![]() Now, I’ve written before about the fascinating research underway on the phenomenon of zoophilia and the reported 1 percent of the human population that feels a primary erotic attraction to other species. ![]() At least, that’s what many people thought at the time. ![]() It seems these animals were valued not so much for their minds or their meat, by some residents of early America, but as lovers. Social historian Robert Oaks had, like me, been interested in hogs-and for reasons that were, oddly enough, not altogether distinct from my earlier observation of their very humanlike rumps. (Ithaca, after all, was the birthplace of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.) So, with those unsettled pigs still prancing about in my mind, it was only natural that my eyes would settle on a rather tangential nod to the genus Sus in a study of crime and punishment in Colonial New England. Between writing my columns for Slate, you see, I’m often scouring the holdings of the Cornell University Library, doing my own research for a book on the psychology of moral outrage and its relation to human sexuality. But that column will have to wait a little longer, because in examining the vast literature on cognitive studies of farm animals-and from all appearances, scientists’ understanding of pig cognition is in a woeful state of disarray-I got distracted (as I often do) by matters of sexual deviance. ![]()
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