Prehistoric depictions of bestiality have been found in Siberia, Italy, France, Fezzan and Sweden. Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun about bestiality as a behavior. Is it really possible for an otherwise normal, healthy person to develop a genuine sexual preference for a nonhuman species? But Gulliver’s tongue, combined with my sympathy for human underdogs, inspired me to go back and reread it, and I saw a rather intriguing scientific question lurking there. I have my own viscerally based, unreasoned biases and-I confess-on first reading this email I promptly mentally filed it away in the untouchable “ Eww…” category. “The politics of acknowledging zoophilia as a ‘legitimate’ sexual orientation,” wrote this reader, “often mean that zoophiles are either ignored as a class or subject to what can only be described as the most vicious, sustained, and hateful attacks by mainstream society.”
This individual, who shall go unnamed unless he wishes to identify himself in the comments section, was a self-professed “zoophile” (Greek for “animal lover”) with a particular romantic affinity for horses, and he was hoping that I might devote one of my column pieces to this neglected, much-maligned topic of forbidden interspecies love. These sarcastic remarks from my confidants reminded me of a rather peculiar email that I had received months earlier, written by an unusually erudite reader of Bering in Mind. And that, ladies and gentleman, is where the real story begins. The story was strange enough for me to share with friends, and this particular tale of man-bites-dog unleashed the predictable onslaught of humorous bestiality innuendos. This gave my partner, Juan, and me at least a temporary reprieve from Gulliver’s normally overindulgent use of that particular organ on our faces. Fortunately, Gulliver showed no signs of lasting trauma and I was saved from having to explain to the vet how it came to be that I bit off my dog’s tongue but for days after the “incident” Gulliver kept his prized possession sealed behind the vault of his own clamped jaw. Shocked by the feel of human teeth chomping down on his tongue, he yelped-then scampered off. But I would submit that that is perhaps a better question for Gulliver, since he’s the one that violated my busily masticating maw by inserting that long, thin, delicatessen-slice muscle of his while I was simply enjoying a bite of a very banal bagel. Now you may be asking yourself what I was doing with his tongue in my mouth to begin with. Here’s a perfect example: I accidentally bit my dog Gulliver’s tongue recently.
The most innocent of things can sound tawdry and bizarre when certain facts and details are omitted. Out of context, many of our behaviors-if limited to the mere veneer of plain description-would raise many an eyebrow.
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