More On Sex With Animals

And why it's like eating meat

I can sense there’s a collective intake of breath anytime anyone—especially me—begins an article with a title like “More On Sex With Animals.”

I’ve previously written about the striking similarity between bestiality and the wrongness of eating meat. My view is, of course, that they’re both seriously wrong, but they are wrong in similar ways, such that there’s no good argument for why one of them is wrong but the other is not. But recently, I realized they were even more parallel than I’d thought before; they are almost morally identical:

1. When asked to justify the wrongness of bestiality, people’s first thought is almost always “animals can’t consent,” sometimes followed by “you sick fuck.” But if animals can’t consent to sex, it seems they also can’t consent to being tortured and killed in a factory farm, or just being killed elsewhere. We generally think that babies, for example, can’t consent to sex, but we don’t think it’s okay to kill babies for pleasure.

2. Sometimes when justifying the wrongness of bestiality, people will say it’s wrong because it harms animals. But so does killing and eating them.

3. Here’s a plausible argument: if it’s wrong to non-consensually have sex with some being, it’s also wrong to kill it. That seems true! Killing some being harms it more than having sex with it non-consensually, generally, so if the first is wrong so is the second. But that implies a parity between bestiality and eating meat—if bestiality is wrong, so is eating meat. There might be weird exceptions to this rule, but it seems like a generally decent heuristic.

4. People often justify eating meat by saying it tastes good. This is the only justification, given that there’s solid evidence that abstaining from meat is good for health. But that’s also the justification for bestiality—for those who enjoy it, it feels good!

5. One common argument people make for eating meat is the logic of the larder. They point out that animals wouldn’t exist if we didn’t eat them. But we can construct a similar logic of the larder for bestiality. Suppose you bring an animal into existence just to have sex with it. Well, it wouldn’t otherwise exist. Or suppose that there’s a dog who would have been killed unless you adopted it—and you adopt it just to have sex with it. That seems relevantly analogous to the logic of the larder case.

6. When people are asked to justify the wrongness of eating meat but the rightness of bestiality, they’ll often say that bestiality is wrong because of what it does to us. But this isn’t plausible—if there was evidence that watching boxing made a person as morally vicious as bestiality, bestiality would still be obviously worse.

7. People often say that it’s okay to eat meat because it’s natural. But this isn’t a relevant difference. If it was natural for us to have sex with dogs for fun, it would still be immoral.

8. In the case of both meat eating and bestiality, our initial intuitions seem best explained by some type of natural law theory. We think that it’s wrong to perform bestial acts because they are in some way a perversion of nature—but that doesn’t apply to eating meat. But in both cases, our real intuitions end up being incompatible with the simple natural law account. Most people intuitively think that it’s wrong to harm animals even if it doesn’t make you a worse person.

9. Both bestiality and meat-eating cause people’s brains to short-circuit. When people talk about why bestiality is wrong, they often make desperate rationalizations. Likewise when people defend eating meat. Thus, these are perhaps the two issues where people reason most poorly.

10. People often say bestiality is wrong because it spreads disease. Now, this is obviously not all of why bestiality is wrong—if a person had sex with a dog while being in a full hazmat suit, such that no disease was spread, that would still be wrong, obviously. But ironically, meat also spreads disease at alarming rates! It’s not at all obvious that eating meat spreads less disease than bestiality.

11. People often say that meat-eating is fine because it’s for convenience and health, while bestiality is for pleasure. Now, the claim that meat-eating is good for health is, of course, false. But we can construct relevant analogies. Imagine that ingesting dog semen was very healthy and that having sex with your dog would make it more likely to go on walks quickly in the future, and thus would be very convenient. It would still obviously be wrong.

12. People say that the pleasure gleaned from bestiality is vicious—it’s not good for the person who experiences it. But why isn’t the pleasure from eating meat not vicious? Generally, if you kill someone and eat them, the associated pleasure is vicious. If you do a horribly wrong act and get pleasure from it, that associated pleasure is thought to be vicious.

I can’t actually come up with a remotely plausible account of why bestiality is wrong that doesn’t also imply that eating meat is wrong. Lots of people have tried, but all of their accounts have obvious counterexamples. For example, Stephen Wigmore wrote a very indignant and self-righteous screed that was, unfortunately, relatively light on arguments. The closest he came to an argument was the following:

Having sex with an animal is more immoral than killing and eating it. Sex intrinsically reflects our personality, our existence and dignity as moral persons, and our ethical regard and perception of ourself and others. It is intimate. This is recognised, in different ways, in our ethics around casual sex as well as life-long marriage; it’s why sexual assault is a different crime to assault, it’s why there are situations in law that allow a person to be killed but never to be raped.

So the distinction is that sex reflects our dignity. He doesn’t explain why this is true, but let’s say that it is. It seems the basic argument here is that sex is a more deep and significant act than just eating something. But suppose it wasn’t. Suppose a person had a lot of one-night stands with animals whose names he later forgot, such that it wasn’t at all meaningful. The rapper Lil’Pump once declared “I fuck a bitch, I forgot her name (Brr, yuh).” But suppose that by bitch here, he meant female dog. In this case, despite it having no lasting significance, it would still be wrong.

It’s true that having sex with animals is different from eating them. But it’s not at all clear that there’s a morally relevant difference. It’s not clear why the fact that some act is intimate and reflects our personality has anything to do with whether it’s morally okay. We think rape is wrong—but not as wrong as murder or torture. The reason for that is that murder and torture harm people more—it has nothing to do with the intimacy of the act. But killing an animal is more wrong than having sex with it.

And while Wigmore is right that we never allow the justice system to rape someone, while we do allow it to kill someone, we also never allow people to be eaten after they’re killed, nor to endure the kinds of cruel conditions that are rampant in the U.S. meat industry.