Me? I always had an extraordinary connection to animals around me. A child of four or five isn't really sexualized yet. But they have a healthy curiosity. They want to see and explore and compare. I did. So, for me, it was a naturally progressing relationship with them. Cows, I thought had the most beautiful faces of any animals. Big eyes and lashes. Walking through the stalls at the county fair, all of them spiffed up and pretty waiting to be judged. They're just beautiful.
Horses not fair behind. Majestic, handsome creatures, sleek, shining coats and gorgeous manes and tails. And those magical cocks that came from almost nowhere, growing, growing, handing down -- trophies of the phallic realm, worthy of sculpture.
Male dogs and their seemingly ever-ready sexuality. Doesn't take much to see an intact dog respond.
And then me, and my comparatively simple, tiny thing. I knew the feelings mine gave me. Did theirs give them the same?
Growing up, I pretty much gauged what was healthy, sexually, by what seemed to come natural to them. Innocents of nature, instinctively following their sexual "program," if animals did this or that, it bore Mother Nature's stamp of approval. We literally said that, my siblings and the neighbor kid. Look, the dog isn't not ashamed of its anatomy and what it does. Then we can't be of ours.
But then you gradually adopt the mores of the adult world, which shames and condemns. Hid my zoophilia away -- or tried to -- for what seems decades. It only raised its head once in a while, with someone mentioning it: the "donkey show" that had been held in the ravine by the river one night. A college friend who mentioned his bestial exploits with his dog. Other than that, kept it under wraps.
It was in my 20s that it came fully to the forefront. Although "Lady," a spayed Chesapeake Retriever, had rejected my curiosity, a yellow Labrador was completely receptive and encouraging. That was my first truly mature "zoo" relationship. I'll never meet her kind again. Then a gentlemanly male yellow lab initiated a sexual relationship with me. And so on, and so forth. He was the first male dog ever to mount my wife. We loved him so much. And he was so much more than a sexual partner.
But that brings us to where we are today. We never expect to sexualize our relationships with our animals. We're more "open to it." If it happens it happens, but it's not required. It's a possibility we embrace but not something we acquire an animal for nor train it to do. It must come naturally or not at all.
How 'bout you? Where are you, where have you been? What has your journey been like?
