Animal Rape, Part 2

Spencer

He hasn’t done anything new or spectacular in the last ten days, except for being sooo cute! He comes up to me and puts his paws on my knee when he wants to be petted or when he is hungry. I hope he will hop up on my lap someday and find he likes it.

Saying Goodbye to WordPress

My friend Rishi is setting up a blog at SquareSpace. She says it is much easier than WordPress and is fun to work with! And it does the SEO automatically. I don’t understand how that could be possible, but we shall see. If all goes well, this may be the last post on the WordPress blog. Or the next to last!

This blog will remain on the Web, so you can always read back articles. I plan to republish the most popular articles, along with a couple that I believe should be popular but aren’t. The new blog will look like this, with a new picture in the header every so often. (I’m change-aversive.)

Animal Rape, Part 2

I figured out what percentage of my readers experienced being abused by animals based on the number of people disclosing in the comments, the number of followers, and the number of visitors to the article. It came to 0.5% for followers and 4% for viewers. 

The odds of these numbers being too high are very low but the odds of them being too low are quite good. Even a thousandth of a percent, though, would break my heart. So I decided to continue writing about it in case Mr. Google mistakes it for the next viral topic. (Thank goodness I can still laugh.)

Categories do not usually have tight boundaries; on close inspection, they seem to blend into each other. So it is with animal rape and bestiality. Animal rape is a form of bestiality. It is weaponizing the animal to bring pain and fear to another human being. The animal is used to force sex on the child, just as a stick or gun barrel is used for penetration.

I think it is reasonable to assume that anything that is done to an animal in a cult setting is terribly traumatic for a child. Seeing an animal tortured or killed, whether it be in a ritual sacrifice, an experiment, or at a “party” will leave a huge wound. The animal is smaller and has far less power than the adults, and it is not lost on a child that they, too, are small and powerless to defend themselves. And what if the child loves that animal? It might have been a puppy or kitten that they were allowed to feed and pet before it was killed. 

Since children identify with animals through size and strength, they can easily imagine that they could be treated as the animal is being treated. I still remember the scene in “When Rabbit Howls” when the family is driving along a rural road, the mother at the wheel. She spots a rabbit and stops the car so that they can watch it. The father grabs his gun and shoots it. Trudi immediately makes the connection: “If he could do that to a bunny rabbit he could do that to me.” Why did he do it? Not for a sacrifice, not for the blood, and not for the meat. He did it because he could.

Seeing animals being abused in any way is traumatic for a child. Seeing them being raped is horrifying. Seeing a child rape an animal brings the realization that they may be the next one coerced into sexually attacking an animal. Seeing a child being forced to endure being licked on the genitals or penetrated by an animal is equally if not more horrifying. (When I imagine these scenes, I identify with the animal when the abuse is by adults, but I identify with both the animal and the child regardless of whether the child is cast as the perpetrator or the victim.)

So how can we heal from these things? The same way we heal from everything else. We cry, we throw up, we wash our face and get some sleep. We journal and draw and talk to our parts. We tell the little child that we once were, now frozen in that moment of long-ago horror, that it is over. We say it wasn’t their fault, ever, and we love them. 

And, if we can, we find somebody who can bear to hear what happened. We need somebody to believe us and can tell us that our reactions were normal back then and are normal now. We need to hear that we weren’t given a choice, we were forced into doing it, and all the blame and the shame belongs to the people who made us do that. And yes, we need validation, we need to hear that it happened to others, too. 

If we are very lucky, we may meet another person who had something similar happen and who wants to talk about it. Each believes the other, even if they don’t completely believe themselves. Each sees the other as blameless, even if they are wracked with guilt. 

The other person serves as a mirror, in a way. Except that the image we see is innocent and blameless. After a while, it occurs to us that we, too, might be innocent. We might truly not be to blame, and we can allow ourselves to lay down our burden of guilt.

I want to say one more thing about dealing with animal rape and other forms of abuse using animals. Chances are that you have remembered other things before this came into your consciousness. You already have tools to deal with it – what worked in the past will, in all probability, work again. You are the expert in what you need to grieve, to understand what happened to you, and to recognize the lies they told you and made you believe through their actions. You have done it before, and you can do it again.