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percent of the human population. Just as it’s impossible for nonzoophiles to become aroused by the steaming, mottled member of a Clydesdale or by a German shepherd rolling over for a tummy rub, “true zoophiles” can’t get (easily) turned on by human beings. One such man—a physician from suburbia, incidentally—could only consummate his marriage to a woman by closing his eyes and imagining his new bride as a horse. Strangely enough, the marriage didn’t last.
    Centuries ago in the newfound colony of Plymouth, zoophilia was obviously not a known sexual orientation (again, the psychosexual construct of an “orientation” wouldn’t appear until the late nineteenth century). But the hysteria over Satan’s prodigal litters reached dramatic heights with the 1642 trial of a sixteen-year-old boy named Thomas Granger. This randy adolescent had been indicted for taking indecent liberties with what seems an entire stable full of animals, including “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” I realize the turkey part is a bit distracting (and how one goes about having sex with a large clawed bird is better left unexamined), but even more remarkable is the legal diligence and sobriety with which this case was prosecuted.
    There was little question in these righteous minds that the boy should be dispatched to the flames for his egregious violations of natural law, but there was confusion on the bench over which sheep, exactly, he’d been defiling, and therefore which of them should be killed and which of them spared. This was crucial to sort out, not only because livestock was a valuable commodity in the beleaguered settlement, but also because if they executed the wrong sheep, they risked the unthinkable happening: a monstrously bleating, hoofed prodigy might drop undetected onto Plymouth. So, naturally, a lineup of busily masticating victims was staged for Granger. With a trembling finger, the boy pointed out those five amber-eyed ruminants that had been targets of his secret woolly lust. Court records indicate that the animals were then “killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus xx. 15; and then he himself was executed.”
    Suspected “buggers” of the past—Old English slang for he who has sex with pigs, donkeys, dogs, and all and sundry critters—could expect a battle of wits with moral arbiters and overzealous prosecutors. In New Haven in 1642, not far from what would later be the Yale campus and just a few years after the Granger affair, a man named George Spencer, a servant notorious for having “a prophane, lying, scoffing and lewd speritt,” was executed for making love to his master’s pig. He swore that he didn’t do it, but unfortunately for Spencer the sow happened to give birth to a deformed fetus (“a prodigious monster”) that resembled George a bit too closely for most people’s comfort. The pig fetus had “butt one eye for use, the other hath (as it is called) a pearle in itt, is whitish and deformed.” This embryological mishap was George’s death sentence. His own ocular deformity bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the stillborn pig, and in the emotional climate of the town’s moral panic over grunting prodigies, this was the critical piece of evidence used to convict him.
    Another town resident with the rather ironic name of Thomas Hogg also found himself at the center of an intense buggery investigation when a neighborhood sow bore a deformed fetus with “a faire & white skinne & head, as Thomas Hogg is.” (I feel compelled to pause for a moment to pity the women of old New Haven, too, since so many aborted pig fetuses were apparently reminiscent of the town’s eligible bachelors.) The allegations made against Thomas Hogg by the townsfolk were so serious that the governor and the deputy governor personally frog-marched him out to the barnyard toward the sow in question and ordered him to “scratt” (fondle) the animal before their eyes.