Latest Bestiality Laws in US 2024

Defining Bestiality and Its Laws

Comprehensive legislation and careful consideration are necessary for the delicate and complicated topic of bestiality laws. There are laws against such acts in many jurisdictions, but the definitions, consequences, and methods of enforcement vary.

Bestiality presents moral, legal, and animal welfare issues that demand a unified, consistent approach throughout the country. Additionally, it is necessary to reassess current laws to make sure they sufficiently shield animals from exploitation and abuse in light of changing public attitudes toward animal rights and welfare.

Furthermore, there is a growing awareness of the psychological risks that such acts pose to the participants, which emphasizes the need for legal frameworks that address the underlying problems as well as the act itself and appropriate interventions.

Bestiality is the performance of any sexual act between a human being and an animal. In criminal statutes, bestiality is also committed when a person-

 (1)aids or abets another person’s sexual acts with an animal;

 (2) permits sexual acts with an animal on any premises that they control;

(3) in any way furthers sexual acts with an animal, including observation of such acts; or

(4) photographs or films of sexual acts with an animal for sexual gratification, whether their own or another’s. Some state statutes instead include bestiality under the ambit of a crime against nature or sodomy.

History of Bestiality

Religious bans on bestiality in the early American colonies gave rise to legal justifications for punishing offenders. Henry Bergh brought the animal welfare philosophy to America in the 1800s, modernizing the nation’s laws about animal welfare.

But up until recently, a lot of American laws were moralistic, out of date, and ambiguous. A growing body of research has emerged since the 1960s that suggests people who injure animals may also offend others on a personal level.

Before 12,000 years ago, human beings relied on animals primarily as a source of food and raw materials in hunter-gatherer societies. It was not until the end of the last Ice Age that humans began to domesticate animals. Archeological evidence in the Near East suggests that wolves were the first animals to enter human societies.

Cattle and pigs entered human societies about 9000 years ago and were followed by horses, camels, donkeys, birds, and others around 3000 years ago.

The earliest recorded legal codes demonstrate the economic value of animals in early human civilization. For example, the Code of Hammurabi from the Mesopotamian civilization of Babylonia is one of the first known recorded legal codes. Its origin dates to around 1750 B.C.E.

 The Code consists of 282 rules punishing various behaviors, a significant portion of which relate to the treatment of animals. Many rules specify the recompense owed to the owner of an animal that suffers harm from someone or someone’s animals.

Early societies responded to bestiality in various ways. In some, such as ancient Greece, sex between humans and nonhuman animals not only went unpunished, but it was possibly commonplace.

Other societies, however, punished bestiality severely. The first known bestiality laws were established by another ancient civilization, the Anatolian Hittites, who inscribed their legal code on clay tablets.

The tablets, which are estimated to date from 1650 B.C.E. to 1500 B.C.E., also contain an array of rules related to the treatment of animals. 

Ancient Rules on Bestiality

Similar to Hammarubi’s code, many Hittite laws treat animals as property with economic value and provide for recompense if one’s animal is injured or killed. Unlike Hammurabi’s code, the Hittites specifically address bestiality in two of their approximately 200 rules.

If anyone has sexual relations with a pig or a dog, he shall die. He shall bring him to the palace gate. The king may have them killed or he may spare them, but the human shall not approach the king. If an ox leaps on a man, the ox shall die; the man shall not die.

They shall substitute one sheep for the man and put it to death. If a pig leaps on a man, it is not an offense.

If anyone has sexual relations with either a horse or a mule, it is not an offense, but he shall not approach the king, nor shall he become a priest.

Legislations regarding Treatment of Animals

It was not until the 1800s in Victorian England that the concept that animals have rights separable from those of humans initially developed.

At that time, governmental and religious institutions became concerned about the use of animals in activities such as experimentation, transportation, and entertainment such as cockfighting and foxhunting.

In 1822, a bill banning cruelty to cattle in England was passed. In 1824, a member of parliament named Thomas Buxton founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), later renamed the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which was the first animal welfare charity in the world.

The RSPCA was initially focused on the welfare of working animals, including equines that worked in coal mines and assisted in monitoring animal abuse in public markets, prosecuting cruelty offenders, and promoting the improved treatment of animals to the public at large.

Henry Bergh, an American diplomat, witnessed animal abuse in England, as well as the RSPCA’s efforts to address it.

After returning to the United States, he incorporated and became the first president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

Bergh was also responsible for the revision of laws regulating the treatment of animals, introducing the term “cruelty” into New York state’s statutory language in the 1860s ′s and expanding the range of punishable offenses.

In response to his activities and successes in New York, other states established their SPCAs and advocated modifying their anticruelty statutes.

The animal rights approach and Bergh’s efforts are reflected in various laws in the United States that continue to define bestiality under statutes entitled “cruelty to animals,” as in Alaska, Colorado, and Maine.

Laws and Provisions on Bestiality

State statutes criminalize additional behaviors related to bestiality. An example of this type of legislation is Wisconsin’s statute, amended in 2019. The law defines a variety of behaviors that may be grounds for prosecution, including those that do not involve sexual contact. The law reads:

No person may knowingly do any of the following:

1. Engage in sexual contact with an animal.
2. Advertise, offer, accept an offer, sell, transfer, purchase, or otherwise obtain an animal with the intent that it be used for sexual contact in this state.
3. Organize, promote, conduct, or participate as an observer of an act involving sexual contact with an animal.
4. Permit sexual contact with an animal to be conducted on any premises under his or her ownership or control.
5. Photograph or film obscene material depicting a person engaged in sexual contact with an animal.
6. Distribute, sell, publish, or transmit obscene material depicting a person engaged in sexual contact with an animal.
7. Possess with the intent to distribute, sell, publish, or transmit obscene material depicting a person engaged in sexual contact with an animal.
8. Force, coerce, entice, or encourage a child who has not attained the age of 13 years to engage in sexual contact with an animal.
9. Engage in sexual contact with an animal in the presence of a child who has not attained the age of 13 years.
10. Force, coerce, entice, or encourage a child who has attained the age of 13 years but who has not attained the age of 18 to engage in sexual contact with an animal.
11. Engage in sexual contact with an animal in the presence of a child who has attained the age of 13 years but who has not attained the age of 18 years

Bestiality has been a crime at the federal level since the 1950s ′s under the United States Armed Forces Code. The Code states that individuals who engage in “unnatural carnal copulation with an animal” are guilty of bestiality and will be punished through court-martial.

In 2019, the U.S. Congress passed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act.

The law criminalizes the creation, sale, and distribution of “crush” videos, or videos depicting cruelty with animals being “crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled, or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury” in interstate or foreign commerce.

Though some have identified the law as a federal solution that closes a loophole in animal maltreatment legislation, others have criticized it as the federalization of what should be state criminal law. Legislations have been strict in Crimes against Animals as they have been in Medical Marijuana/Weed Laws.

FAQ’s

Reference

Holoyda, B.J.; Newman, W.J. Zoophilia and the law: Legal responses to a rare paraphilia. J. Am. Acad. Psychiatry Law 2014, 42, 412–420.

Wisch, R.F. Table of State Animal Sexual Assault Laws. Animal Legal & Historical Center. Available online: www.animallaw.info/topic/table-state-animal-sexual-assault-laws

General Laws of Rhode Island Annotated; §11-10-1. 1998. Available on: http://webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/Statutes/TITLE11/11-10/11-10-1.htm

Mississippi Code Annotated; §97-29-59. 1942. https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/2017/title-97/chapter-29/in-general/section-97-29-59/

California Penal Code; §286.5. 2019. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN§ionNum=286.5

Hawaii Revised \Statutes;§711-1109.8. 2021. Available on https://law.justia.com/codes/hawaii/2021/title-37/chapter-711/section-711-1109-8/

New Jersey Statutes Annotated; Title 4; §22-17. 2017. Available on https://www.state.nj.us/health/vph/documents/4_22-17%20Text%202018.pdf