment is necessary for humans and that the real issue is shallow anthropocentrism. Read more...
A crab-eating macaque using a stone tool to crack open a nut.
Animal cognition describes the mental capacities of non-human animals and the study of those capacities. The field developed from comparative psychology, including the study of animal conditioning and learning. It has also been strongly influenced by research in ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology, and hence the alternative name cognitive ethology is sometimes used. Many behaviors associated with the term animal intelligence are also subsumed within animal cognition.
Researchers have examined animal cognition in mammals (especially primates, cetaceans, elephants, dogs, cats, pigs, horses, cattle, raccoons and rodents), birds (including parrots, fowl, corvids and pigeons), reptiles (lizards and snakes), fish and invertebrates (including cephalopods, spiders and insects). Read more...
A pet or companion animal is an animal kept primarily for a person's company, protection, or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or laboratory animal. Popular pets are often noted for their attractive appearances, intelligence, and relatable personalities.
Two of the most popular pets are dogs and cats. A cat lover is known as an ailurophile and a dog lover is known as cynophile. Other animals commonly kept include: rabbits, ferrets, pigs; rodents, such as gerbils, hamsters, chinchillas, rats, and guinea pigs; avian pets, such as parrots, passerines, and fowl; reptile pets, such as turtles, lizards and snakes; aquatic pets, such as fish, freshwater and saltwater snails, and frogs; and arthropod pets, such as tarantulas and hermit crabs. Small pets may be grouped together as pocket pets, while the equine and bovine group include the largest companion animals. Read more...- Zoosadism is pleasure derived from cruelty to animals. It is part of the Macdonald triad, a set of three behaviors that are considered a precursor to psychopathic behavior. Read more...
- The history of zoophilia and bestiality begins in the prehistoric era, where depictions of humans and animals in a sexual context appear infrequently in European rock art. Bestiality remained a theme in mythology and folklore through the classical period and into the Middle Ages (e.g. the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan) and several ancient authors purported to document it as a regular, accepted practice – albeit usually in "other" cultures.
Explicit legal prohibition of human sexual contact with animals is a legacy of the Abrahamic religions: the Hebrew Bible imposes the death penalty on both the person and animal involved in an act of bestiality. There are several examples known from medieval Europe of people and animals executed for committing bestiality. With the Age of Enlightenment, bestiality was subsumed with other sexual "crimes against nature" into civil sodomy laws, usually remaining a capital crime. Read more... - Hani Miletski (born 1962) is a sexologist, and sex therapist living in Bethesda, Maryland, United States. She specializes as a trainer and supervisor in the field, in sex addiction, and also works within the criminal justice system. Read more...
- Zoophilia and the law looks at the laws governing humans performing sex acts with non-human animals. Laws against humans performing sex acts on animals, where they exist, are concerned with the actual act, which it commonly refers to as bestiality, rather than the sexual attraction to animals. For this reason, prohibitions of zoophilic pornography are more varied; they may be unlawful if an actual sex act with an animal is involved, but the status is not clear-cut if there is a mere representation, such as a painting or cartoon. In that case, normal obscenity laws will normally apply. All zoophilic imagery is widely regarded as pornography. Read more...
- Speciesism (/ˈspiːʃiːˌzɪzəm,
-siːˌzɪz-/) involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership. The term is sometimes used by animal rights advocates, who argue that speciesism is a prejudice similar to racism or sexism, in that the treatment of individuals is predicated on group membership and morally irrelevant physical differences. Their claim is that species membership has no moral significance.
The term has not been used uniformly, but broadly embraces two ideas. It usually refers to "human speciesism" (human supremacism), the exclusion of all nonhuman animals from the rights, freedoms, and protections afforded to humans. It can also refer to the more general idea of assigning value to a being on the basis of species membership alone, so that "human–chimpanzee speciesism" would involve human beings favouring rights for chimpanzees over rights for dogs, because of human–chimpanzee similarities. Read more... - A sexual norm can refer to a personal or a social norm. Most cultures have social norms regarding sexuality, and define normal sexuality to consist only of certain sex acts between individuals who meet specific criteria of age, consanguinity (e.g. incest), race/ethnicity (e.g. miscegenation), and/or social role and socioeconomic status.
In most societies, the term 'normal' identifies a range or spectrum of behaviors. Rather than each act being simply classified as "acceptable" or "not acceptable", many acts are viewed as "more or less accepted" by different people, and the opinion on how normal or acceptable they are greatly depends on the individual making the opinion as well as the culture itself. Based on information gained from sexological studies, a great many ordinary people's sex lives are very often quite different from popular beliefs about normal, in private. Read more... - Cetacean intelligence is the cognitive ability of the Cetacea order of mammals. This order includes whales, porpoises, and dolphins. Read more...
Terms human–animal hybrid and animal–human hybrid refer to an entity that incorporates elements from both humans and non-human animals. Read more...
Anthrozoology (also known as human–non-human-animal studies, or HAS) is the subset of ethnobiology that deals with interactions between humans and other animals. It is an interdisciplinary field that overlaps with other disciplines including anthropology, ethnology, medicine, psychology, veterinary medicine and zoology. A major focus of anthrozoologic research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party and the study of their interactions. It includes scholars from fields such as anthropology, sociology, biology, history and philosophy.
Anthrozoology scholars, such as Pauleen Bennett recognize the lack of scholarly attention given to non-human animals in the past, and to the relationships between human and non-human animals, especially in the light of the magnitude of animal representations, symbols, stories and their actual physical presence in human societies. Rather than a unified approach, the field currently consists of several methods adapted from the several participating disciplines to encompass human-nonhuman animal relationships and occasional efforts to develop sui generis methods. Read more...
A four-week-old puppy, found alongside a road after flooding in West Virginia, United States, is fed at an Emergency Animal Rescue Service shelter in the Twin Falls State Park.
Animal welfare is the well-being of nonhuman animals. The standards of "good" animal welfare vary considerably between different contexts. These standards are under constant review and are debated, created and revised by animal welfare groups, legislators and academics worldwide. Animal welfare science uses various measures, such as longevity, disease, immunosuppression, behavior, physiology, and reproduction, although there is debate about which of these indicators provide the best information.
Respect for animal welfare is often based on the belief that nonhuman animals are sentient and that consideration should be given to their well-being or suffering, especially when they are under the care of humans. These concerns can include how animals are slaughtered for food, how they are used in scientific research, how they are kept (as pets, in zoos, farms, circuses, etc.), and how human activities affect the welfare and survival of wild species. Read more...
Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the non-human members of the Hominidae or great ape family: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.
Advocates include primatologists Jane Goodall and Dawn Prince-Hughes, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosophers Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, and legal scholar Steven Wise. Read more...
Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism is a term that also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or trained behavioural responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity. Many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour throughout history. Ethology has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and by Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, joint awardees of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to some other disciplines such as neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Ethologists are typically interested in a behavioural process rather than in a particular animal group, and often study one type of behaviour, such as aggression, in a number of unrelated animals.
Ethology is a rapidly growing field. Since the dawn of the 21st century, many aspects of animal communication, emotions, culture, learning and sexuality that the scientific community long thought it understood have been re-examined, and new conclusions reached. New fields, such as neuroethology, have developed. Read more...
Great egret (Ardea alba) in a courtship display communicating the desire to find a mate
Animal communication is the transfer of information from one or a group of animals (sender or senders) to one or more other animals (receiver or receivers) that affects the current or future behavior of the receivers. Information may be sent intentionally, as in a courtship display, or unintentionally, as in the transfer of scent from predator to prey. Information may be transferred to an "audience" of several receivers. Animal communication is a rapidly growing area of study in disciplines including animal behavior, sociology, neurology and animal cognition. Many aspects of animal behavior, such as symbolic name use, emotional expression, learning and sexual behavior, are being understood in new ways.
When the information from the sender changes the behavior of a receiver, the information is referred to as a "signal". Signalling theory predicts that for a signal to be maintained in the population, both the sender and receiver should usually receive some benefit from the interaction. Signal production by senders and the perception and subsequent response of receivers are thought to coevolve. Signals often involve multiple mechanisms, e.g. both visual and auditory, and for a signal to be understood the coordinated behaviour of both sender and receiver require careful study. Read more...
A "wise old owl" in a 1940s poster from the War Production Board
When anthropomorphising an animal there are stereotypical traits which commonly tend to be associated with particular species. Often these are simply exaggerations of real aspects or behaviours of the creature in question, while other times the stereotype is taken from mythology and replaces any observation-based judgment of that animal's behavior. Some are popularised or solidified by a single particularly notable appearance in media. For example, Disney's 1942 film Bambi portrays the titular deer as an innocent, fragile animal. In any case, once they have entered the culture as widely recognized stereotypes of animals, they tend to be used both in conversation and media as a kind of shorthand for expressing particular qualities.
While some authors make use of these animal stereotypes "as is", others undermine reader expectations by reversing them, developing the animal character in contrasting ways to foil expectations or create amusement, like a fastidious pig or cowardly lion. Read more...- 23rd Tirthankara, Parshwanatha revived Jainism and ahimsa in 9th century BC, which led to radical animal rights movement in South Asia.
Animal rights is the idea in which some, or all, non-human animals are entitled to the possession of their own lives and that their most basic interests—such as the need to avoid suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings.
Its advocates oppose the assignment of moral value and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone—an idea known since 1970 as speciesism, when the term was coined by Richard D. Ryder—arguing that it is a prejudice as irrational as any other. They maintain that animals should no longer be viewed as property or used as food, clothing, research subjects, entertainment, or beasts of burden. Multiple cultural traditions around the world such as Jainism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Animism also espouse some forms of animal rights. Read more...
Leda and the swan, with a Cupid in attendance (4th-century Roman relief)
The mythological tradition is full of sexual encounters between humans and animals, especially mortal women and gods in the guise of animals. Bestiality is a particular characteristic of intercourse with Jupiter (Greek Zeus), who visits Leda as a swan and Europa as a bull. The Minotaur is born when Pasiphaë feels such sexual attraction for a bull that she has herself disguised as a cow to mate with him. Satyrs, known for their sexual voracity, are often pictured with bestial features.
Mock bestiality is recorded as a form of sexual roleplay in Imperial Rome. Nero is supposed to have enjoyed a form of bondage with either male or female partners in which he dressed in animal skins to attack their genitals, just as condemned prisoners were bound and attacked by wild animals in the arena (see Damnatio ad bestias). The historian Dio tells of how a prostitute pretended to be a leopard for the gratification of a senator. The actor Bathyllus was known for an erotic dance in which he dressed as Leda having sex with the swan; the women watching were variously aroused. Bestiality is also a theme of Apuleius' novel Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass), in which the protagonist, transformed into an ass, is desired by a wealthy noble matron, just as Pasiphaë desired the bull. Read more...
Animal sexual behaviour takes many different forms, including within the same species. Common mating or reproductively motivated systems include monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, polygamy and promiscuity. Other sexual behaviour may be reproductively motivated (e.g. sex apparently due to duress or coercion and situational sexual behaviour) or non-reproductively motivated (e.g. interspecific sexuality, sexual arousal from objects or places, sex with dead animals, homosexual sexual behaviour, bisexual sexual behaviour).
When animal sexual behaviour is reproductively motivated, it is often termed mating or copulation; for most non-human mammals, mating and copulation occur at oestrus (the most fertile period in the mammalian female's reproductive cycle), which increases the chances of successful impregnation. Some animal sexual behaviour involves competition, sometimes fighting, between multiple males. Females often select males for mating only if they appear strong and able to protect themselves. The male that wins a fight may also have the chance to mate with a larger number of females and will therefore pass on his genes to their offspring. Read more...- The animal rights movement, sometimes called the animal liberation movement, animal personhood, or animal advocacy movement, is a social movement which seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and an end to their use in the research, food, clothing, and entertainment industries.
It is one of the few examples of a social movement that was created, and is to a large extent sustained academically, by philosophers. Read more... - The humanzee (Homo sapiens sapiens × Pan) is a hypothetical chimpanzee/human hybrid. An unsuccessful attempt to breed such a hybrid was made by Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov in the 1920s.
The portmanteau word humanzee for a human–chimpanzee hybrid appears to have entered usage in the 1980s. Read more... - Exogamy is a social arrangement where marriage is allowed only outside a social group. The social groups define the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. In social studies, exogamy is viewed as a combination of two related aspects: biological and cultural. Biological exogamy is marriage of nonblood-related beings, regulated by forms of incest law. A form of exogamy is dual exogamy, in which two groups engage in continual wife exchange. Cultural exogamy is marrying outside a specific cultural group; the opposite being endogamy, marriage within a social group. Read more...
- Sexual ethics or sex ethics (also called sexual morality) is the study of human sexuality and the expression of human sexual behavior. Sexual ethics seeks to understand and evaluate the moral conduct of interpersonal relationships and sexual activities from social, cultural, and philosophical perspectives. Historically, the prevailing notions of what was deemed as sexually ethical has been tied to religious values. Sexual ethics involve issues, such as gender identification, sexual orientation, consent, sexual relations, and procreation. Read more...
A drawing of a cat by T. W. Wood in Charles Darwin's book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, described as acting "in an affectionate frame of mind".
The existence and nature of emotions in animals are believed to be correlated with those of humans and to have evolved from the same mechanisms. Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to write about the subject, and his observational (and sometimes anecdotal) approach has since developed into a more robust, hypothesis-driven, scientific approach. Cognitive bias tests and learned helplessness models, have shown feelings of optimism and pessimism in a wide range of species including rats, dogs, cats, rhesus macaques, sheep, chicks, starlings, pigs, and honeybees.
Some behaviourists, such as John B. Watson, claim that stimulus–response models provide a sufficient explanation for animal behaviours that have been described as emotional, and that all behaviour, no matter how complex, can be reduced to a simple stimulus-response association. Watson described that the purpose of psychology was "to predict, given the stimulus, what reaction will take place; or given the reaction, state what the situation or stimulus is that has caused the reaction". Read more...- Laws affecting zoophilic activities vary across different countries and other sub-national jurisdictions. In general, these laws regulate performing or receiving sexual activity from non-human animals, or the sale, distribution, and ownership of zoophilic pornography. Read more...
The human–animal bond can occur between people and domestic or wild animals; be it a cat as a pet or birds outside one's window. The phrase “Human-Animal Bond” also known as HAB began to emerge as terminology in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Research into the nature and merit of the human–animal bond began in the late 18th century when, in York, England, the Society of Friends established The Retreat to provide humane treatment for the mentally ill. By having patients care for the many farm animals on the estate, society officials theorized that the combination of animal contact plus productive work would facilitate the patients' rehabilitation. In the 1870s in Paris, a French surgeon had patients with neurological disorders ride horses. The patients were found to have improved their motor control and balance and were less likely to suffer bouts of depression.
During the 1820-1870s America's Victorian middle class used the human-animal bond to aid in children's socialization. This was an entirely gendered process, as parents and society believed only boys had an innate tendency towards violence and needed to be socialized towards kindness and empathy through companion animals. Over time pet keeping to socialize children became more gender neutral, but even into the 1980s and 90s there remained a belief that boys especially benefited from pet keeping due to the fact that it was one of only ways they could practice nurturing given the limiting gender norms. Read more...
Dog intelligence or dog cognition is the process in dogs of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new situations information and conceptual skills.
Studies have shown that dogs display many behaviors associated with intelligence. They have advanced memory skills, and are able to read and react appropriately to human body language such as gesturing and pointing, and to understand human voice commands. Dogs demonstrate a theory of mind by engaging in deception. Read more...- The timeline of zoophilia covers the history of zoophilia and bestiality among humans and non-human animals. Read more...
Ancient Greek sodomising a goat by Édouard-Henri Avril
Sodomy (/ˈsɒdəmi/) is generally anal or oral sex between people or sexual activity between a person and a non-human animal (bestiality), but it may also mean any non-procreative sexual activity. Originally, the term sodomy, which is derived from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis, was commonly restricted to anal sex. Sodomy laws in many countries criminalized the aforementioned behaviors. In the Western world, many of these laws have been overturned or are not routinely enforced. Read more...- Posthumanism or post-humanism (meaning "after humanism" or "beyond humanism") is a term with at least seven definitions according to philosopher Francesca Ferrando:
- Antihumanism: any theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition.
- Cultural posthumanism: a branch of cultural theory critical of the foundational assumptions of humanism and its legacy that examines and questions the historical notions of "human" and "human nature", often challenging typical notions of human subjectivity and embodiment and strives to move beyond archaic concepts of "human nature" to develop ones which constantly adapt to contemporary technoscientific knowledge.
- Philosophical posthumanism: a philosophical direction which draws on cultural posthumanism, the philosophical strand examines the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and extending subjectivities beyond the human species
- Posthuman condition: the deconstruction of the human condition by critical theorists.
- Transhumanism: an ideology and movement which seeks to develop and make available technologies that eliminate aging and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, in order to achieve a "posthuman future".
- AI takeover: A more pessimistic alternative to transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise. This is related to the view of "cosmism" which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".
- Voluntary Human Extinction, which seeks a "posthuman future" that in this case is a future without humans.
Anthrozoology (also known as human–non-human-animal studies, or HAS) is the subset of ethnobiology that deals with interactions between humans and other animals. It is an interdisciplinary field that overlaps with other disciplines including anthropology, ethnology, medicine, psychology, veterinary medicine and zoology. A major focus of anthrozoologic research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party and the study of their interactions. It includes scholars from fields such as anthropology, sociology, biology, history and philosophy.
Anthrozoology scholars, such as Pauleen Bennett recognize the lack of scholarly attention given to non-human animals in the past, and to the relationships between human and non-human animals, especially in the light of the magnitude of animal representations, symbols, stories and their actual physical presence in human societies. Rather than a unified approach, the field currently consists of several methods adapted from the several participating disciplines to encompass human-nonhuman animal relationships and occasional efforts to develop sui generis methods. Read more...- Human–animal communication is the communication observed between humans and other animals, from non-verbal cues and vocalizations through to the use of language. Read more...
According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, "near human-like levels of consciousness" have been observed in the grey parrot.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
The topic of animal consciousness is beset with a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form because animals, lacking the ability to use human language, cannot tell us about their experiences. Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, for example, has sometimes been blamed for mistreatment of animals because he argued that only humans are conscious. Read more...
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Selected images
Art by Franz von Bayros depicting oral sex between an adolescent and a deer
Man having intercourse with a horse, pictured on the exterior of a temple in Khajuraho.
Ancient Greek sodomising a goat", plate XVII from 'De Figuris Veneris' by F.K. Forberg, illustrated by Édouard-Henri Avril.
Hokusai's (1760–1849) The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife.
Pan having sex with a goat, statue from Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum, 1752
Several companies (e.g., Bad Dragon) sell dildos in the shape of animal penises, both realistic and fantastical. This one is based on a wolf's penis.
The taboo of zoophilia has led to stigmatised groups being accused of it, as with blood libel. This German illustration shows Jews performing bestiality on a Judensau, while Satan watches.
Leda and the Swan, copy of a lost Michelangelo.
Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print from Utagawa Kunisada's series, "Eight Canine Heroes of the House of Satomi", 1837.
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