Who is exploiting whom when man lies down with animal?

That there was virtue in a dog's lick, many an ancient Greek believed

That the plumes of rare birds and the brilliance of fox fur enhanced masculine attractiveness, every medieval knight worth knowing knew. I throw in these observations as my contribution to the bestiality discussion initiated in last week's Independent Sunday Review. There's a bestialist trying to get out in every one of us, that's all I'm saying.

That the plumes of rare birds and the brilliance of fox fur enhanced masculine attractiveness, every medieval knight worth knowing knew. I throw in these observations as my contribution to the bestiality discussion initiated in last week's Independent Sunday Review. There's a bestialist trying to get out in every one of us, that's all I'm saying.

You do better as a bestialist under paganism than under monotheism. As a pagan there was always a chance that some god might take a fancy to you in the guise of an animal. But One and Only gods don't do that stuff. Lie with a beast in the Old Testament and you're guilty not only of an abomination but of confusion, which is worse. I am a great admirer of the laws against confusion myself - milk isn't meat, Jeffrey Archer isn't literature, your neighbour's ox isn't your wife. But I accept that there's a downside, aesthetically speaking.

Who'd be without Titian's Rape of Europa, or Leonardo's Leda and the Swan or Yeats' great poem of the same name? The feathered glory, the strange heart beating, the brute blood of the air. Not that there was much feathered glory in the first photographs of bestiality that came my way.

I was selling small leather goods on Cambridge market at the time, on the stall opposite the world's filth in cling-film wrappers, and in a Jaffa orange box under a tarpaulin at the back of the stall, the über-filth, magazines depicting acts of love between women and domestic or farmyard animals, reserved for cognoscenti, classicists, masters of colleges and, at the end of the day, fellow stallholders like me. Grossly engrossing I found them, arousing by virtue of their outlandishness.

I took a couple home once in order to enliven a dinner party I was giving. Something told me that not everybody would like them. Women especially, I guessed, would see the photographs as exploitative of their sex and me as doubly exploitative for looking at them.

Talk like that was obligatory in the early 70s. Why must every perversion have a woman in it, blah blah? How come there's no trade in pictures of men stuffing chickens, blah blah? What I hadn't expected anyone to say, though, was that the photographs were exploitative of the animals.

"It's exploitative of a pig," I remember snapping back, "to turn him into a bacon sandwich. It's not exploitative of a pig to tell him that you love him and to offer him unrestricted access to your private parts."

To which the answer - "Any sort of sexual interference with an animal is abuse!" - brought all further conviviality to an end.

Search me. I find abuse a problematic concept. To what extent it can be said of the bestialist that he or she takes advantage of mute compliance, trespasses on the loyalty of his or her dog or pony or simply misreads a signal, I am unable to decide. Date rape is a tricky enough charge when it concerns only humans; across the species it is a conundrum to baffle Solomon.

On the face of it, the tongue-lolling bull terrier humping our shin is indeed asking for everything it gets, but how can we claim to understand what courtship means to dogs when we make such a hash of interpreting what it means to one another? What if the shin-hump is merely the equivalent of taking off all your clothes, climbing into your boyfriend's bed, feeding him a bucketload of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, and ordering him to keep his hands to himself?

I was forced to consider the place of sex in the life of animals throughout the time I exercised a sort of stewardship (I cannot in this context employ the terms "owned" or "kept") over a cat called Wolfgang. In all other respects a fine and sociable and even comic cat, Wolfgang repeatedly let me down in the matter of what, had he been a human, we'd have called keeping his dick in his pants.

No sooner did I have a guest than Wolfgang would leap into a prominent position on a sofa or a window sill (for he was an exhibitionist as well as an onanist), entwine his manhood in a blanket or a doyly, make his eyes disappear into his skull, purr with a lasciviousness that would have made De Sade blush, and use himself so improperly that I feared for his life let alone his sanity.

Let no one tell you that masturbation, in man or beast, is harmless. Masturbation did to Wolfgang what generations of teachers once warned children it would do to them. It made him blind. It made the palms of his paws hairy. And it made a simpleton of him. Whether, in the light of that, he would have had a more fulfilling erotic life had I interfered in it I cannot say. But I fail to see that I could have done him any harm he hadn't already done himself.

In the end I stand by the abomination position. At least there's grandeur in abomination. Grandeur of outrage and grandeur of arousal. But we moderns have lost all that. We sin only porno-farcically now.

In those magazines I devoured on Cambridge market the women always wore regulation pin-up gear - high heels, stockings, suspenders. To lie down with a pig they wore suspenders? Yes. Is that not wonderful? To inflame the beast they showed him their lingerie.

But who knows - maybe lingerie was all that was in poor demented Wolfgang's mind.