Ancient myths are full of human-animal hybrids: satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids swan-Zeus, jackal-headed Anubis, shapeshifting fox-women.Ĭloser to the present, in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask), an Armenian shepherd confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. Indigenous peoples in South-East Asia, Australasia and North America have traced their origins to sex between women and dogs. The oldest surviving evidence of bestiality comes from a Palaeolithic cave painting in Italy, which shows a man penetrating an animal similar images are common in the art of the Iron and Bronze Ages. It isn’t something openly talked about, apart from – like so many other things we repress elsewhere – in art, folklore and myth, where sex with animals has always featured in a big way.
What could be better than this?įor some people there is an answer, and it is sex with animals. Later we will take each other for a walk in the meadow and delight in each other’s delight: at rabbits forever out of reach, at the clean line she cuts through water, at the shivering trees. She lies next to me as I write, her paws tucked neatly under her otter-smooth head, her body pressed against my side. But the arrival last summer of Goose, a black Labrador, means that I too now know what it is to be the object of an animal’s love, and to love her in turn, as I tell her several times a day. When one morning I found his cold, motionless body next to the wheel in which he had whirred away the days, a small furry Sisyphus, I cried for a creature I had never really known. The heart of my hamster, Kramer, was an enigma. Jasper, the ill-advised beagle that followed, loved no one but himself.
H ave you ever experienced the love of an animal? Jack, my family’s golden retriever, put on an admirable show of adoring all of us, but we knew his deepest attachment was to my mother, on whose lap he liked to lie, having his silky ears stroked as he slept.
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