Skegness Magistrates’ Court has handed a suspended sentence to a young man who admitted an act of sexual penetration with a Staffordshire bull terrier.
Some of my conservative friends are indignant at the leniency of the punishment, but I, being a resolute defender of progress and modernity, think it was unduly harsh.
For one thing, I too have warm feelings about bull terriers, even though so far I haven’t expressed such sentiments physically. Let’s face it, they aren’t the prettiest of dogs, which is why they need all the love they can get.
As to escalating such love to sex, who’s to say this is wrong?
Certainly not the Dutch scientist Midas Dekker, who in 2000 published the academic treatise Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, adding a whole new meaning to the concepts of heavy petting and indeed Midas touch.
Dr Dekker argued that people and animals can form loving erotic relationships, just like hetero- or homosexual humans. It is therefore wrong to assume that sex between a human and, say, a Staffordshire bull terrier violates the latter’s rights. On the contrary, it upholds them.
The right to warm and loving relationships has been sanctified by the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights, and surely a bull terrier starved of canine companionship can’t exercise this right.
Since we’ve finally cottoned on that it’s not just humans but also animals who have rights, the owner would have been in default of his obligations had he declined to stick… well, I’ll spare you a graphic description of what he shouldn’t have declined to do.
The great philosopher Prof. Peter Singer, he of the tireless campaign to grant apes the same human rights that are denied to about 90 percent of the world’s humans, studied the issue of bestiality from the moral standpoint and reached the same – commendable! – conclusion.
“We are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes,” explained the good professor, doubtless on the basis of frank self-assessment. Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”
One wonders how poor Mrs Singer feels about this, assuming that her hubbie-wubbie practices what he preaches, as Dr Dekker apparently does. One suspects she may deny the family dog that extra helping of Pedigree Chum, you know how jealous human females can get.
According to these scholars, sex has no ethical dimension at all – it’s all about feeling, ‘lurve’, passion, pleasure, that sort of thing. By inference, no object of such romantic cravings can possibly bring them into disrepute, and they’re all worthy of being consummated or even sanctified by marriage.
Witness the kind of love that in the past dared not speak its name, but now not only screams it off the rooftops but actually threatens legal action against those who refuse to join the chorus.
Approaching the issue from the purely pragmatic angle, once sex has been scoured of its moral, social, religious and – well – human aspects, a dog may be seen as a better partner than a woman, a man or anything in between.
A canine lover is unlikely to encumber the relationship with soppy sentimentality and post-coital verbosity that used to make sex so complicated for human beings.
A dog isn’t going to demand flowers in the evening or respect in the morning.
It’s guaranteed not to say anything stupid – in fact, even better, not to say anything at all.
And if you decide to get rid of it, it won’t take you to the cleaners – and nor will it sell to the papers any disparaging stories about your character or sexual performance.
An ideal companion any way you look at it, in other words.
One only wishes that the Skegness chap had done the honourable thing and made an honest bitch out of his bull terrier… Sorry, I assumed that his canine lover is female; how silly of me.
Since the word ‘perversion’ has been expurgated from our lexicon, it doesn’t matter whether the bull terrier was male or female. The sex of either lover can no more act as an obstacle to matrimony than their species.
The famous Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld has shown the way by marrying his Siamese cat Choupette. I don’t know if the union was sanctified by the church, but I rather doubt it, considering Mr and Mrs Lagerfeld live in a residually Catholic country. The way our own dear Anglican church is going, before long guests will be tossing rice at poodles – or bull terriers, if you’d rather.
I have so much more to tell you on this subject, but I’ve got to run. I’m late for an appointment with the manager of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home who wants to discuss the possibility of repositioning his establishment as a dating service.