To Change Ones Mind: A Short Memoir
1. How I learned of zoophiles
Ever since I was a child, I've seen myself as a non-human animal. I'm not sure how or why that is the case, but it's been an essential truth about me for as long as I can remember. This affected me greatly when I entered my teenage years, a time that coincided with the dawn of fairly accessible internet media. As any teenager with access to an internet connection does, I used it to explore my sexuality, something which would come to shape the way I view the world in a very destructive way.
Since I saw myself as a non-human, I quickly found that I did not share the attractions of my peers. I had no intimate interest in either guys girls at school, and whenever some rebel had snuck in a pornographic magazine to the school yard, I never understood why people found it so appealing to look at. The closest thing to attraction I had felt was when watching Animal Planet, and seeing some much more relatable, four-legged animal doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel. Finally feeling that kind of attraction was a thrill. It was strange because I definitely wasn't much like the animals on TV, but the feelings led me on a quest to learn more online.
I didn't know what I was looking for, and in the early multimedia age, I found awful things. For every piece of media that appealed to me, I found dozens which were clearly depicting animal abuse of varying severity. What's worse is that I found this disgusting media to receive praise for pages and pages in the forums it was posted. Content was not well sorted, and thumbnails or previews were rare, so I had to painstakingly download each random piece of media to know what it was. For years, I dredged the internet for anything that I could relate to as a non-human animal.
Eight out of ten pieces of media depicted abuse, and over the course of these years I grew to despise the zoophiles who created it. These people, these abusers, these monsters caused me to feel immense shame over what I was. I might have even hated them, because they caused me to hate myself. I wanted nothing to do with them at all, I was not like them, I was not an animal abuser. I was an animal stuck in a human world, and somehow these horrible people were the closest thing to myself that I could find.
2. Privilege
As a well-behaved young man living in a quite free country, it took me a long time to ever have to face pressure from any authority. I respected the law because the laws I saw made sense. This would all change when I suddenly found myself on the wrong side of a law which I didn't agree with. I had gotten caught committing a minor offence which would have had no effect on anyone but me, but was none the less illegal. The full brunt of the legal system bore down on me, and after a few tense weeks I was served with a small slap of the wrist for attempting to try some drugs in the wrong company.
This was a major turning point for my world view. It made no sense to me that I should be punished for something like that. I wasn't hurting anyone, I wasn't even affecting anyone in any way, positive or negative. The effort expended to punish me seemed ridiculous - tens of pages of paperwork, many man-hours by police and lawyers, all to punish me for trying to eat something. It just made no sense to me, and I was forced to reevaluate my faith in the infallibility of law. This experience made me think a lot about liberty, and it taught me to question the world in a new way: My old self would have viewed me at fault for breaking the law, but the person that stepped out on the other side of the experience considered the law at fault for treating a very timid and harmless person like a hardened criminal.
3. Embracing fallibility
Years passed, life moved on, and in time I found myself a professional in a field that is very unforgiving when it comes to making mistakes of judgement. I had to learn to question myself, admit and overcome biases, and to forego pride for humility if I was to succeed. These practices carried over to other parts of life, and I began to see it as an exciting challenge to question the things I took for granted. I would try to identify biases in my own thinking, and would then try to pick them apart and challenge them. I'd try to find my prejudices, and then expose myself to the targets of those prejudices to see if they held true. To learn that I was wrong about something became a thrill, and like any thrill seeker w be climbing to the next highest cliff, every topic I tackled had to cut deeper into myself than the last.
I never stopped looking at non-human media that I found attractive, and while the technical advances of the internet made it easier to filter out the bad stuff over time, I still wanted nothing to do with zoophiles. I knew that the abusive content was still being made and that zoophiles were still applauding it in their forum threads, it had simply become easier for me to look away.
Was that really the case, though?
It was only a matter of time before I had to question my disdain for zoophiles. I had to face the fact that my judgement of them had been made during a very sensitive part of my life. I had never reevaluated that judgement through the new lenses available to me. There were obviously zoos out there who weren't monsters - I had been scrubbing the internet in search of their media for years at this point. Yet my internal view of zoophiles was still a monolith where I despised them as much as the abusers. Much like how the legal system had punished me as if I was a hardened criminal, all those years prior. This prejudice had to be challenged, no matter how painful or off-putting it might be for me to do so.
4. Considering liberty
Following my run-in with the law, I developed a world view that was strongly based on personal liberty. I had come to feel that people should be free to do as they please to the broadest possible extent, as long as they don't inflict suffering unto other living beings. While society at large requires much more consideration than that, this is the core tenet that's shaped my current view of zoos. In a society where liberty is valued, each individual action by each individual person has to be considered, and it's impossible to justify prejudice against any broad and varied group of people.
In this light, it becomes impossible to condemn all zoos, because if even a single one of them is not harmful (and it takes very little effort by an internet-savvy person to learn that plenty of them are not), then they can't be judged as one single group. It was very difficult for me to accept this, but I ultimately had to admit that feeling disdain for all zoophiles was incompatible with my liberty-oriented world view. I had witnessed many situations where zoos and animals engaged in acts where both parties partook with excitement, and no harm was done to any being involved. From a position based on liberty, it's not possible to make a good-faith argument to condemn a situation like that.
5. Meeting zoos
As this new understanding set in, I found myself becoming curious about zoos. It's a strange feeling to realize that a group of people you've seen only as a scary, dark shadow waiting to envelop you, is actually made up of individuals who all have unique stories to tell. Once I was able to see this with my newfound clarity, it became very evident how nonsensical the hatred I had felt all my life was. There was no evil cabal of animal abusers who were behind all the bad content I had seen, that entire idea was something I had fabricated in my teenage mind and never questioned.
I ventured online to seek out zoos in order to test this new perspective. I knew where to find them, so I simply began to message people and ask questions. I'd ask them about everything I didn't know, about what kinds of people they were, what their beliefs were, how they looked at animals, and so on and so forth. At first it was only a few, but my curiosity only grew with each person I met, and as I'm writing this I've spoken to well over a hundred different zoos.
I've yet to meet one of the monsters I feared as a teen. They're certainly out there, but by simply not going out of my way to find them, I've only found a bunch of pretty normal people who just seem to love and care about animals a lot more than most. This was not what I expected to find, and it was extremely humbling to be forced to admit that I was wrong about such a core tenant of my beliefs.
I was prejudiced, and I was wrong about zoos.
6. To face a monster
I have existed adjacent to zoos for my whole life, but it's only recently that I've dared take a critical look at how I view them. My affliction of seeing myself as a non-human animal, and the trauma of seeing awful things online at a vulnerable age led me to fear zoos, and to hate them. I feel that I am an animal, and I had seen zoophiles mistreat animals, so I saw them as people who would mistreat me. In recent years, following my critical examination of my own prejudices, I've made efforts to reach out to zoos, to talk to them and to get to know them as people. I've yet to meet a single zoo who felt like the threat I pictured them to be as a young man, and I have talked to a lot of zoos by now.
I can't condemn zoos with a broad brush any more. It's not a defensible position for someone who values liberty as much as I do, and I am glad to have come to understand this. It has not been easy to arrive at this position, but I find that my life contains less pointless fear and hate (for others and for myself) since embarking upon this journey. By taking the difficult steps to question myself, there now lives one less monster in my world, and like the monsters under our beds, it only took one brave look into the unknown to learn that there was no monster at all.
Thank you for reading this mini-memoir. I hope my perspective has been of some value to you.
Frank (August 2024)
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