". I find it hard to imagine the public policy problem these statutes are intended to resolve." I imagine there might actually be people who would like to engage in zoophilia and then there might be concerns about animal rights or some religiously motivated reasons. Wouldn't that be a problem?
Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 19:42@Flater Certainly I did not mean to imply that. I had considered "why is x illegal" to be a value-free way of asking the question. I'm always interested in suggestions for how to maintain a value-neutral way of phrasing it.
Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 2:54A less suggestive way of phrasing the question is "What makes bestiality laws necessary in the United States?"
Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 5:38@ErikE That implies the law was created out of necessity, which may or may not be true. There's nothing wrong with the current title.
Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 6:03That proposed new title is more cumbersome. The current title is clear and succinct. Let's not edit it to mitigate an imaginary issue.
Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 6:10As Wikipedia indicates such state laws seem to have a curiously bimodal distribution. Some are two (or more) centuries old, and some are pretty recent, e.g.
I suspect the old laws have a pretty religious basis, or at least based on Victorian morality, like some sodomy laws of the time. Some of the newer ones seem to have a pro-animal-rights lean, e.g. Alaska's has provisions about reimbursing for the vet care of animals hurt this way.
I did find one 2017 piece of news headlined "Push to make bestiality a crime in Ohio after man who had sex with daughters' boxers only got 30 days in jail". According to Wikipedia, Ohio is one of the states with a recent (2017) law in this area. The animal-rights angle is not uncommon relative to other Western societies, e.g. Germany's 2012 ban contemporanous with news about "erotic zoos" and upheld in 2016.
The Ohio story has some background:
answered Sep 1, 2018 at 11:33 Make StackExchange GREAT 4ever Make StackExchange GREAT 4ever 169k 29 29 gold badges 412 412 silver badges 861 861 bronze badgesEight states and the District of Columbia still lack anti-bestiality laws. Some states inadvertently lifted earlier prohibitions on human-animal sex when they were updating their laws to remove sodomy as a crime.
The Humane Society of the United States led the lobbying effort to outlaw bestiality, but a much larger coalition, including domestic violence shelters, conservative Christians, law enforcers and psychologists, got behind the law this time.
“We were able to explain that this is not just an animal issue,” said Corey Roscoe, the society’s Ohio state director. “This did have ramifications for human violence. Sexually deviant acts are a red flag to other acts of sexual violence.”
Since 2005, arrests for animal sex abuse and exploitation in the U.S. have risen dramatically. The number of arrests in 2014 was more than double the total number of arrests in the 30 years between 1970 and 2000.
Jenny Edwards, a criminologist in Washington who studies the issue, said the rise has been driven by the Internet.
Online forums that exist behind powerful firewalls allow like-minded people to communicate and share animals for breeding and sexual experiences.
“It’s been great for deviants,” Edwards said.
A decade of research by Edwards also shows links between those who abuse animals and those who abuse other vulnerable groups, including children, women and other family members. [. ]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation singled out animal cruelty offences in its national crime statistics for the first time last year, in an effort to begin to definitively quantify the problem.
With regard to the newer laws, a controversial case, alas in Canada, probably sheds some insight independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/…
Commented Sep 1, 2018 at 11:47Bestiality is not a crime, per se, in five states, although in some cases it may constitute animal cruelty.
In Colorado (where the enactment was fairly recent), bestiality is per se an act that constitutes cruelty to animals, but some states classify it is a form of immoral and indecent conduct, focusing on the immorality of the perpetrator rather than on the alleged harm to the animal.
These laws are generally enforced by local prosecuting attorney's offices (a few states, such as Florida, assign the function to a state agency instead), which generally do not have coherent policies on the topic and play mostly a behind the scenes role in the legislative process, usually through a statewide lobbying organization for prosecuting attorneys generally.
Basically, bestiality laws are reactions to moral panic:
a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. A Dictionary of Sociology defines a moral panic as "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media".
The legislative history of the Ohio example, detailed by @Fizz illustrates the moral panic narrative of these enactments, following a repeal of many such laws in connection with the repeal of anti-sodomy laws.
In some cases, anti-sodomy laws that included bestiality where repealed in connection with state overhauls of their criminal statutes modeled on the Model Penal Code (1962) which served as a template for state legislation (at least in part) in two-thirds of U.S. states, which did not include a bestiality offense. Many of the legal revisions modeled on the Model Penal Code took place in the early 1970s. But, some of those states later enacted bestiality laws as noted in the answer of @Fizz regarding the bimodal distribution of enactment dates.
Other anti-sodomy laws that happened to also include bestiality were repealed as a housekeeping matter because the case Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 538 (2003) that held a law banning consensual sodomy between adults to be unconstitutional. Conservative Justice Scalia's dissent in that case argued that if the court was not prepared to validate laws based on moral choices as it had done in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) (which Lawrence overruled), state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity would not prove sustainable.
Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff sums up this point succinctly in talking about another issue that occurred last spring when Republican Reps. Keith King and Jim Welker started comparing homosexuality to increased crime rates and later bestiality. Said Romanoff: “We’re talking about the budget, and they’re talking about bestiality.”
The bestiality prohibition in Colorado was enacted two years later, but as a form of cruelty to animals rather than as a form of immorality law, a compromise reached to allow pro-gay rights legislators to avoid attacks claiming that they were pro-bestiality.
The motives of the proponents of the law sums up some of the motive of recent legislative action on the issue, which is that a focus on criminalizing bestiality flows, in part, from an effort to obtain legislative buy-in to an agenda that also includes opposition to gay rights.
Much of the conservative opposition to gay rights in turn derives from declining marriage rates and increasing divorce rates, especially for working class adults, which conservatives have framed as a decline in and threat to a societal commitment to "family values" such as marriage between one man and one woman, and sex as confined to marriage. (The actually cause has more to do with the stagnant or declining economic prospects of working class men relative to the rising economic prospects of working class women.)
Purportedly this traditional marriage concept has roots in the Bible, even though this ideal is does not have Biblical support and is instead a considerably later development (e.g. the Biblical Hebrews were polygamous). Bestiality laws, of course, do have a Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. Old Testament) precedent, e.g. in Exodus 22:19 which states:
Whoever lies with an animal shall surely be put to death.
There is a fair amount of legal or partially legal/political scholarship on the topic as well as the evolving behavioral science literature. Some of the most cited and notable include the following (in reverse chronological order, you will need to find your own links in some cases):
Jenkins notes that:
Although conservative groups are singled out due to their opposition based on moral grounds, opposition to bestiality is found across the political spectrum, including from such liberal groups as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States. Nevertheless, cases occasionally come into public view, such as an Eastbank, West Virginia case in which police allege that they caught a man in the act of raping a sheep at a live Nativity scene (PETA, 2003). According to Pet-Abuse.com (2003), there were nine such criminal cases in the United States during 2002 involving animals as small as a poodle to as large as a horse.
Hensley, Adams, and Zillman extend the theory that bestiality like other forms of animal cruelty is predictive of psychopathy and violence against humans.
Peter Singer is the most prominent advocate for only making it a crime when there is actual cruelty to the animal on a case by case basis, with criticism of him in papers commenting on his work. Critics on the animal cruelty front such as Beirne are largely arguing that animals can't meaningfully consent.
Rubin, Monter and Rydström indicate the linkage of LGBTQ issues to Bestiality, in general, in legal/political motive.
Several look at historical status like Murrin, Salisbury, Monter, Rydström and Liliequist are applicable to the reasons for older wave statutes, basically moral ones motivated by "disgust" and traditional morality.
Beetz is useful as a general source with many different opinions. I have not been able to locate full text access to Pierson, Habermas, Dekkers, Noske and Regan but they are referenced in other works and appear to be meaningful contributions to the academic discussion.