Sexual intercourse with animals has finally been outlawed in Sweden after a new law was passed last Tuesday.
The penal code has refused to list bestiality as a crime for the past seven decades because laws on cruelty to animals were said to be adequate enough to cover it. Previous regulations only banned sexual intercourse with animals if it was proven the animal suffered physical or mental harm.
The new law was supported by Rural Affairs Minister Eskil Erlandsson, who has believed for some time that the act of bestiality needed to be made illegal. Last year, he said that bestiality was, without a doubt, completely unacceptable.
However, cattle farmer Gudman Stenstrom said he felt the law would make no difference. He explained that he didn’t care about the law and he believed it was passed solely for someone to win a political point.
Stenstrom’s views stem for a time about six years ago when he thought he heard his cows being murdered at his farm near the southern Swedish town of Sloinge when he heard them stamping their feet in the barn. However, when he went to check what the commotion was about, he discovered a middle-aged man engaged in sexual intercourse with a calf.
However, far from raging at the man, Stenstrom first joked that the calves hadn’t reached sexual maturity yet. He then caught the man when he tried to flee, before bringing him back to the barn and teaching about the difference between heifers and calves as well as animal insemination.
The farmer went on to say that the majority of these people are not well and need psychologists to help them, adding that they also need education on bestiality.
Erlandsson was criticised in 2008 when he used a graphic example to explain why it wasn’t easy to define what should be classed as sexual abuse to animals.