You don’t hear much about good old-fashioned bestiality anymore. Mostly, it’s just a bad gag with a worse punch line - “With all a’ them sheep, you had’ta go an’ pick the sheriff’s girl.” Sex within species is pretty much available to all these days, and if someone goes for a pig instead, it’s because he’s one twisted mother. But in Days of Olde, when people on farms lived a much more isolated existence, it was a bit more common. Still a weapons-grade perversion, of course. After all, for the sake of cleanliness alone, it’s hard to imagine how the bung hole of a cow could ever look good. Just about anything would seem more sanitary, including the palm of your right hand. In his rollicking diaries, Boswell admits that, as a young man, he preferred hugging oak trees, imagining they were gnarly whores and finding relief from the desires that, his later life shows all too clearly, plagued him constantly. Well, at least it’s cleaner. But look out for that poison ivy.
Of course, if he’d stuck to following Dr. Johnson around and screwing oak trees, he probably wouldn’t have had to write Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays, detailing his persistent battles with gonorrhea.
Yet, for the historian, it’s interesting to note the moment in history when the fire and brimstone of American Puritans met the dying days of bestiality, and it’s really, really hard not to laugh, despite the fact that the confessed practitioner of same was summarily hanged. The part that’s so hysterical is the fact that, once the poor bastard had confessed, before he was hanged he had to take the whole kit and kaboodle of judges and church deacons down to the old homestead to tell them which of the animals there he’d had “unnatural congress” with. Can you even picture it? “Well, Daisy’s been my favorite since she was born. I love her curly hair.” Then poor Daisy, as well, faced the hangman’s noose.
Actually, despite their well-deserved reputation for stern punishment, so much so that, even in the mid-1600's, guys who’d come with them (pardon the pun) were leaving to start their own, less oppressive settlements, the Puritan fathers weren’t doing this to punish the animals. They were doing it because of their lack of any real understanding of the process of procreation. Their biggest fear was that it might be possible for the man to have impregnated a cow or a pig. And then what? What sort of unholy monster might result from that? So, with visions of It’s Alive (“Another one’s been born in Seattle”) dancing in their heads, they had the animals hanged, too. They were not slaughtered; no one was allowed to eat them. They were quietly buried in a secret place, before the lonely goatherd went to meet his Maker.
RIP
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