Austin Sarat
It is not often that members of the United States Senate spend time talking about bestiality. But they did on Tuesday when, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, F.B.I. Director Kash Patel was asked why he had changed the qualifications for service in the agency.
Along the way, Patel removed the prohibition on anyone who has engaged in bestiality from joining the FBI. According to the journalist Kathryn Wilkens, the bureau now “allow(s) applicants to remain eligible if the conduct occurred before they turned 18….(T)he policy does not differentiate between applicants who willingly engaged in bestiality and those who were coerced.”
During the hearing, Illinois Senator Richard Durbin pointed out that the Director had stated that removing the automatic disqualification of those people was important because the FBI was losing too many qualified candidates and was adhering to the “rigors of standards from yesteryear.” Patel ignored the issue of the FBI’s personnel difficulties and responded that he did not “want to punish victims of bestiality.”
Patel insisted that if someone was “forced” to engage in bestiality, they should not be disqualified. He described them as “great Americans.”
Patel displayed more sensitivity toward them than he has shown toward people who disagree with the Trump Administration on politics or support DEI initiatives. The director thinks those things should disqualify someone from trying to prevent terrorism or apprehend drug traffickers, but theft from an employer, prostitution, or engaging in bestiality should not.
Patel has waged a crusade against professionalism and politicized the agency. He is welcomed into the ranks a crew of people who have helped alter its culture in ways that do a disservice to the agency itself and the American people as well.
As NPR reports, “(A) number of senior FBI officials have been pushed out under the Trump administration. These are people with decades of experience. So the Bureau’s lost a lot of knowledge, a lot of expertise, which matters now because neither Patel nor his deputy have any experience in the FBI.” And Patel “he has a very different leadership style from his predecessors…. Patel, in contrast, pushes out flashy videos or photos on social media… he’s also gone to NHL games and …sat ringside for UFC fights in Miami and Las Vegas.”
Even for him, the appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was bizarre. For a moment, his testimony seemed like a Saturday Night Live sketch.
That was especially the case when Louisiana Senator John Kennedy returned to the subject of bestiality later in the hearing. He asked Patel to explain what the FBI had changed regarding eligibility to serve in the FBI.
Patel listed “prostitution, bestiality, crimes like that” as things that would no longer disqualify someone from service. He explained that if “you were a victim of…these vicious crimes” and “wanted to serve your country, the FBI is now for the first time ever considering your application.”
Senator Kennedy seemed a bit taken aback by the FBI Director’s idea that someone could be a victim of bestiality. “How do you involuntarily do it?”
“I am trying to understand why you did this,” he explained.
Kennedy asked, “If Joe participated in bestiality, not as the animal but as the human, don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?” “If he voluntarily did it, sure,” Patel responded, but if he was trafficked into it that is different.
Kennedy’s questioning highlighted the muddled thinking and absurd reasoning that led Patel to want to open the FBI to people who had participated in an activity that has been an important taboo since biblical times. And as the senator pointed out, “All this stuff has really hurt the FBI.”
Given all the problems that the FBI is now having, “Why would you even get into bestiality?” Patel said it had not been his idea, but that someone had shown him cases in which a person was forced to have sex with animals and was disqualified when they applied to the FBI.
Kennedy asked, “Why didn’t you just say, ‘What planet did you parachute in from?”
Kennedy was right to ask that question and to observe that “All this stuff has really hurt the FBI.”
We have an economy that is faltering, a war that we are losing, and problems too numerous to name, and an administration preoccupied with renaming buildings, building ballrooms, and ensuring that victims of bestiality are treated fairly.
Like the president, Patel’s priorities seem “increasingly detached from the concerns of voters” and ordinary Americans. In Trump’s case, as the New York Times notes, “His focus is trained on his own obsessions and pet projects, including his expansive and costly renovations at the White House and around the nation’s capital, a topic that he returns to again and again.”
Not sure where making sure that “victims” of bestiality would fall on Americans’ list of hopes for the FBI, but I suspect it would not be very high.
And as the forensic psychiatrist Brian James Holoyday notes, “(L)aws punishing individuals who have sex with nonhuman animals have existed since the earliest written legal codes.” The Old Testament says, “Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith, neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto” and describes the severity of the offense this way: “If a man has sexual relations with an animal, he must be put to death.”
Today, every state but Nevada and West Virginia criminalizes engaging in sexual conduct with animals. Some treat bestiality as a felony, carrying a long prison term. Others classify it as a misdemeanor.
“The act of bestiality,” Michigan State University Law Professor Rebecca Wisch explains, “was often placed in statute that covered other sexual acts that were historically considered ‘unnatural’ and ‘perverted’ (Maryland), or ‘abominable’ and ‘detestable’ (Rhode Island). One state (South Carolina) still refers to the activity as ‘buggery.’”
Recently, she notes, “States have moved from categorizing these acts as crimes against morality to viewing them as a form of animal cruelty.” None of these laws makes an exception for cases in which a person is in some way forced to have sex with an animal.
Human trafficking is unspeakably evil. Patel is surely right on that score and right to denounce the “degrading acts of all kinds” that victims of trafficking endure.
But as Senator Kennedy observed, “We are having a tough time attracting agents, good quality agents we can trust because so many people, fairly or unfairly, that in order to be an FBI agent now, your political point of view matters.”
That, not bestiality, is the real issue facing the FBI. For Patel, it is much easier to address the latter than it is to address the conditions that Kennedy highlighted
In the United States, bestiality has long been prohibited. The rationale for criminalizing sex acts with animals has changed over time and has included moral condemnation, considerations of animal rights and animal welfare, and most recently, a concern about the relationship between animal cruelty and interpersonal violence, colloquially known as the Link. This article reviews the history and current state of bestiality law in the United States. It notes important differences in language, specificity, and potential punishments for offenders depending on the jurisdiction. It also reviews the research basis of the Link between bestiality and interpersonal violence and some risks associated with a reliance on the Link to promote legislative reform.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
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