Since our association started to gain more and more awareness, discussion florishes – in the zoophiles community as well as elsewhere – whether such a zoophiles-club is necessary in the first place. Frequently this includes whether it does more harm than good to the community. Sometimes outrageous claims are made concerning the aims of our initiative, from assigning prestige cravings to specific members over ”recruting drives” for more zoophiles to changes in the law we are said to demand (e.g. §§ 184a StGB and 17 TierSchG).
Thus the following shall serve as a detailed examination what our goals are with this initiative. We hope this way any misunderstandings can be cleared.
First and foremost, it is absolutely not our intention to see our names engraved nor do we want to use our -admittedly not common- preference for mere publicity. On the contrary – we naturally prefer to be more in the background, only to emerge publically when we see the need to react to public or political events.
A very common misconception is the claim that this initiative is a network to organise meetings for the purpose of intercourse with animals. This is far from the truth. In fact, merely all the actions of this association are text-based. Meaning to educate through words, for example by participating in internet discussions on platforms like Facebook interfacing with the media, handing out informational leaflats and so on. Moreover, this initiative organises predominantly over the internet; face to face meetings for constructive work are most often out of the question because of the large distances in between members.
This association was indeed formed to address a current need. Due to the ubiquity of social networks nowadays, such as Facebook and Linked-In , and the emerging quicker interactions between people, there is a steep increase in anti-zoophile activists. Information as well as misinformation on zoophiles can be circulated faster and wider. The internet furthermore enables easy pooling of sentiments against zoophiles. In a way, our association is therefore indeed a support group for the individual. Granted, there are objective scientific studies, but these are rare. – Not least because of the taboo that is placed on this topic. In the end, we will have to face that there is no help for our course available from the outside – especially no political lobby…
Have a look at public opinion on zoophiles. In general, the majority of the populace receives very little information on us. Per se, that is not tragic at all. But a real sham is that this little information carries almost no quality. There is a filter-bias from the mass media, and groups like Stumme Schreie etc., through which only the most abhorrent cases, in which animals are brutally tortured or even killed, are selected. The most juicy cases are cherrypicked by these and then create a false public image of all zoophiles. Often, the antagonists do not stop short of lies such as the distribution of pictures showing animals with unrelated illnesses or accidental injuries while alleging the causes were sexual abuse.
In total, all zoophiles are portrayed as hormon-crazed sadists, which is far from reality. As a matter of fact, the spectrum of zoosexual people diversifies into a plethora of shades in between black and white. The exact multitude of these shall be discussed elsewhere. To make the point: There indeed exists – even if this seems to be unimaginable in the flood of (mis-)information – a group of zoosexual people who love and respect their animals as well as honour their volition. It is this specific group of zoosexuals for whom we want to speak. We zoophiles do not want to be rubberstamped as sadists, but be seen as real people with a genuine sexual orientation (as e.g. homosexuality is) which incorporates to love an animal as one can love a human. We condemn horse ripping, the killing of dogs and similar at least as much as the next normal person.
Another Problem we are facing in the struggle for tolerance is that most people recognise animals only as asexual entities, which are not believed to particularly enjoy intercourse in general. Such a stance has been scientifically disproven long ago. We’d therefore want to battle this misconception in favour of the idea that it may be possible to be intimate with an animal without hurting it, without the need to specifically train such a performance. But don’t take just our word on this, we compiled for this reason many studies and further reading suggestions for you to form your own picture.
Let us close on the last and most important objective of this initiative – to lobby against the criminalization of sexual human-animal encounters.It happened already in Switzerland, France and the Netherlands. We want to fight this – in our opinion – injust treatment by compiling available scientific literature and for example volunteering for further scientific studies as well as acting as the official advocacy group of the zoophile community.
