Philias: Zoophilia and the Hidden Community That’s Into Animals

Get ready to learn about the underground and frequently misunderstood world of zoophilia. With the help of paraphilia researcher Alexandra Zidenberg and hosts of the zoophile podcast Zooier Than Thou, we’ll unravel what it really means to be attracted to animals. We’ll learn what it is that attracts “zoos” to non-human animals, explore the hot-button issue of animal consent, wrestle with the ethics of bestiality, understand the incredible diversity within the zoophile community itself, and hear about the immense challenges zoophiles face in a society that’s quick to judge what they don’t understand. Tune in for an ultra-taboo episode that will challenge what you thought you knew about the world.

Video version:

Zoophilia and the Hidden Community That’s Into Animals
Get ready to learn about the underground and frequently misunderstood world of zoophilia. With the help of paraphilia researcher Alexandra Zidenberg and hosts of the zoophile podcast Zooier Than Thou, we’ll unravel what it really means to be attracted to animals.

Resources from Alexandra Zidenberg:

Resources from Zooier Than Thou:

Citations and further reading:

TRANSCRIPT

044 Zoophilia-transcript

[00:00:00] Ashley: Sexual contact between humans and animals is as old as time, but our attitudes about it are constantly changing. You can see it in the history of bestiality laws. While not all civilizations have had laws against sex with an animal, I mean, ancient Greece seemed to be just fine with it. The earliest recorded bestiality laws are old, from the Hittites, starting in 1650 BC.

[00:00:29] Ashley: They said that if a man had sex with a pig or a dog, the man would be put to death. But if the pig is the one who initiated, it’s fine. Those early societies seem to base their bestiality laws on cleanliness. Even the Torah says that sex with an animal defiles the human. That belief continued into Christian religions, which continued into Christian societies, which would often put both the animal and the human to death for acts of bestiality.

[00:01:00] Ashley: In 1642 in Plymouth Colony, a 16 year old boy was convicted of buggery with a mare, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey, and the animals were killed in front of him before the boy was hanged. Many of our current bestiality laws still echo these beliefs, that sex with an animal degrades a person.

[00:01:23] Ashley: Here in North Carolina, where I’m based, the law still calls bestiality a crime against nature. But I’m willing to bet that you, listening right now, Don’t really object to sex with an animal because you think it’s bad for the human. If you object, it’s probably because you think it’s bad for the animal.

[00:01:43] Ashley: And that’s a shift that only started in the last 150 years or so. And even more recently, in the last few decades. The law has started to reflect a belief, without much evidence, that not only is bestiality bad for animals, but those who do it are one step away from committing sexual violence against their fellow humans.

[00:02:04] Ashley: Suffice it to say, society has never been super comfortable with human animal sex, but the reasons for that aren’t as firm as you might think. But whatever the reasons for outlawing bestiality, it’s clear that there have always been people having sex with animals. Not just the curious farmhand or lonely shepherd seizing on an opportunity.

[00:02:27] Ashley: In fact, there are people who have a deep, usually lifelong attraction to non human animals, and often form romantic relationships with them. It’s called zoophilia, and it’s really an orientation. And today, we’re going to explore how common it is The idea of animal consent and what life is like with an attraction, this taboo.

[00:02:52] Ashley: I’m Ashley Hamer and this is Taboo Science, the podcast that answers the questions you’re not allowed to ask.

[00:03:19] Ashley: So I started this episode talking about how long people have had sex with animals, an act called bestiality. But the first thing you need to know is that zoophilia and bestiality are different things.

[00:03:31] Alexandra Zidenberg: So zoophilia refers specifically to the attraction to non human animals. So it literally translates to a love of animals.

[00:03:41] Alexandra Zidenberg: That’s about the attraction, those feelings, what people like. Bestiality describes an act. So that is the act of receiving sexual gratification from animals. Sometimes they overlap and people who are zoophilic or who are in the zoophile community will commit acts of bestiality, but they’re not always the same thing.

[00:04:06] Alexandra Zidenberg: So somebody might commit an act of bestiality and not be a zoophile at all.

[00:04:11] Ashley: That is Dr. Alexandra Zidenberg.

[00:04:13] Alexandra Zidenberg: I am an assistant professor currently at the Royal Military College, but I will be starting at the School of Criminology at the University of Montreal in a couple weeks. My main area of research is in psychology, and specifically looking at human sexuality.

[00:04:32] Alexandra Zidenberg: and a bit of forensic psychology, and kind of where they overlap. Um, and within that domain, I do quite a bit of research on paraphilias.

[00:04:40] Ashley: Dr. Zidenberg did her doctoral dissertation on zoophilia, but it wasn’t her original plan. Her dissertation was originally focused on sexual offending, but when her PhD supervisor passed away, she was forced to promote a couple of side projects to her main project.

[00:04:57] Alexandra Zidenberg: The first was looking at what veterinarians know about animal sexual abuse, and the other was, um, a broader project that looked at zoophilia. They were never meant to go together in the same document, because they are quite different. They really discuss different constructs, they use different language, they’re with different populations.

[00:05:17] Alexandra Zidenberg: But after the passing of my supervisor, they kind of got mashed together into something that made sense for me to finish my degree and get the PhD after my name and all of that.

[00:05:30] Ashley: But the spark for her interest in zoophilia as a research topic came when she was studying what veterinarians know about animal sexual abuse, and she kept running into different terms for people who were attracted to animals.

[00:05:43] Ashley: Every paper on the topic used different terminology and different definitions. Which makes it hard to look at zoophilia as a coherent body of research.

[00:05:51] Alexandra Zidenberg: What I also saw was a lot of the time when people are looking at sexual attraction to animals, it would kind of be like a yes or no checkbox. Are you attracted to animals?

[00:06:01] Alexandra Zidenberg: And that’s fine. You can do some statistics with that. You can get some information, but as I read more and more, it seemed that sexual attraction to animals was just as varied as sexual attraction to humans. So a yes or no checkbox. Wouldn’t really work for human beings, because our sexuality is just a lot more complex than that.

[00:06:25] Alexandra Zidenberg: And whether or not somebody is attracted to humans or animals, it’s pretty much the same. So we wanted to create something that would capture that complexity, and that could be used to better understand the community and the people within it.

[00:06:38] Ashley: So, she and her team began writing their own survey questions.

[00:06:42] Ashley: They used research from other papers and feedback from other experts in human sexuality and forensic psychology to get the questions exactly right. And then they sent the survey to the admins of a large online community of zoophiles in hopes that they’d distribute it to the members of that community.

[00:06:59] Ashley: And they got some notes.

[00:07:03] Alexandra Zidenberg: They came back with a lot of comments and a lot of wording changes and things that could be added, which is a little bit overwhelming because it’s quite difficult to work through some of those kind of research psychometric questions with people who are non experts, but it was so valuable because neither me or my co author Mark Oliver have a sexual attraction to animals.

[00:07:30] Alexandra Zidenberg: So we didn’t really know what to ask or the language that would resonate best with the community. So getting that feedback was really, really invaluable. It was fantastic and it made for a much better survey.

[00:07:43] Ashley: So once they had their feedback and tweaked the survey accordingly, they sent it out among the community and got a ton of responses.

[00:07:50] Ashley: Dr. Zidenberg credits that to the changes they were able to make, since the questions made sense to the people they were asking.

[00:08:03] Ashley: Once they got the answers, they crunched the numbers and came up with four subscales. Instead of one binary yes no checkbox to see if someone was attracted to animals, they found that every member of the community lands on a four dimensional spectrum. Those dimensions include zoophilia.

[00:08:21] Alexandra Zidenberg: That talks about a general love for animals, a sexual attraction to animals.

[00:08:26] Ashley: Opportunism.

[00:08:27] Alexandra Zidenberg: So those are people who are not necessarily attracted to animals, but if the opportunity to have sex with an animal was Presented, they would take it.

[00:08:37] Ashley: Zoonecrophilia and zoosadism.

[00:08:40] Alexandra Zidenberg: So those are people who derive pleasure from animals in pain or having sexual contact with a dead animal.

[00:08:48] Ashley: And then the furry sex subscale, which looks at a person’s sexual interest in anthropomorphized animals, fursuits, and a desire for their human partners to act like an animal.

[00:08:59] Ashley: There’s some overlap between all four of those scales, but the important thing to know is that But everyone’s different. The same people don’t fall into each of the same groups. And while concepts like zoosadism do sound pretty shocking, the vast majority of zoophiles hardly register on that scale. They love and care for animals and would never want to see them in pain.

[00:09:22] Ashley: But even zoophilia specifically is on a spectrum.

[00:09:26] Aqua: Somebody can fall anywhere on a spectrum from not zoosexual.

[00:09:30] Ashley: Zoosexuality is often used interchangeably with zoophilia, though some people consider it different from being zooromantic, romantically but not sexually attracted to animals. But for our purposes, consider it the same as zoophilia.

[00:09:45] Ashley: I should also mention here that zoophiles often refer to themselves as zoos, and you’ll hear that term a lot in this episode.

[00:09:52] Aqua: So on that line, somebody can be non zoo or they can be exclusively zoosexual at the other end. Most people fall somewhere in the middle.

[00:10:02] Ashley: That is Aqua, one of the hosts of Zooier Than Thou, a podcast for zoophiles.

[00:10:08] Ashley: They work alongside their co host Toggle, who I also spoke to for this episode.

[00:10:12] Toggle: I would suggest that I am an aromantic zoophile and I am interested in both animals and humans. I do have specific animals that I’m most attracted to. Um, male dogs, both male and female horses, and boars, like, male pigs. Those are the ones I’m interested in the most.

[00:10:34] Toggle: Oh, I also like kangaroos, I think they’re pretty great.

[00:10:37] Aqua: I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I am still interested in human relationships, and I, I still pursue them. One does not replace the other. I need both, they satisfy different needs, and I’ve learned in the past that if you ignore one side or the other for too long, then That causes problems.

[00:10:57] Aqua: As far as the kinds of animals that I’m interested in, pretty standard issue. Dogs, horses, I tend to lean male. You know, I have some others that are less practical. I really like cetaceans of all kinds, so that’s dolphins, killer whales.

[00:11:13] Ashley: Toggle and Aqua are in good company. Research suggests that dogs and horses are the most popular animals when zoophiles are surveyed.

[00:11:21] Ashley: I also spoke to Steeeeeeeeeve, that’s Steve with nine E’s, another contributor to Zooier Than Thou and a member of the zoophile community since the mid 90s. Dogs also top his list. I asked him what appeals to him about non human animals.

[00:11:44] Steeeeeeeeeve: They have a lot going for them. So there’s, there’s a simple truth to animals where everything is right on the surface. And, you know, if, if we were describing human behavior, we might call it. earnestness, where they’re just really forthright about their motives and there’s no effort at deception, right?

[00:12:08] Steeeeeeeeeve: Everything is right up front.

[00:12:10] Toggle: How a dog behaves is part of what makes them attractive. That confidence, in particular for me, is very important. It’s kind of like a, you know, what do you like in a guy? I like confidence.

[00:12:23] Aqua: Maybe the, the way to think about this is if somebody who is not a zoo, they’re out in the world and they see another person that is really attractive to them for some reason.

[00:12:35] Aqua: Their appearances, their personality, and they go, oh yes, okay, I want to get to know this person. Much better. Uh, now replace them with an animal. It’s that simple. It doesn’t really make sense to me either. I stopped trying to make sense of it, and started trying to just work with it.

[00:12:59] Ashley: In studies of LGBTQ people and other sexual minorities, most discover their attractions a few years before puberty. That’s about the time kids hit adrenarche, which is the body’s first shot of hormones as puberty approaches. But there are many LGBTQ people who knew it about themselves even earlier. And the same is true of zoophiles.

[00:13:20] Ashley: Many realize that they have these feelings for animals around 8, 9, 10 years old, but some as young as 5 or 6. That’s when Steve and Aqua discovered it.

[00:13:31] Steeeeeeeeeve: I’d say going back as far as when I was five years old, I could, I could tell right away I was emotionally interested in, in animals and then romantically and then, you know, as your body develops and you become sexually active, then that was a natural progression for me.

[00:13:48] Aqua: I was very young, like five or six. One of my siblings was taking horseback riding lessons. And so I, of course was along for the ride, even if I didn’t really want to be there. And, you know, there were other horses around, there were stables, and there wasn’t really all that much supervision, but you also couldn’t really get into too much trouble.

[00:14:08] Aqua: So, that’s what I basically did for An hour and a half was just wander around and look at horses. And, uh, you know, eventually I saw something that I really liked. And that stuck with me for a long time. It wasn’t scary. It didn’t feel wrong. It just felt private. And it was something that I was, uh, I was pretty comfortable keeping to myself for, for many years.

[00:14:34] Ashley: For Toggle, the discovery happened a little later, and fair warning, while I promise to avoid explicit descriptions in this episode, Toggle’s experience does involve sexual contact with an animal.

[00:14:46] Toggle: I think the discovery was very much intertwined with the discovery of me being a furry as well. I was drawing furries before I knew what a furry was, but as I got older I became curious about the dog at my grandmother’s house, who was very openly curious about me.

[00:15:04] Toggle: And one day, I let him knock me over and go at it, and I said, Wow, this is actually great! Um, and I started exploring that and trying to understand it. There would be points where it felt exactly right while I was experimenting with this very very willing and very eager dog who always wanted to play around and I would I remember like we would do it and then Afterwards, I’d have this calm, like, this feels right, this feels like it’s supposed to be this way.

[00:15:45] Toggle: And then, like, 24 hours later, I would feel really guilty, because I was Christian, and somehow, I didn’t absorb that, like, gay was supposed to be wrong, but I did absorb that bestiality was wrong. So I had those kind of conflicting feelings, um, and so I started exploring online. I’m trying to find an outlet that way.

[00:16:06] Toggle: I actually was looking for bestiality, but I found furry art instead. And suddenly, that world opened up, and the two kind of were intertwined in that way. Um, so that origin story for both kind of, uh, Wraps up and I was like 13 when I discovered the furry fandom and also discovered that I really really really like dogs

[00:16:33] Ashley: We’re not going to spend too long on the intersections between the furry fandom and zoophilia Except to say that intersections do exist.

[00:16:41] Ashley: Furry pornography may be designed for people who like cartoon animals but it also appeals to people who like real animals. So those two groups are bound to cross paths. The furry community is sensitive about having zoophiles within their ranks. And being a furry absolutely does not make you a zoophile.

[00:17:00] Ashley: But zoophile furries are out there. That brings me to my next question. How many zoophiles exist? What kinds of people have this attraction toward non human animals? And how common is it? Here’s Dr. Zidenberg again.

[00:17:16] Alexandra Zidenberg: So I would say it’s probably more people than you would expect. So some of those online forums have hundreds of thousands of people in them.

[00:17:25] Alexandra Zidenberg: And that is not necessarily Everyone who is interested in those activities or is sexually attracted to animals in general. So I would say it’s probably a fairly good slice of the population. It’s really hard to pin down prevalence. The literature, depending on where you’re looking, It says about 2 10 percent of the population.

[00:17:53] Alexandra Zidenberg: If we look at more atypical samples, like people who frequent sadomasochist clubs, or people who are incarcerated, that rate can jump up to about 30%. But unfortunately we don’t have any good prevalence studies.

[00:18:09] Steeeeeeeeeve: Well, here’s the test. If you want to see if there are zoophiles around, just check to see if there are humans around.

[00:18:16] Steeeeeeeeeve: And wherever there are humans, there will be a certain number of zoophiles. And it’s every walk of life. I know a lot of female zoos. I know a lot of male zoos. I know trans zoos. And they’re in every occupation, in every economic bracket, from super wealthy people to the poorest people you’ve ever met in your life, men, women.

[00:18:38] Steeeeeeeeeve: young, old, differently abled, different ethnicities. So it’s, it’s everywhere. It’s a whole rainbow and it seems like there’s nothing in common that you could point to and say like, well okay, this person is more likely to be a zoo. The only thing that tells you that they’re a zoo is them telling you that they’re a zoo.

[00:18:58] Steeeeeeeeeve: But it’s just a, it’s like people were picked at random by space aliens and they just beamed them up with no concern for what group they might belong to and said, These are all the zoos.

[00:19:13] Ashley: The research bears this out, and this makes sense if you think of it as an orientation. You find LGBTQ people in every walk of life as well, since it’s not a product of culture or upbringing, but seems to be something inherent to a person.

[00:19:37] Ashley: But there’s still the elephant in the room. Is it wrong? That’s not a question I’m going to answer on this episode. Spoiler alert. But we can address the reasons many people think it’s wrong. At the top of that list, as Aqua and Toggle can tell you, is the idea that animals can’t consent to sex.

[00:19:57] Aqua: To be honest, the consent debate, we’re kind of done with it because we’ve had 20 something years, each of us, to really think it through carefully.

[00:20:08] Aqua: and examine every position, giving the animals the benefit of the doubt. And there really isn’t any argument that withstands rigorous discussion. They all tend to fall back to a position of disgust.

[00:20:25] Ashley: The main zoophile argument is this. Animals express consent and a lack of consent, with humans and other animals, all the time.

[00:20:33] Ashley: Here’s Steeeeeeeeeve.

[00:20:34] Steeeeeeeeeve: If a male of the same species attempts to initiate mating with an unwilling female, she registers her disapproval, uh, in a variety of ways, some of which are lethal. Say there’s people who breed and trade in, you know, equine livestock, right? So, they’re, they’re breeding horses, and the horses don’t necessarily want to breed, but the human owner of these horses says, No, I, I, there’s a profit motive here, so this is legal, we’re doing this.

[00:21:05] Steeeeeeeeeve: So, it’s not uncommon for the mare, the receptive partner there, to, if she’s not, you know, interested in the stallion to kick him in the head so hard that it ends his life. So, did she consent? No. Was that ambiguous? I’d say also no. I mean, he’s laying there dead on the ground. You know, he, he shot his shot.

[00:21:26] Steeeeeeeeeve: Things didn’t work out, right? And there’s a lot of stuff that leads up to that that’s incremental degrees of like, hey man, I’m not into this. And there’s also incremental degrees of, yes, I am receptive, I am into this, let’s do this right now. And, you know, I feel like that’s not an unfamiliar concept for humans.

[00:21:48] Steeeeeeeeeve: I feel like there’s a variety of different levels of communication, verbal and non verbal, that enable us to guess with varying degrees of accuracy whether someone is interested in a romantic or sexual advance. And I think that the degree to which we can’t also see that happening in non human animals, which, you know, share a lot of our evolutionary background.

[00:22:17] Steeeeeeeeeve: is equated directly to a lack of empathy. So if you just, if you just can’t and or won’t imagine that other beings also want sex and have different ways of communicating that, then I think that it’s going to be difficult for you to understand that animals can and do consent as they do with members of their own species.

[00:22:40] Aqua: At least among the zoos that I know, consent is rule number zero. If you’re not sure that you have mutual consent before and during some activity, it doesn’t have to be sex. It can be anything. It doesn’t happen. That activity stops. The zoos that I know, and myself included, we, we practice cooperative care and methods like consent testing.

[00:23:02] Aqua: In just mundane interactions with the animals that we care for, that could be trimming a dog’s claws, uh, instead of forcing them through this experience that is scary and painful if you do it wrong. We ask permission, and the dog can withdraw that permission at any time, and they’re never punished for it.

[00:23:22] Ashley: I’m a cat person, as anyone can probably tell if they stuck around to the end of an episode, and when I read up on consent testing, it was super familiar to me. The idea that if you want to pet a cat, you allow the animal to approach you, let them sniff you, try one pet, stop and see if they move in for more.

[00:23:40] Ashley: These are all forms of consent that the cat is giving you to pet them. We get consent from animals for stuff like this all the time. Zoophiles are just arguing that animals can consent to more than that. But as Toggle says, the concept of animal consent seems to only be reserved for arguments against zoophilia.

[00:23:59] Ashley: Society doesn’t seem to care about it in any other arena.

[00:24:03] Toggle: Certainly in animal agriculture, animals are not consenting to the sexual interactions that they have with humans in those situations, for the most part. Or, at the very least, humans aren’t interested in whether or not they’re consenting. And your meat on your table depends on That being a quick and efficient process without any regard for the animal’s feelings there, so I think this is like the first time, like, when they encounter this that anyone starts to even think about whether or not animals are consenting to any interaction, and then they don’t go further.

[00:24:37] Aqua: I think most people intuitively understand that animals are capable of consenting to something and expressing it clearly, but consent is not a precondition for basically any other use or interaction that we have with animals.

[00:24:58] Ashley: But saying bestiality is okay because animals are treated worse in agriculture isn’t a super compelling argument.

[00:25:05] Ashley: To their credit, Aqua had a good response to this.

[00:25:09] Aqua: In this case, when we are talking about sex for pleasure versus sex for business, If somebody thinks both of those are a problem, that’s fine. What we’re doing is zooming out so that the problem, the same problem, is now being examined at its proper scope.

[00:25:27] Ashley: To distill the argument, animals consent to things all the time. and emphatically refuse consent all the time too. And if your main objection to bestiality is that animals can’t consent to sex, you’d better be up in arms about commercial breeding practices too. Otherwise, you’re saying that when it makes someone money, it’s fine, but when it brings someone pleasure, it’s not.

[00:25:49] Ashley: But bestiality is just one element of zoophilia, and not all zoophiles engage in it.

[00:25:55] Steeeeeeeeeve: So say that you know for sure that you are only attracted to humans of the opposite gender identity from yourself. That doesn’t mean that you are definitely, currently having sex with one of those humans. Or that you have recently. Or I mean what if you haven’t had sex with anyone yet, right. It doesn’t change your orientation, it just doesn’t change who you’re attracted to, it just means that the current circumstances of your life don’t include that expression of your sexuality.

[00:26:27] Ashley: And objecting to that to that sexual orientation, that thing about a person that they were probably born with and can’t change, that’s unproductive at best.

[00:26:37] Alexandra Zidenberg: I think what is really important to remember is whether or not the actual acts themselves are legal or illegal or moral or immoral, where you live for within your own person. Just Being attracted to animals, it might seem icky to us. It might make us feel, um, uncomfortable, but it’s not a crime to be attracted to animals.

[00:27:04] Alexandra Zidenberg: People are attracted to a wide variety of things. And if we were all judged by some of the more niche things we were interested in, that would probably be very difficult for a lot of us. So, again, whether or not it’s legal or moral or you consider it ethical, just being attracted to animals is fine. You might not like it, it might not be your thing, but there’s nothing legally or really ethically wrong with an attraction.

[00:27:42] Ashley: That is certainly not the prevailing belief out there. I mean, there’s a reason most of these guests are not appearing on camera. Being out as a zoophile is a really risky proposition. Even studying it like Dr. Zidenberg does can be hazardous.

[00:27:57] Alexandra Zidenberg: I think most people who are, are somewhat public and do paraphilia research or research on topics that are more difficult for the public to understand, will occasionally get like a, a gif of a, a woodchipper sent to them or, or pictures of firing squads or whatever it is.

[00:28:19] Ashley: And for zoophiles themselves, it can be rough out there. Especially if you speak about it to the public, like Toggle does.

[00:28:26] Toggle: Death threats are not uncommon. Um, suicide baiting, it’s a daily thing, actually. I have someone who screens my emails so that I don’t have to deal with that stuff. But on, you can’t get around it on Twitter.

[00:28:39] Ashley: And zoophiles frequently face doxing, where personal information like their real names, addresses, and workplaces are revealed online.

[00:28:47] Toggle: So that can result in people calling your job and trying to get you fired, or showing up at your house, or sending you mail, or, you know, various other social consequences that are extremely dire.

[00:28:59] Toggle: And that is something that you risk when you try to put yourself out this way. You’re suddenly visible to the right people, but also to all the wrong people too.

[00:29:08] Aqua: On the legal side, it really depends on the circumstances, but it doesn’t get better. Wellness checks from police or animal control officers who are there to look for exigent circumstances to seize animals on the property.

[00:29:24] Ashley: And those exigent circumstances can encompass a lot of things. A criminologist specializing in animal sexual abuse named Jenny Edwards appeared on an animal control podcast to explain that signs of someone sexually abusing animals could include the existence of butt plugs, BDSM gear, or even a complete medical kit.

[00:29:44] Ashley: Things that people in the LGBTQ and kink communities also commonly have. This is nothing new. The law targets the communities it’s most popular to hate in order to get a toe in the door to target everyone else.

[00:29:57] Toggle: We are target practice. Funny fact about a cage, they’re never built for just one group. So when that cage is done with them, it will come for you.

[00:30:06] Aqua: Run the Jewels.

[00:30:09] Ashley: But I don’t want to make it seem like having an attraction to animals curses you to a life of isolation and death threats. You can live a full, fulfilling life as a zoophile.

[00:30:19] Toggle: The perception is, and we get this a lot, no one loves you. No one can love you. No one will ever accept you for who you are, and You’re always gonna be sad and lonely, and there’s, there’s, you should, you should just kill yourself right now!

[00:30:35] Toggle: That idea that we’re unlovable and unacceptable and One thing we’ve been able to do with the podcast is really completely dispel that. We’ve had people on the podcast come out to their parents, we’ve had one of their parents come onto the show and talk to us about when their son came out to them, um, I’ve come out to my parents, we’ve had people write in talking about coming out to their friends, their family, Their loved ones, like their, their significant others, with acceptance.

[00:31:09] Toggle: It is not given that someone who is a zoosexual can’t find some kind of kindred or acceptance from the people that they need it from.

[00:31:21] Ashley: In fact, isolation is antithetical to the goals of Zooier Than Thou. The podcast’s slogan is Exposure is the Solution.

[00:31:30] Toggle: Essentially, in the same way that coming out is so important for gay people and their visibility and their own welfare, like, peace of mind, being visible for zoophiles is how we dispel the caricature.

[00:31:46] Toggle: We do it by being in a podcast and openly talking publicly about what we’re doing and who we are and what we’re interested in. Zoos can do it by coming out to people that they care about and suddenly that person sees a whole person when they think about a zoophile. So in theory when they see injustice being perpetrated, they think of you.

[00:32:12] Toggle: And now, other zoophiles are also humans, that matter, instead of just cartoon villains.

[00:32:20] Ashley: I’m hoping that in some small part, this episode did that for you. Zoophilia is a sexual orientation, just like any other, and the vast majority of zoophiles care deeply about animals. And they are people, just like you.

[00:32:35] Steeeeeeeeeve: The more that we make that effort to imagine what it’s like for other people, and imagine that their lives are just as precious and lovely. The more we move away from persecution and war and mob violence and police reactions to that and, you know, the really yucky stuff that fills up the news headlines.

[00:33:01] Steeeeeeeeeve: Yeah, so if anyone’s open to suggestions out there and wants to Try making the world a little better place. I’d say just maybe imagine what things are like for other people a little more and you’ll find that maybe they’re not so different than you.

[00:33:25] Ashley: Thanks for listening. Big thanks to Dr. Alexandra Zidenberg for sharing her research. You can check out her dissertation at the link in the show notes. And thank you to Steve for being so generous with his time and information. And massive thanks to Aqua and Toggle, who actually pitched this episode to me and gave me more resources on the topic than I knew what to do with.

[00:33:46] Ashley: I really appreciate all the effort. Again, their podcast is Zooier Than Thou, and you can find a link to it in the show notes. I’d say you can find it where you found this podcast, but it’s not on some of the major platforms, the reasons for which should make sense now that you’ve heard this episode.

[00:34:04] Ashley: Taboo Science is written and produced by me, Ashley Hamer. The theme song is by Danny Lipka of DLC Music episode. Music is from Epidemic Sound. I welcome your feedback and ideas about the show, whether it’s positive or negative. You can send them in two ways. Email me atAshley@tabooscience.show, or you can leave a voice memo at pod line fm slash taboo science.

[00:34:29] Ashley: No pictures of wood Chippers, please, and thank you. The next episode comes by Popular Demand. Age play and diaper fetishes, known in the lingo as ABDL. You know you’ve always wondered about the diaper thing. Hope you tune in. I won’t tell anyone.