Man and Beast

BRIAN: We’re going to end the show today with a quick jump backwards, back to early America. Now, this story contains some less than savory material. You parents out there, you may want to turn down the volume for the next eight minutes or so.

PETER: In the mid 17th century, Puritan New England saw a sudden spike in prosecutions for one particular crime, bestiality. Sex with animals had been illegal back in England, too. But New Englanders prosecuted it more often and more harshly, sometimes imposing the death penalty. So why the harsher crackdown in the new world?

BRIAN: I put that very question to Doron Ben-Atar. He’s an historian at Fordham University, and he’s working on a book about bestiality in early America. Ben-Atar pointed me to the 1662 case of a respectable New Haven man, named William Potter.

DORON BEN-ATAR: Potter was caused by his son having sex with a dog. So William Potter confessed. And he admitted that he had a lifelong fondness for bestiality. A few years earlier, his wife caught him. And they even hung the seductress dog when his wife caught him.

He promised never to do it again. But you know how it is. It’s like cigarettes. Once you take one, you’re hooked for life.

BRIAN: Doron, I don’t know how it is, actually.

DORON BEN-ATAR: With cigarettes?

BRIAN: No. With animals.

DORON BEN-ATAR: So now, the wife and son decide to turn him in. And this was one of the founders of New Haven. He’s 60 years old. And he confesses, and he was sentenced to die.

And then what follows is the best line up in American history, in which Potter goes through the farm and points out the specific animals that he had sex with. And on the day of his execution, a cow, two heifers, three sheep, and two sows died with him, after he confessed to having sex with them.

The animal is always executed, in the 17th century, with the offender. There’s all this commentary about why they execute the animal. In other words, is the animal a guilty party? Is the animal seducing the man? Or is it only the lust of the man?

In the Middle Ages, up until about the 10th and 11th century, it was quite common to execute the animal and not the [? man ?], believing that animals are naturally lustful. What can you expect of them? They’re animals. They want to have sex all the time. And sometimes men in compromised state would succumb to temptation. So you can forgive.

Later on, as Christianity move to a far more anti-sex ideology, then you start moving towards executing the person and the animal.

BRIAN: Let me ask you how common bestiality prosecutions were in colonial America? Were these anomalies?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Well, there were a fair number of prosecutions. There were only seven executions in 17th century New England. But practically every colony had bestiality trials. And this raises an excellent question. Since bestiality, we know, happens in every society at every time, only at particular times do societies decide to prosecute.

For the most part, people tolerate bestiality. It’s a joke, but it doesn’t seem to be threatening society. And then at particular moments, the threat seems very real.

BRIAN: In 17th century colonial America, was there a much greater concern with bestiality than in England, for instance?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Yes. Absolutely. In New England, yes. In New England, there’s absolute concern with bestiality. And the concern has to do with the Puritan project. If you’re about to create a city on a hill and it’s supposed to be a model for all Protestantism all over the world, what kind of model will you be if you allow such abomination in you midst?

But it’s not only the Puritan project in terms of what would the world say. It’s also the anxiety felt by the Puritans themselves as they are confronting the wilderness in America.

BRIAN: So it’s the environment also.

DORON BEN-ATAR: It’s the temptation of the environment. Temptation of running away, backsliding. Human beings backsliding into animal nature, or into being animal-like. And that’s the real threat. This is a era where people believed in werewolves. People believed that deformed children were born because women were watching dogs copulating while pregnant. I mean, this was the kind of belief that they had at the time.

BRIAN: But what was it about the American environment that put Americans at greater risk?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Well, A, because you can actually survive in the American wilderness. It’s a very fertile land. You’re not so dependent on other human beings. And the Indians are available. If you think of Virginia, early Virginia, one of the worst offenses one could do is to run away and leave with the Indians. The punishment for that was the death penalty.

BRIAN: And that is because it was considered that you were leaving civilization and returning to a primitive state.

DORON BEN-ATAR: Correct. And Indians were considered to be these liminal creatures of some sort. There’s this fear of human beings sliding back into animal-like existence.

BRIAN: So the law and the prosecution of those who violate the law is really a way to just shore up that rather porous line between humans and animals.

DORON BEN-ATAR: Exactly.

BRIAN: When did New England society become more relaxed about bestiality? And when did these prosecutions die down?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Well, the last prosecution in the 17th century is that of Benjamin Goad. And I believe that’s in the 1670s. 1674. Sorry. And then for a century, there are a lot of bestiality trials, but they don’t end in executions.

BRIAN: What about the animals? Did the animal still get it?

DORON BEN-ATAR: No. I think Benjamin Goad is the last recorded case that I am aware of in which the animal is buried with the offender. I think that what you get is with the 18th century, with the Age of Reason. It’s also the age of classification.

And the boundaries between species is established. It becomes the great chain of being, and each species occupying a particular place. It created boundaries between species. And those boundaries reduced the threat, the feeling that bestiality could really blur the line between animals and people. And therefore, we are not threatened by the animal world as they were in the 17th century.

BRIAN: So we’re feeling more secure about our distance from animals, so we don’t need the courts to shore that up?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Exactly. Doron Ben-Atar in an historian at Fordham University. He’s the author with Richard Brown of the forthcoming book Taming Lust, Bestiality in 18th Century America.

PETER: And if you still haven’t had your fill of early American bestiality, head on over to our website, backstoryradio.org. There you can hear about a prosecution in which the key piece of evidence was a deformed piglet, allegedly fathered by a local man name Thomas Hogg.