Research by Richard Brown and Doron S. Ben-Atar sheds light on colonial bestiality

Thursday afternoon at the UConn Co-op Bookstore in the Storrs Center, Richard Brown and Doron S. Ben-Atar gave a talk on their co-written book, “Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic.”

The book covers the topic of bestiality in the colonies, and is a historical study of sexual crimes against animals in New England during the colonial period. Brown and Ben-Atar found many clusters of these crimes within the New England colonies, more specifically in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and particularly focused on two cases. One crime that put on trial and convicted two men in their eighties for bestiality and had them executed by hanging, and the other case, two teens were put on trial for the same offense.

“This seemed to us,” said Brown, “to be a very strange situation that we hoped to explore further.”

“This book is unusual in so many ways,” said Ben-Atar. “There is a great deal of uncomfortable air surrounding the topic of bestiality. But there is evidence of it everywhere. The issue became: ‘how do we explain this and give the reader as much information as possible?’”

The two historians began by trying to get a broader understanding of this crime as a phenomenon. They found people who commit this crime “tend to take part in animal abuse, which leads to animal sadism,” said Ben-Atar.