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 _ her _, as well as caressing her body with its many limbs.
How much of this is fantasy, the King Kong-ish archetypes of an earlier age? In the 1940s, Kinsey asked twenty thousand Americans about their sexual behavior, and found that 8 percent of males and 3.5 percent of females stated that they had, at some time, had a sexual encounter with an animal. Among men living in rural areas, the figure shot up to 50 percent. Dekkers suggests that for young male farm hands, animals provided an outlet for sexual desires that could not be satisfied when girls were less willing to have sex before marriage. Based on twentieth-century court records in Austria where bestiality was regularly prosecuted, rural men are most likely to have vaginal intercourse with cows and calves, less frequently with mares, foals and goats and only rarely with sheep or pigs. They may also take advantage of the sucking reflex of calves to get them to do a bj.
Women having sex with bulls or rams, on the other hand, seems to be more a matter of myth than reality. For three-quarters of the women who told Kinsey that they had had sexual contact with an animal, the animal involved was a dog, and actual sexual intercourse was rare. More commonly the woman limited themselves to touching and masturbating the animal, or having their genitals licked by it.
Much depends, of course, on how the notion of a sexual relationship is defined. Zoologist Desmond Morris has carried out research confirming the commonplace observation that girls are far more likely to be attracted to horses than boys, and he has suggested that "sitting with legs astride a rhythmically moving horse undoubtedly has a sexual undertone." Dekkers agrees, adding that "the horse is the ideal consolation for the great

Ingrid Newkirk on bestiality: "If a girl gets sexual pleasure from riding a horse, does the horse suffer? If not, who cares? If you French kiss your dog and he or she thinks it's great, is it wrong? We believe all exploitation and abuse is wrong. If it isn't exploitation and abuse, it may not be wrong."

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2001/mar/01032904.html
http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/Week-of-Mon-20031222/014119.html

My Opinion:

I apologize to you for NOT specifying the correct anatomical position in relation to the positioning of the "kicking strap" on a bull!....I should have used precise and simple terminology more appropriate to your mentality! Instead of stating "pulled up around it`s guts" I should have said "reefed up around it`s pizzle and knackers!" because that is where I would consider a bucking bulls "guts" to be!

The reference to the application of the use of the "jigger" ( cattle prod ) was intended ( as you should quite well know ) to the "failure to perform" (refusal to leave the chute / lay down ) and had nothing to do with performance in the arena!

I would take further issue with your statement "that the best bull is the one that kicks the highest!"....Your pathetic attempt to belittle me in the mistaken assumption that I am a female ( who you and your ilk seem to obtain the utmost satisfaction in demeaning ) was a failure once again, as even an "experienced" gun rodeo participant like yourself should be aware that the "best" performing bucking bull is the one that uses more twists, turns etc ( in your appropriate terminology ) "every which way!" in his effort to unseat his rider ( tormentor )!

For your enlightenment, I am a 69 year old Australian MALE who has spent a large chunk of his life involved in horses and cattle!( I have also served for a subsatantial period of time in the Defence Forces) I have sadly witnessed many barbaric and unneccesarily cruel treatments applied to our animals and over the years have gradually withdrawn myself from these types of procedures!....Our animals deserve and are entitled to better treatment that what is currently being dealt out to them!

Your reference to the "US Pro Rodeo Circuit" and "ranchers" compel me to make the following observations: I do NOT particularly like the US or it`s policies! I do NOT particularly like loud-mouthed Americans! If you are one those or a supporter, then I do NOT particularly like you!

Cuphandle, I have the utmost respect for anyone, male or female who has served in the Australian Defence Force. However I have no respect for some of your misinformed, biased opinions on rodeo.

I’m glad you take further issue with my statement “that the best bull is the one that kicks the highest.” This statement was in reference to the use of the kicking strap or rope on a bull or horse and to my knowledge has no effect on the animal to encourage twists or turns but only an effect on them kicking high when bucking. But what would I know, I only rode for six years!

As to the reference that I was an experienced gun rodeo participant, that is so uncanny, how did you possibly know that?

As to your reference that “you do NOT particularly like loud-mouthed Americans!” I agree, I don’t like loud-mouthed Americans either, but I also don’t like loud-mouthed Aussies and you’re starting to sound like one.

Dekkers agrees that "the horse is the ideal consolation for the great injustice done to girls by nature, of awakening sexually years before the boys in their class, who are still playing with their train sets"

The existence of sexual contact between humans and animals, and the potency of the taboo against it, displays the ambivalence of our relationship with animals. On the one hand, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition — less in the East — we have always seen ourselves as distinct from animals, and imagined that a wide, unbridgeable gulf separates us from them. Humans alone are made in the image of God. Only human beings have an immortal soul. In Genesis, God gives humans dominion over the animals. In the Renaissance idea of the Great Chain of Being, humans are halfway between the beasts and the angels. We are spiritual beings as well as physical beings. For Kant, humans have an inherent dignity that makes them ends in themselves, whereas animals are mere means to our ends. Today the language of human rights — rights that we attribute to all human beings but deny to all non-human animals — maintains this separation.
On the other hand there are many ways in which we cannot help behaving just as animals do — or mammals, anyway — and sex is one of the most obvious ones. We copulate, as they do. They have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the fact that the vagina of a calf can be sexually satisfying to a man shows how similar these organs are. The taboo on sex with animals may, as I have already suggested, have originated as part of a broader rejection of non-reproductive sex. But the vehemence with which this prohibition continues to be held, its persistence while other non-reproductive sexual acts have become acceptable, suggests that there is another powerful force at work: our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals.
Almost a century ago, when Freud had just published his ground breaking Three Essays on Sexuality, the V

Three Essays on Sexuality, Viennese writer Otto Soyka published a fiery volume called Beyond the Boundary of Morals. Never widely known, and now forgotten, it was a polemic directed against the prohibition of "unnatural" sex like bestiality, homosexuality, fetishism and other non-reproductive acts. Soyka saw these prohibitions as futile and misguided attempts to limit the inexhaustible variety of human sexual desire. Only bestiality, he argued, should be illegal but only in so far as it shows cruelty towards an animal. Soyka's suggestion indicates one good reason why some of the acts described in Dekkers book are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes. Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)

Sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop. Soyka would have thought this within the range of human sexual variety.
At a conference on great apes a few years ago, I spoke to a woman who had visited Camp Leakey, a rehabilitation center for captured orang-utans in Borneo run by Birute Galdikas, referred to as "the Jane Goodall of orang-utans"