Animal Sexual Assault Piers Beirne, Jennifer Maher and Harriet Pierpoint Introduction The focus of this chapter is ‘animal sexual assault’, though by way of a historical introduction, we need to begin with a discussion of ‘bestiality’ A seventeenth-century English word, ‘bestiality’ derives from the Latin bestialitas, which was used severally to refer to primitive behaviour, to human–animal sexual intercourse and to the way in which animals copulate Sometimes, bestiality has been classified as a crime against nature; in this it was a bedfellow of other crimes allegedly involving ‘moral pollution’ such as sodomy, buggery, masturbation and paedophilia At other times, the terms ‘sodomy’ and ‘buggery’ were used interchangeably to describe bestiality, though they have also been employed to denote homosexuality Each of these terms carries with it baggage of condemnation that varies in its moral sources, in its intensity and in the duration of its social censure In some societies, such as in New England from the Puritan 1600s until the mid-nineteenth century, bestiality has been generally regarded with such trepidation that even the very mention of the word is censured In legal and J Maher (*) Á H Pierpoint Centre for Criminology, University of South Wales, Pontypridd, United Kingdom e-mail: jenny.maher@southwales.ac.uk; harriet.pierpoint@southwales.ac.uk P Beirne Criminology Department, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, USA e-mail: beirne@maine.edu © The Author(s) 2017 J Maher et al (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_4 59