Mandunyane Teenager Escapes Bestiality Charge
Lebogang Mosikare | Monday September 11, 2017 16:01
The act of having sex with animals is worldwide, but bestiality, which is also known as zoophilia, though legal in some countries, is considered unnatural, illegal and shunned upon in many communities.
The 2006 story of a Sudanese man who was forced to marry a goat after being caught having sex with it made news headlines around the world.
The story elicited mixed feelings. However, stories of people having sex with animals are common throughout the world.
According to Dr Mark Griffiths, a Chartered Psychologist at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK, bestiality is typically defined as relating to repeatedly extreme sexual fantasies, urges, and sexual activities with animals.
In Botswana there has been reports of goats giving birth to human like creatures.
For obvious reasons, such kind of stories touched a nerve in conservative and mostly Christian Botswana where it is normally accepted that male humans should derive sexual pleasure from their female counterparts only.
This week, a 19-year-old man of Mandunyane reignited the bestiality issue after being forgiven for having been caught having sex with a goat near Shashe Dam on September 3.
The owner of the goat saw the man stooping over the goat and upon reaching the spectacle, and seeing what was happening, the culprit tried to run away, but the goat owner and his companion caught him.
When the owner and his companion frogmatched the young man to the scene of crime, they found the goat in a state of paralysis, lying on the ground unable to move.
Superintendent Kenanao Badumetse of Tonota police confirmed the incident, saying the man was arrested and was now in custody. “The goat is also in our custody and will be used as an exhibit when the accused is tried before a court of law.”
Last Monday the man appeared before the Tonota customary court to answer to one count of performing an unnatural act.
However, the accused got away after the owner of the goat forgave him.
Following the hearing, Kgosi Bokamoso Radipitse told The Monitor that the accused was freed after the owner of the goat and the accused’s parents reached an out-of-court settlement “to give the accused a second chance in life since he is still a young man.”
The accused, Radipitse added, also readily admitted committing the offence and begged for mercy.
“I ended up forgiving him after taking into consideration that he was still a young man who deserves another chance in life and what the owner of the goat and his parents said. However, I sternly warned him that in future he would not be so lucky. The courts abhor such kind of behaviour, but are usually not harsh with first time offenders,” Radipitse said.
According to Health24, few institutions of higher learning in the world have conducted serious research about bestiality, which makes it difficult to give credible estimates about how widespread the matter is.
Health24 further says experts are divided on what exactly causes bestiality.
According to the newspaper, some experts believe that the condition is caused by genetic factors while some say it is caused by environmental causes.
There are some inherent problems, Health24 says, associated with zoophilia.
“Human can transmit diseases to animals while animals and vice versa… some of which can be quite dangerous. Conditions that can be passed from a human to an animal are referred to as anthroponotic diseases and can often cause serious harm as animals generally receive a much lower standard of care than humans,” Health24 states.
Health24 and Crestview news bulletin classified zoophilia in 10 ways, which are:
l Human-animal role-players – those who never have sex with animals but become sexually aroused through wanting to have sex with humans who pretend to be animals.
l Romantic zoophiles – those who keeps animals as pets as a way to get psychosexually stimulated without actually having any kind of sexual contact with them.
l Zoophilic fantasisers – those who fantasise about having sexual intercourse with animals but never actually do.
l Tactile zoophiles – those who get sexual excitement from touching, stroking or fondling animals or their genitals but do not actually have sexual intercourse with animals.
l Fetishistic zoophiles – those who keep various animal parts (especially fur) that are used as erotic stimuli as a crucial part of their sexual activity (typically masturbation).
l Sadistic bestials – those who derive sexual arousal from the torturing of animals (known as zoosadism) but do not involve sexual intercourse with the animal.
l Opportunistic zoosexuals – those who have normal sexual encounters but would have sexual intercourse with animals if the opportunity arose.
l Regular zoosexuals – those who prefer sex with animals than sex with humans (but are capable of having sex with both). Such zoophiles will engage in a wide range of sexual activities with animals and love animals on an emotional level.
l Homicidal bestials – those who need to kill animals in order to have sex with them. Although capable of having sex with living animals, there is an insatiable desire to have sex with dead animals.
l Exclusive zoosexuals – those who only have sex with animals to the exclusion of human sexual partners.