ry of insanity or
neurosis in the family, and no injury or illness in his own history. He
had spells of moroseness and irritability, however, and had also been a
masturbator. Women had no attraction for him, but he would copulate with
the mares upon his father's farm, and this without regard to time, place,
or spectators. Such a case would seem to stand midway between ordinary
bestiality and pathological zooerastia as defined by Krafft-Ebing, yet it
seems probable that in most cases of ordinary bestiality some slight
traces of mental anomaly might be found, if such cases always were, as
they should be, properly investigated.[42]

We have here reached the grossest and most frequent perversion in this
group; bestiality, or the impulse to attain sexual gratification by
intercourse, or other close contact, with animals. In seeking to
comprehend this perversion it is necessary to divest ourselves of the
attitude toward animals which is the inevitable outcome of refined
civilization and urban life. Most sexual perversions, if not in large
measure the actual outcome of civilized life, easily adjust themselves to
it. Bestiality (except in one form to be noted later) is, on the other
hand, the sexual perversion of dull, insensitive and unfastidious persons.
It flourishes among primitive peoples and among peasants. It is the vice
of the clodhopper, unattractive to women or inapt to court them.

Three conditions have favored the extreme prevalence of bestiality: (1)
primitive conceptions of life which built up no great barrier between man
and the other animals; (2) the extreme familiarity which necessarily
exists between the peasant and his beasts, often combined with separation
from women; (3) various folk-lore beliefs such as the efficacy of
intercourse with animals as a cure for venereal disease, etc.[43]

The beliefs and customs of primitive peoples, as well as their mythology
and legends, bring before us a community of man and animals altogether
unlike anything we know in civilization. Men may become animals and
animals may become men; animals and men may communicate with each other
and live on terms of equality; animals may be the ancestors of human
tribes; the sacred totems of savages are most usually animals. There is no
shame or degradation in the notion of a sexual relationship between men
and animals, because in primitive conceptions animals are not inferior
beings separated from man by a great gulf. They are much more