Is zoophilia normal? Am I a bad person for having these attractions?

[lice_eater_22]

Title. I've felt attracted to animals for as long as I've felt attraction (i have an about 60/40 split of attraction for animals/humans), and having these feelings has always made me feel weird. I see a lot of other LGBT people (i'm a queer trans girl) saying really violent anti-zoophile stuff, and it tears me up inside. Is there any way to get rid of these feelings? Any way to not feel bad for having them?

[Heather]

Feelings and thoughts and actions aren't the same thing. This is really important to remember in so many parts of sex and sexuality, and this is one of those.

Is this a common way to feel? It's not, to the best of my understanding. But something not being common doesn't mean it's wrong. How you feel usually isn't something you can change, and with things like this, often trying to change feelings only makes them dig in more. Your feelings and thoughts don't have any impact on anyone but you. They can't hurt anyone, animals included, when they are only thoughts or feelings, so I don't see any reason for you to feel bad about them.

Laws notwithstanding, where we'd get into very problematic territory is that animals can't give fully informed consent to things outside their abilities to understand, like human sexuality. But again, that's about actions, not thoughts and feelings. Make sense?

[lice_eater_22]

Yeah that makes sense. One time I was at a family friends house and their dog started humping me when I was bent over to pick something up. If something like that happened and I let the dog keep going would that be ethical/ok?

[Heather]

This gets us into an area of conversation with this that's moving outside our guidelines and policies.

If and when a human is doing something with an animal for *their* own sexual gratification, or not stopping them from doing something the animal is doing without knowing that a) what they are doing is sexual and b) it is also sexual for the person involved, well, that just isn't at all what informed consent looks like. Not with people, including children, not with animals, not about sex nor about, say signing a lease. When we talk about consent here, we're talking about transparent, informed consent.

But we also can't discuss this more once we're talking about anything more than thoughts or feelings per our policies around informed consent and the law.