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Artistic aspects
Human sexual contact with animals has been described and depicted in all cultures since ancient times. Shown here is a man having intercourse with a donkey. Rock carving,
Val Camonica, Italy,
ca. 3000 B.C.
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In Judeo-Christian societies, sexual contact between humans and animals was, for a long time, a criminal offense. As recorded in the Bible, the ancient Hebrews prohibited such activity under the penalty of death (Leviticus 20). The Talmud did not even allow a widow to keep a pet dog for fear that she might use it for sexual purposes (Abodah Zarah 22b; Baba Metziah 71 a). These negative Jewish attitudes were later adopted by the Christian churches which, in turn, influenced the secular law in most Western countries. The crime was called “sodomy”, after the biblical city of Sodom, which was destroyed by God as a punishment for “unnatural” sexual behavior (Genesis 19). To the medieval mind, this meant all forms of non-coital sexual intercourse, especially homosexual acts, but also sexual contact with animals. (Actually, the Bible does not say that Sodom’s citizens had any such contacts.) Indeed, in a deeply ironic turn of history, the sodomy laws were eventually used against the Jews themselves. Some medieval theologians declared that a Christian's sexual contact with a Jew or Moslem was the moral equivalent of "unnatural" intercourse with an animal "inasmuch as such persons in the eyes of the law and our holy faith differ in no wise from beasts." The offense was considered very serious. For centuries, indeed well into modern times, men and women were buried alive, burned at the stake, or hanged for having had sexual contact with animals. In some cases, the animals were executed along with them.
These religious and legal traditions were also reflected in Western medical thinking. Thus, behavior that appeared sinful and criminal to clergymen and legislators was readily denounced as sick by psychiatrists. For them, sexual intercourse with animals symptomatic of a "disorder", an "aberration", "abnormality", or "perversion". What the church and the state had called "sodomy" and a "crime against nature", psychiatry hastened to condemn as "zoophilia" or "bestiality". People who engaged in such behavior were declared to be mentally ill. It was only in the 20th century that psychiatrists became more self-critical and began to avoid such indiscriminate summary judgements.
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