There is a Greek vase from 520 BC showing a male figure having sex with a stag a seventeenth-century Indian miniature of a deer mounting a woman an eighteenth-century European engraving of an ecstatic nun coupling with a donkey, while other nuns look on, smiling a nineteenth-century Persian painting of a soldier, also with a donkey and, from the same period, a Japanese drawing of a woman enveloped by a giant octopus who appears to be. His book has a wide range of illustrations, going back to a Swedish rock drawing from the Bronze Age of a man a large quadruped of indeterminate species. Dekkers, a Dutch biologist and popular naturalist, has assembled a substantial body of evidence to show that humans have often thought of “love for animals” in ways that go beyond a pat and a hug, or a proper concern for the welfare of members of other species. Though, as Chatterbox has written before, Gore toward the end of the campaign attempted a bold raid on the Platonist camp.)

Had Singer’s Nerve essay surfaced before the November election, Gore’s Aristotelianism might have tempted the Journal’s high-spirited partisans to declare Gore the animal fanciers’ fellow traveler. (A chunk of Al Gore’s sophomoric eco-tome, Earth in the Balance, is dedicated to criticizing the Platonic worldview and embracing the Aristotelian one, a stance that Lynne Cheney attacked rather unfairly in her plodding anti-political-correctness jeremiad, Telling the Truth. The foundation for Singer’s argument is the Aristotelian view that man is part of nature, as opposed to the Platonic view that man exists apart from nature. (It was Singer who coined the term “speciesist.”) In the Nerve essay, which is actually a review of a new book about bestiality called Dearest Pet, Singer argues that the taboo against bestiality should be dispensed with. Singer is, of course, the notorious bioethicist whose Princeton appointment three years ago caused a mild ruckus because of his hard-line views about animal rights. The Journal’s ire was directed at an essay titled “Heavy Petting” by Peter Singer on the highbrow porn Webzine Nerve.

Bestiality taboo