Dear Dr. Date,
I have unnatural feelings for my girlfriend’s female Great Dane. What should I do?
— Confused
Don’t tell your girlfriend. It’s one thing for you to have a crush on one of her chums, quite another when she’s second chair to a dog. But to your credit, you may not be completely guilty. Believe it or not, it’s very common for home-wrecking female dogs to flirt with boyfriends like you.
Dogs are pack animals with very strict hierarchies, and dominance must be established for dog society to run smoothly. They do this with wiggly-romp body language and their strange sniffy-sniff ways. Humans and dogs go great together because to them we’re just bigger, smarter, skinless dogs, and in most households we’re the top dogs. In dog-nut speak, you are the alpha male and your girlfriend is the (forgive me) alpha bitch. Except that now your girlfriend’s Great Dane is making a bid for that spot and the right to be mounted by you (Get in line!).
Granted, the pooch could be wholly innocent — and since she ain’t talkin’ let’s get back to you. I hate to propagate nasty stereotypes, but according to the Kinsey report, a befuddling 17 percent of the demographic known as farm boys have had sex with some sort of domesticated animal. This may merely be some rite of passage like cow tipping, except … not tipping. A recent study done in Europe found that a an encouraging, yet still amazing, 3 percent of men have had sex with an animal.
The law knows it as bestiality, but to the practitioner it’s called zoophilia. A person that carnally knows an animal (dog, horse, dolphin) is known as a zoophile, or zoo for short.
I actually don’t have many problems with zoophilia. The true blue zoos I interviewed essentially chorused the same idea: they just really love their animals. If you remember from the start of this response, dogs don’t distinguish between human and canine like we do, so sex with a human can be normal to them.
As always, consent is the issue. I abhor mistreatment of animals and screwing a dog that doesn’t want to be screwed is rape, or at least cruelty.
A dog’s ability to transcend pure instinct and make a choice about sex is unlikely, which makes zoophilia illegal and immoral. In the meantime, since it’s a Great Dane, one of the world’s biggest dogs, I’m sure she can take care of herself.
