After watching the movie Zoo I reflected on what I had just watched. Contrary to what I thought I would be feeling, I experienced a sense of empathy towards these men who had everything taken away from them. I think Zoo was a very important film to make because it took away the stereotypical judgments of beastiality and allowed us to look closer at what was actually going on. We saw real people.
Zoo is a documentary about a fatal sexual encounter that occurred outside of Seattle. The movie itself is rather ironic being many opposing adjectives, like tender, shocking, haunting, elegantly made, disgusting and beautiful. You experience many emotions while viewing this film, while you are filled with a constant struggle on how to feel about it. I would say this is a good film that everyone should see because it really gets you thinking.
The men who participated in zoophilia made a sort of club that met at a farm outside of Seattle, they all connected through the Internet. It was like a boys night they took part in every so often. The Internet was a turning point in many of these men’s lives. Those who had participated in zoophilia found out that it was a disease and they realized they were not normal. And the ones who had never done it before were exposed to it and were able to find links to satisfy their desires or answer their questions.
The interesting thing about this movie for me was the perspective of loving the animals. Before this movie I had always thought of zoophilia as just having sex with an animal for your own pleasure. These men make it about the horse and themselves, it is actual love making. There were no bonds or ties, which shows the horse had to be consensual. It is a horse; if it was not happy one could be severely hurt. The men said they went out in the field naked and the horses just came to them, it is their nature. It is pretty sensual and ritualistic. Can the horses really love the men the way they love them? Other than that, the horses were taken care of extremely well. The owner said they would have been fed before he was.
The men themselves, although may have had 'tangled wires’, misplaced human love for the love of their animals. We do not see what made them this way, but we do see their personalities. They were normal people, maybe a little quiet, or shy, or maybe uneducated. But aren’t we all? One man just liked that horses weren’t humans and they did not talk. We should not be forced to want something we do not. He probably would never experience love with a human.
After Mr. Hands’ death the law quickly changed to ban zoophilia and the horses were removed from the farm and castrated. The men and the horses had to change. This made me think about how before the horses were wild and free and now they had to be behaved and repressed. They had to wear what the other horses wore and be confined, they turned these horses into what they were “supposed to be.” The same happened to the men. The last interviews with the men were disparaging, they had nothing left and were trying to fill their lives with something that mattered, to fill the hole. If we really thought about it and converted it to human terms, it would be like taking away someone’s love forever. That takes time to recover from.
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