Loving Animals

Bourke's post-anthropocentric approach to human-animal love and lust is a remarkable and much-needed contribution to both queer studies and animal studies. She offers a critical and thorough analysis of the joys, hopes, and dangers of intimacy with the most vulnerable of all lovers--animals. --Monika Bakke, Philosophy Department, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan (Poland) In this courageous book, Bourke combines scholarship and clear prose to tackle head-on one of our most stigmatized taboos--sexual relations between humans and nonhumans. In doing so, she provides an illuminating perspective on a subject too often swept under the rug. Even if so-called zoophilia were a rare aberration, it ought to be addressed. That it is far more widespread than commonly believed justifies the need for thorough, contemporary examination. --Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows and Super Fly This bold and imaginative book is thoughtful and--inevitably--provocative. With characteristic compassion and insight, Bourke undertakes a tour de force of historical and cultural attitudes towards human-animal relations to guide us through serious ethical and political questions concerning sexuality, power, and consent. --Julie-Marie Strange, Durham University Bourke believes society should take a more nuanced approach to the matter. In her new book, Loving Animals, she points out that studies suggesting a link between bestiality and psychosis should be treated with caution due to sampling bias, because they were conducted on people already within the penal system, rather than a cross-section of the population. The sexually frustrated young farm-hand who interferes with one of his mares shouldn't necessarily occupy the same taxonomic box as the bona fide sex pest; his indiscretion is, in the words of the psychiatrist Philip Q. Roche, an 'adaptive expedient of bucolic loneliness'--a matter of circumstance rather than proclivity; contingent rather than pathological. -- Times Literary Supplement