Animal Sexual Assault 61 boundaries between them precisely Prefaced by the general command ‘Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy’ (Leviticus 19:2), holiness requires that individuals conform to the class to which they belong This theme continues in Leviticus 19:19: ‘Ye shall keep my statutes Thou shalt not let Thy cattle gender with a diverse kind; thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed’ To the Mosaic lawmakers, if different classes of things should not be confused, then the mingling of humans and animals—bestiality—is confusion and should be harshly condemned On this basis, the early Christian church regarded copulation with a Jew as a form of bestiality and penalised it with death So, too, from the time of Leviticus onwards, bestiality has been regarded as sinful or criminal because it ruptures the natural order of the universe; it violates the procreative intent required of all sexual relations between Christians; and it produces monstrous offspring that are the Devil’s work However, during and after the mid-nineteenth century, many nonreproductive sexual practices, including bestiality, were in effect decriminalised Following the early lead of Jeremy Bentham and others, the social control of bestiality formally passed from religion and criminal law to a medicopsychiatric discourse at whose centre, it was thought, lie diseased individuals who are often simpletons or imbeciles with a variety of characteriological defects and/or psychopathic personalities However, though fictional and quasi-autobiographical accounts of bestiality have occasionally appeared in serious works of literature, it is remarkable that a practice that has traditionally been viewed with moral, judicial and aesthetic outrage has been almost completely neglected by disciplines such as moral philosophy and the social sciences, including criminology In higher education the discussion of human–animal sexual relations has until very recently been confined to lectures on criminal law given by professors who, with embarrassed chuckles, have referred to the declining volume of bestiality prosecutions as an example of the secularised tolerance and the supposed rationality of western law But how quickly times change! During and since the 1990s an unlikely coalition has emerged between ultra-conservatives (the ‘moral majority’) and animal rights groups The ultra-conservatives wish to control sexual behaviour in the bedroom, their members believing bestiality to be immoral or unethical behaviour Supporters of animal rights think that bestiality is a form of animal abuse It can cause animals to suffer internal bleeding, ruptured anal passages, bruised vaginas, battered cloaca, psychological and emotional trauma and death (Beirne 2002) This coalition has resulted in the recriminalisation of human–animal sexual relations in many European societies (Maher 2015) and in about two-thirds of states in the USA (Beirne