One way of looking at Peter Berkowitz versus Peter Singer on the subject of bestiality is to see two metaphysical elitists battling it out (Peter Berkowitz, "Puppy Love," TNR Online, March 8, 2001). Singer's antispeciesist philosophy ranks human and nonhuman animals according to a hierarchy of cognitive entitlement to "personhood" similar to the old-fashioned view of the world as a Great Chain of Being with human beings on top and everyone else way down below, as when Singer ranks our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates, with "intellectually disabled human beings" (Rethinking Life and Death, 183). His is an All Animals are Equal, But Some Animals are More Equal Than Others philosophy, even as it calls for "an impartial concern for . . . all sentient beings" (A Darwinian Left, 63).

In attacking Peter Singer's equivocal treatment of bestiality, Peter Berkowitz slightingly concedes that "nonhuman animals have their needs too," but he couples this patronizing concession with a damaging image of nonhuman animals as "vicious predators" and inferiors, to have sex with whom offends "our status and dignity as human beings."

I look forward to seeing what Midas Dekkers' book, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, has to say about sexual relations between human and nonhuman animals; however, it seems most likely that the majority of instances if not all of them do not reflect the desire of other species to fornicate with humans, but rather what Singer refers to in his review of Dekkers as the "inexhaustible variety of human sexual desire," coupled with the self-regarding disrespect for the rest of life that diminishes our dignity as human beings. Berkowitz's invocation of human "longings of the soul" where sex is concerned has to contend with much contrary evidence. The teenager who in William Bradford's book, Plymouth Plantation (Ch. 32), confessed to having sex with mares, goats, sheep, calves and turkeys according to a custom "long used in old England" and men who through history have "taken" their wives, servants, slaves, girl friends and others, when and how they saw fit, show another side of the story. But we need not look to the past.

Berkowitz says that for Peter Singer, "the only consideration we need bear in mind in using animals to satisfy our sexual desire is whether we are causing cruelty." He says this as if to say that cruelty (or at least cruelty to animals, like animals themselves in his view) amounts to little more than a pesky footnote in the ethical account of humanity. He seems far more aggrieved by the idea that other creatures have a dignity that links us to them than by the cruelty we impose on them without a shred of compassion or restraint, which is exactly how hens are treated by the egg industry in the case that Singer cites to show how deeply woven into the fabric of human life human obscenity really is. In making his case, Berkowitz says Singer "informs us, sex with hens, though pleasurable, is to be avoided because it often proves fatal to the bird. But aren't there other issues involved?" There are, Mr. Berkowitz, but first, let us contemplate this particular issue, before moving on.

Rather than breeze by the concrete situation that Singer offers for illustration, let us imagine how a hen feels having a man's penis pushing inside her, and what it must be like for her to be grabbed by a hand that is nearly as big as her entire body is, having her head cut off by that hand, and then, as she is dying this horrible death, having her killer rape her. When we expand our vision beyond this bizarre horror to include details of the Big Picture at the institutionalized level of our treatment of nonhuman animals, the core of which is our invasion of their sexual privacy and manipulation of their sex and reproductive lives, we begin to see bestiality more clearly.

Peter Singer's essay is disturbing. As disturbing as anything are his insistence that nonhuman animals have sought to have sexual encounters with humans and the glee that seems to accompany this information. The examples he gives, of domestic dogs rubbing their genitals against the legs of humans and a male orangutan seizing a female researcher, presumably for sex (he let her go), come from situations in which the animals in question are in a form of human imposed captivity. What, we ask, is a sexually mature male dog deprived of a normal sex life with a member of his own species supposed to do with his sex drive? (This is not a plea for dogs' unprotected sexual freedom, given the predicament of "pet overpopulation" we've created for them.)

The idea that nonhuman animals have a generic penchant for sex with humans creates yet another opportunity for us to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our mistreatment of animals and to blame them for their predicament with us. The idea is also supremely egotistical. What examples are there of animals in nature choosing to have sex with members of other species? Is it not interesting how we impute "choice" to nonhuman animals when we want to justify our abuse and denigration of them while normally denying them a capacity for autonomy otherwise? The rhetoric of exploitation is always the same. Rapists from animal agriculture to the circus declare in a jargon especially developed for the purpose, These Animals Want To Be Treated This Way. What will it take to make us utterly ashamed of such lies and the behavior they perpetuate?

United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
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(UPC Letter to The New Republic re: Bestiality/Peter Singer )