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Douglas Spink: I tend to use "heterospecies" rather than "zoophile." I see it as the difference between calling someone gay and calling them a faggot.I do not think that I'm terribly good as a categorical representative of heterospeciesists or any particular class. I'm a bit of an outlier, even in the communities where I feel most at home. A BASE-jumping, Chicago MBA–carrying, counter-surveillance-tech-developing, Asperger's-diagnosed oddball. Proudly so.
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I was raised in a horse-centric environment, having learned to ride at age two. I was (and am) able to empathetically understand things from the horse's perspective. In biology class, I was presented with some counterintuitive claims of facts that were decidedly incongruent with what I knew from my firsthand immersion alongside equine companions, like "Animals were devoid of any interest in sex or sexuality, and bred purely based on instinct."As a young teenager, I was able to learn about the (then new) horrors of factory farming from nonprofits like PETA. I became a lifelong (if imperfect) vegetarian, and my interest in activist work in support of non-human well-being kicked into high gear. Bring those threads together, and you get the question of heterospecies relations between humans and non-humans.OK, so you questioned the treatment of animals early on, and animal sexuality—but how did you move past the initial taboos and start engaging with heterospecies intimacy?
Anyone who can really generate some sort of putative revulsion over the idea of two social mammals engaging in intimate relations is displaying a deeply problematic misunderstanding of what it is to be a social mammal. It's a manufactured taboo.
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The most compelling evidence is the vastly common theme of human/non-human couplings within the genesis stories of so many different cultures and religions. Clearly, this is not a concept that was beyond imagination in the vast majority of human cultures. If anything, the evidence suggests that it would be unimaginable for such things not to have taken place as part of routine social activities!I do note that the rise of modern torture-farmed production of meat (and milk and eggs) for human consumption takes place step-by-step alongside the sudden (putative) freak-out over non-human sexuality and heterospecies relationships. Whether there's a causative link between those two variables is an open question within the research literature.
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While it's not too difficult to see that pulling the skin from a still-living cow is harmful to her—something that happens hundreds of times a day in torture farms, 100 percent legal in the USA—it's not at all clear that equating sexual intimacy with abuse has any scientific or empirical basis.People say any sexual interaction between a human and a non-human is "always abusive" because non-humans are unable to consent to being passive participants in a sexual act. But the zoophobic hate-law passed in Washington State in 2006 came about as a direct result of an interaction in which the humans were passive. People say non-humans cannot make their own choices about their own sexual activities. But a mare who prefers not to mate with a given stallion does just fine telling him "no" with her hooves. That's called "female mate preference," and it's an essential part of mammalian life.
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The community, as fragmented and occasionally (perhaps often) dysfunctional as it is, exists. Sometimes there are heated political divisions between the “dog zoos” and “horse zoos” in the heterospecies community. And the rotten apples tend to smell strongest and be most easily picked out. But that doesn't mean they represent the wide body of apples in the barrel, eh?
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The tragic reality is that bigotry toward heterospecies individuals primarily manifests itself in attacks on the non-human partner in the relationship. There are examples documented in this country of police abducting mares from (presumed) zoophiles and burning off their genitals with a blowtorch while forcing the human partner to watch the torture. What's been done to me, as a person, pales in comparison to the horror of knowing my loved ones—family members I would gladly put my life down to protect—were murdered while I was held in a solitary-confinement isolation cell in federal prison, unable to save them. It's quite difficult to pretend this is all motivated by a concern for non-human well-being when the first targets are always the non-humans involved.Stigmatized or targeted minorities are subjected to a barrage of bizarre, counterfactual, essentially mythological assertions by the majority social groups. Look at how many “respectable” newspapers published the bullshit Vaseline-slathered-mice myth relating to my case in 2010. There's not a single actual recorded instance of Vaseline-slathered mice actually existing. I've also seen it in the almost-humorous lengths to which mainstream journalists will go in writing stories about me without ever contacting me.
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There is an “evolving consensus” amongst researchers who actually bother to study such things that a heterospecies orientation is indeed a legitimate sexual orientation, whatever “legitimate” means in this context. Turn it around: Where's the research suggesting that a heterospecies orientation is not a legitimate sexual orientation? There's no such research.
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My work is entirely in support of full, reciprocal, respectful interconnections between humans and non-humans. Period. Zoophobic persecution is the other side of the coin of hatred of, disrespect for, and rejection of full personhood on behalf of non-human people.In the political space, I see zoophobic bigotry more as a manifestation of the breakdown of the rule of law in modern America: "The law doesn't exist to protect people like you." That transcends the heterospecies community and includes extra-legal attacks on people of color, trans folks, immigrants, those without lots of financial resources.It's a betrayal of all the good things on which our country was originally founded (if imperfectly so: see treatment of Native Americans, slaves, women, and others): Equality, equal protection under law, and due process.
