Not so long ago, any form of sexuality not leading to the conception of children was seen as, at best, wanton lust, or worse, a perversion. One by one, the taboos have fallen. The idea that it could be wrong to use contraception in order to separate sex from reproduction is now merely quaint. If some religions still teach that masturbation is “self-abuse,” that just shows how out of touch they have become. Sodomy? That’s all part of the joy of sex, recommended for couples seeking erotic variety. In many of the world’s great cities, gays and lesbians can be open about their sexual preferences to an extent unimaginable a century ago. You can even do it in the US armed forces, as long as you don’t talk about it. Oral sex? Some objected to President Clinton’s choice of place and partner, and others thought he should have been more honest about what he had done, but no one dared suggest that he was unfit to be president simply because he had taken part in a sexual activity that was, in many jurisdictions, a crime.

But not every taboo has crumbled. Heard anyone chatting at parties lately about how good it is having sex with their dog? Probably not. Sex with animals is still taboo. If Midas Dekkers, author of Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, is right, this is not because of its rarity. Dekkers, a Dutch biologist, has assembled a substantial body of evidence to show that humans have often thought of “love for animals” in ways that go beyond a pat and a hug. His book has a wide range of illustrations, going back to a Swedish rock drawing from the Bronze Age of a man fucking a large quadruped. There is a Greek vase from 520BC showing a male figure having sex with a stag; a 17th-century Indian miniature of a deer mounting a woman; an 18th-century European engraving of an ecstatic nun coupling with a donkey, while other nuns look on, smiling; a 19th-century Persian painting of a soldier, also with a donkey; and, from the same period, a Japanese drawing of a woman enveloped by a giant octopus which appears to be sucking her vagina and caressing her body with its limbs.

How much of this is fantasy, the King Kong-ish archetypes of an earlier age? In the 1940s and 1950s, the Kinsey Institute asked 18,500 Americans about their sexual behaviour. It found that 8 per cent of males and 3.5 per cent of females stated that they had had a sexual encounter with an animal. Among men living in rural areas, the figure rose to 50 per cent. Dekkers says that for young male farm hands, animals provided an outlet for sexual desires that could not be satisfied when women were less willing to have sex before marriage. Based on 20th-century court records in Austria, where bestiality was regularly prosecuted, rural men are most likely to have vaginal intercourse with cows and calves, less frequently with mares, foals and goats and only rarely with sheep or pigs. They may also take advantage of the sucking reflex of calves to get them to do a blowjob.

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