Zoosexuality at a Glance
“Some animals are beautiful to look at.” That seems like a fair enough sentence, right? I think most people could agree with that. Horses, for example, find their way into our classical statues and paintings not just because they used to be an everyday part of our lives, as beasts of burden, but also because they’re wonderful looking, with their dense sleek muscles and their big endearing eyes. Another sentence, “Some people share close bonds with animals,” is also probably pretty fair. I’m sure you’ve seen posts on social media, or maybe you’ve seen it yourself, where a human and an animal just seem to almost magically be speaking each other’s language, or melting into each other as they cuddle.
Zoosexuals are people who experience an attraction to animals that is sexual, or romantic, or both. You’ve probably read or seen enough stories about dogs–stuff like Old Yeller, Where The Red Fern Grows, Marley and Me, “That Episode” of Futurama, Bolt, and so on–that you can understand the basic idea of where someone might be coming from, when they say that their dog is their life partner, or when they say that they feel closer to horses than they do to humans.
“Some animals are beautiful to look at…”
“Some people share close bonds with animals…”
Those truisms, I believe, are pretty easy things to wrap your head around. And at the end of the day, what “zoosexuality” is doesn’t get away from those two points all that much.
But still, even if you do get the basic idea well enough, maybe there are still a few questions that you have too: maybe there are some elements of zoosexuality that you’re not quite sure of.
So, hi there! My name is Alissa, I’m a zoosexual who has gladly shared my bed and the best years of my life with a big slobbery affectionate mutt, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about who zoosexuals are, what we do, and how we get by living in the modern world right now.
Now, there’s something that I think we should begin with, and this may seem like a silly thing to have to clarify, but let me just point something out: If someone kisses a dog, they don’t suddenly sprout a tail, they don’t immediately start talking like Scooby Doo all the time, and they don’t get the word “ZOOSEXUAL” magically tattooed across their forehead. To put it another way: Zoosexuality isn’t something that you can see. Bestiality, which is the actual act of having sex with an animal, is something that you could see. But, outside of the bedroom, (or the stable, or the pasture,) zoosexual people can blend in pretty seamlessly with everyone else.
Because we tend to be pretty invisible, you might not guess just how thoroughly zoosexuals are integrated into society. But I promise you that we’re around. Maybe the last time someone rang up your groceries, that cashier gave their Golden Retriever a loving romantic kiss before heading out the door for work. Maybe the last time you went out to a restaurant, the waiter who brought your food out had a thing for horses growing up.
Zoosexuals make up about 7% of people, by the best scientific estimations we have so far. So think of it this way: that’s about the same odds as drawing a King out of a deck of cards. That’s pretty common for something that polite society doesn’t talk about very much! If you’ve played any game with a deck of cards, you’ve probably seen a King come into play. And if you’ve gone outside lately, you probably crossed paths with a zoosexual without knowing it. Maybe you’re friends with one, or there’s one in your family.
Zoosexuality comes in a lot of different varieties. For some people, they have a sexual attraction to animals but not much of a romantic one, whereas some other people are completely the other way around, and feel a strong romantic life bond with animals but don’t care as much for the sex. A lot of zoos feel both sexually and romantically attracted to animals.
Usually zoosexuals also have different thoughts depending on which species of animal we’re talking about. Dogs and horses are the most commonly talked about among zoosexuals as the animals we’re most likely to be attracted to and fall in love with, but other domesticated animals like donkeys, sheep, and cows are common as well.
Attraction towards male or female animals can also vary from species to species, for many of us. Some amount of bisexuality is pretty common, for example, “I like male humans but female horses,” or “I’m bi for dogs but only really interested in stallions, not mares.” Bisexuality isn’t the rule though, nor is interest in multiple species: some people are like “For me it’s male dogs or nothing,” or “Mares, thanks!”
There are a lot of animals, especially domesticated ones, that humans can “do the deed with” in the way you might imagine. With ponies for example, the genitals work in basically the same way human genitals do, and the size difference is within the bounds that it can work if everyone is playing safe. It’s worth noting, though, that not all interspecies couples “go all the way.” Some do! But other interspecies couples are happy to leave it at kissing and erotic licking, or maybe no erotic touching at all. It all depends on the interests of both the human and the animal.
There are also species that humans flat out can’t have sex with in that way, like domestic housecats. For those species, the romantic attraction may be every bit as strong as it could be with a dog, but any sexual attraction that might exist definitely can’t be consumated. To some extent there may still be other outlets, like intimate lovey nuzzling, but it’s likely largely going to be the case that this is romance-only, no sex attached. And I think that that’s every bit as sweet to hear about.
Frankly, if a human couple tells me that they’re together, I’m highly unlikely to start asking questions about what they do or don’t do in the bedroom. So when someone says their husband is their cat Mittens, I think that that sounds adorable and I wish them all the best happiness and fulfilment in that.
In the zoosexual community, we very adamantly teach that whether an animal “should” be compatible with you or not, if they’re telling you no, that means no.
There aren’t really any health risks that zoosexuality and zoosexuality alone has to face. Any diseases that a human might get from having sex with an animal, they could just as easily be exposed to by handling that animal’s food bowl. For a hygenic animal like a well-taken-care-of dog, the risk of a human and a dog sharing any diseases at all in their lifetimes is very minimal.
It’s important to know that zoosexuality, like homosexuality or heterosexuality, isn’t automatically “bad,” and it’s also not automatically “good.” We have countless examples of straight men being creepy and objectifying towards women, even some horrific examples of serial killers who take that creepiness and objectification to the extreme. But, there are also plenty of men who are as respectful as they can be to the women in their life, and the last thing they would want or allow would be to see harm come to any females around them. Unfortunately, this same spread of outlooks can be seen in zoosexuality too. People who are cruel towards animals in a sexual way are called zoosadists, and even though they are shunned from zoosexual communities, they are usually the first people you hear about when someone wants to paint all of zoosexuality in an unfavorable light.
But, let me tell you about myself. I love going on hikes, and I love it if a dog is willing to come with me, because I can watch them run around wagging and sniffing, doing their little investigations via smell, and seeing them happy makes me happy. I’ve given one pretty lucky dog a handjob hundreds of times, maybe a thousand, and I’m a pretty big fan of the way a dog’s equipment feels, and how pleased they get at the opportunity to use it with me and relieve their urges, stimulate their junk, have sex. I am a killer ally to have in pub trivia, I like to read Fantasy books, and my preferred programming language is Ruby but I’m more than happy to use other languages when a project calls for it. Some of my friends are also zoosexuals, some of them aren’t. Most of my zoosexual friends live pretty normal lives: they have jobs, they have hobbies, a lot of them even have a human partner in addition to an animal partner. I really do think that if you had zoo radar and could see who around you was letting their dog get some, you’d be surprised.
The act of bestiality is currently illegal in the United States and many other countries, which is why most zoosexuals like to be hush-hush about our orientation, even when all we’re doing stems from love. You could compare it directly to a time when homosexual sodomy was illegal in the US.
In general, I think it would be fair to say that zoosexuality is seeing a trend towards greater acceptance. Most people “in real life” don’t care one way or the other, in my experiences of coming out and having these conversations. The vast majority of the hate you’ll ever see about zoosexuality is really from people online. But to counterbalance that random hate, we’re currently seeing a lot of zoosexual community pride projects coming to bloom. This website would be one big example, with two new articles on the topic of zoosexuality coming out every week. There are also podcasts like Zooier Than Thou, and forums like Zoo Community. We have music, writing, stickers, a pretty awesome flag, really almost anything you would want out of a blossoming queer pride movement.
But, basically all I want to say is that if you know someone, and then you learn that they make out with their dog a bit, you haven’t learned a ton more about them than you already knew. It might explain why they tend to be secretive, or shy away from questions as to whether they’re dating anyone. But really, you’ve pretty much only learned that they have some fun now and then with a trusted partner who likes them–I wouldn’t want to get that personal with those kind of teeth on someone who didn’t like me, anyways.
Thank you, for taking the time to learn more about us. I hope that if you know any zoosexuals, and they’re being nice to their animals, that you don’t give them a hard time over any of it. Love is love, even if for some of us it’s a little more slobbery.
Article written by Alissa Dogchurch (October 2023)
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