A list of common objections to zoophilia and zoos being tolerated
- Zoophilia is immoral
- Zoophilia is unnatural
- Zoophilia is a mental illness
- Humans and animals are two different things
- Animals cannot consent
- Animals cannot enjoy sex
- Animals only have sex to reproduce
- Animals are like children and don't know any better
- Animals are unable to defend themselves
- Animals only tolerate sex with a human because the human is seen as a dominant/threatening figure
- Sexual acts involving animals is always harmful to the animal, mentally and/or physically
- Sexual acts involving animals carry health risks for both parties
- All zoophiles want to have sex with animals
- All zoophiles are mentally handicapped
- All zoophiles come from country areas
- Condoning zoophilia would encourage more people to become zoophiles
Feel happy to provide extra objections and they will be included on the list as soon as possible.
How this works
Select one point and refute it.
The next commenter expands on that point or provides a counter-argument.
The next commenter, be he (or she) the original commenter or a new person, expands on or provides a counter-argument to the reply.
This continues until there is nothing left to say or one side concedes (or refuses to concede on moral grounds).
Even if a point has already been answered, refute it - it's best to hear an argument in every possible way it can be said.
Rules
Don't resort to name-calling. This is supposed to be an intelligent discussion.
Don't resort to name-calling. This is supposed to be an intelligent discussion.
Try to back up what you say with facts sourced from legitimate sources, be they books, speeches or other websites. If they are the latter, provide a link if possible.
[deleted]
May I ask what the purpose of the questionnaire might be before contributing?
I shouldn't have taken down the previous thread about this, that explained everything.
This is my attempt to contribute something to this subreddit. I thought it would be beneficial that a sticky thread be made that is essentially an FAQ: anyone new to this sub can be directed to this page. A new person arrives that has a gripe with zoos, this is at the top of the feed. This is in response to a particularly hostile user's comments here.
Still, maybe it's a bit much to ask of the moderators.
Regardless, you do not have to post anything personally identifying, so don't worry.
This would be better as a wiki page. But it's disabled for this subreddit...
I have a top-0.1% IQ, a good degree, a published scientific paper, and am currently learning a foreign language for fun. Look at my writing, I can form coherent sentences with correct spelling! This already puts me ahead of most of the comments sections of the internet. ;)
I grew up in a long, thin, suburban conurbation. (Obviously can't prove this one without IDing myself…)
More or less. :)
I discovered the meaning of the word 'wether' while wondering whether 'whether' was 'weather' or 'whether'. While 'whether' was the w(he|ea)ther I wanted, 'wether' was forever with me whenever I wanted an anecdote about words and spelling.
Sheep!
OK, maybe not all zoophiles are mentally handicapped, but how can I tell if you are just a rare exception to that general rule? Besides, I don't have to say that zoophiles are retarded in general, as I know Mr. Hands was an engineer. But it takes a special kind of social retardation to get fucked so hard that you bleed to death and say nothing. Same goes for his "buddies", who dumped him at the hospital and ran off to suck more horse dick or whatever.
My point is, zoophiles don't have to be shoes on head retarded to be handicapped. Just autistic as fuck, which they clearly are if they'd rather fuck goats than people.
Not sure how to respond to a general, non-specific like "a special kind of social retardation", but I can respond to
Firstly, I'm fairly normal on the autism spectrum, for a man.
Second, fantasising about having sex with an animal is 36% more common in women than men, yet women are less likely to be autistic than men.
And how many actually do it? It's mostly men, even according to your own stats. That showed up in Kinsey, Miletski, and a bunch of other surveys. Regardless, though, there are autistic women out there, and they have the same reasons as autistic men to want to fuck animals: because they can't talk to people, or at least they suck at it.
One of the most famous autistic women in the world is Temple Grandin, and her whole career is based on staring at cow's asses and literally inventing the fucking hugbox. Why? Because "the part of other people that has emotional relationships is not part of [her]." She's a fucking sociopath, and her whole life has been spent trying to make animals feel better, even as they're slaughtered. Sounds like a zoophile to me.
Men report a higher number of sexual partners in general than women, not just with regard to animals.
But the point remains, a group with reduced frequency of autism has a greater frequency of zoophilia. If autism implied zoophilia, the opposite should be seen.
I've never figured out how to successfully counter people who both criticise anecdotes when used against them, and yet also use anecdotal evidence in their own arguments.
(I've never heard of Temple Grandin before).
This is the part where we need more studies really. At the moment all we can say for sure is "I'm not autistic". I'm guessing the majority of us here have never showed enough autistic traits to actually get tested for autism in the first place.
It's not really our responsibility to prove anything to be false untill they can prove it to be true. An appropriate response should be, is there any studies that you can provide that has been peer reviewed that would support that claim? What evidence do you have to support your claim? Next you have to ask yourself is this person really worth debating with? They are throwing out insults which may mean they don't care about the truth. They may just be emotionally responding to the situation.others are social justice warriors who wont fact check the quotes,links ,or sources of information. The common link between the two is they have defined animals as impossible to have sex with. Its not that animals can't but society has defined them as unable to do so.first they are too dumb to know what sex is,thin they turned into children,now its instinct and they only want baby's. This is going on for longer thin I wanted so I will end here.
This is my first question to myself, and the answer is 99% of the time a no. I dont have enough knowledge to make killer arguments, and even if I did I feel they are wasted on the majority of people who lash out at us.
I guess I'm a bit selfish but I think life's too short to waste time on negative people. If they dont get it then thats fine by me, they will never affect my life anyway.
There are two reasons to argue:
u/Kynophile is being deliberately contrarian to help us hone our arguments. It does us no good to put the onus on our enemies to demonstrate we are what they already believe us to be, because we are trying to convince them they are wrong about what they believe. And because they are convinced of their own rhetoric, they don't think they have to demonstrate anything.
I've been representing the other side in this thread because I'm a skeptic in general, and I think that understanding the arguments against our position will only do us good. It will either compel me to find reasons those arguments don't work, or if they really are that strong, will help me change my mind to a better supported position.
As for the burden of proof, it depends on the claim. Yes, each of the bulleted points here is a claim that would require evidence in a logical debate. The fact is, however, that many of these claims are widely believed by those who disagree with us, and if we want to convince them or people on the fence that we are correct, it does us no good to sulkily demand evidence and end the conversation there.
Also, there are positive claims we would like to make that require evidence. An example might be, "Happy interspecies couples exist," to counter the idea that we're in denial about the damage we're doing. An absolute claim like, "The animals you fuck are always worse off for it," is generally best refuted by a counterexample as a proof of concept.
As for debates being pointless, I agree if the goal is to convince someone to see your perspective and they simply refuse to do so for emotional reasons. But if a debate can be done publicly (difficult for us in person, obviously, but still), it may help to convince third parties of your position. Better still, if a debate is recorded and placed online, in a forum or on YouTube for example, it can be used to showcase both sides of the argument to a larger argument, or perhaps to refine your own in response.
\*wags\*
scratches behind ears
Oh really now?
Spelled correctly, just used the wrong word. Seriously though, making a mistake while saying such things is guaranteed :)
(Still embarrassing, though)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
Two of them? Well, yes that's fair. :)
Just so you guys are aware, I've decided to play devil's advocate here and argue against every refutation, in the hopes of strengthening them where possible. I'm going to be writing in a more offensive, "trolling" style as well, because that tone is often used against us even in respected sources (news media, academic papers, etc.)
I mean almost nothing I'm going to say in this thread, and if you feel offended or insulted, be aware that that may part of an opponent's goal: to upset you enough that you say something stupid or insult them right back, then use whatever you just did as ammo in a later discussion. Or just to piss you off because they think it's funny.
"All zoophiles come from country areas". Not true for me as I grew up in a city.
Again, why should I give a shit about you? After all, Kinsey found that people who fuck animals are way more likely to be hillbillies. On Table 124 of his Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, there's a table with all the cowfuckers in it. And in every category there, farm folk are at least twice as likely to fuck a donkey as city people, and in some cases way more likely.
My favorite piece there is that if you went to college, but grew up on a farm, it's 15 times more likely that you fucked a kid as a kid than if you grew up in a city. Of course, if you're fucking your sisters and moms too, I guess a goat would look good to you, wouldn't it, inbred hunks of shit.
I think you're having a bit too much fun :P
Hehe, I am. It's over the top.
I've jacked off to images of goats!
Here's another one you would enjoy then. goatse.cx. Enjoy, you perverted sad fucks.
That sir is not a goat.
My eyes...they burn!
I also grew up in the city.
Morality is relative. Everything I've seen called a "moral absolute" has a counter-example of a culture doing that thing. There is only social and anti-social.
What I want to do is precisely that which is natural for me. If a dog wants to mount me, that is what is natural for him.
That said, why do people use "unnatural" to imply "bad", when they're on the internet, communicating further than nature would allow using a box of unnatural plastic, synthetic glass, and processed metals? Natural-unnatural is a different axis to good-bad.
Just because people disagree about morals doesn't mean they're relative. Here are a couple examples from Piers Beirne, one of the more respected animal rights voices that has spoken out against your filthy fucking habits.
Do you not have rights? In that case, can I have your address? I would like to introduce a certain crowbar to the back of your skull. That's not wrong as far as you're concerned, so i'm free to do it, right?
There are many theories of "human rights" (which I assume are the basis of the "rights theory" quoted, but I didn't find that phrase on the page linked and "human rights" is the closest match Google gave me.)
These rights exist only in so far as state powers enforce them, not as universal realities. They are not universal, they are mere laws. States can, and quite often do, have one group massacre another, metaphorically (and sometimes literally) inserting a crowbar inside skulls. (Wikipedia lists 20 genocides between 1951 and 2000.)
(You completely ignored that I wrote "There is only social and anti-social.", which I thought covered all this already. Guess that wasn't clear.)
Indeed, if you believe as I do that animals are in any sense persons ("in any sense" because I want this to be interpreted in the most inclusive way possible, yet I have seen the word "person" does not come close to meaning the same thing to everyone: sentience, sapience, self-awareness, intelligence, take your pick), then the fact that animals are slaughtered at all is proof of the absence of universal rights.
My moral code not being the same as somebody else's moral code does not mean there is no moral code, it means that moral codes are not universal. As a different example: I like Mexican food and dislike Ethiopian food, therefore taste in food is personal rather than universal. But one cannot go from saying "taste in food is not universal" to saying "so I guess you must like eating poo because taste doesn't exist!"
(I think we should add a bullet point to cover your second quote.)
Suggest the common objection list includes "Animals only tolerate it because they are used to being bossed around by humans".
It's up, not that this thread will become relevant again. Sigh.
Thanks :)
I think it will. It's hard to focus on everything at once, but it's good to have a record of where we're at. u/Kynophile has helped, it would have been much easier to dismiss the same comments made by someone outside the community.