Fla. bill inspired by goat rapes seeks to make sex with animals illegal

There's an animal sex bill moving through the state Senate right now that's caused some snickering, a little uneasiness and a case of confusion that's made one senator the subject of jokes.

But Sen. Nan Rich is completely serious when she explains the importance of her bill, which would make having sex with animals illegal.

"People mostly don't want to discuss it. I watch my colleagues. They kind of look down when the bill is being presented," said Rich, D-Weston. "We should be adults here. It's something that happens and it needs to be discussed and we need to fix the problem. It makes people uncomfortable, but that's never stopped me."

Rich sat in her office with a thick folder containing news clippings of cases around the state of people having sex with animals. While the act is sickening enough, she says research has shown that people who molest animals are likely to rape or molest people.

"There's quite a number of cases," said Rich, holding up an article. "This one is, unfortunately, a man having sex with his guide dog. This is about a goat's death, a female goat in Walton County that had been sexually assaulted. Unfortunately it's not an isolated incident. We need a mechanism to prosecute."

Florida is one of 16 states without a law banning bestiality. Rich's bill has been unanimously approved by two Senate committees and has two other committee stops before reaching the full chamber. It would make the offense a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.

The Walton County case in 2006 helped bring the problem to light. There were at least four goat rapes in Mossy Head, including one that resulted in the animal dying. Instead of being charged with a sex act, a suspect was charged with stealing two goats, said Dee Thompson, the director of Panhandle Animal Welfare Society.

Thompson has been a strong advocate of a law ever since, and she says a month hasn't gone by without a call from animal welfare workers in other counties asking how to handle similar cases.

"Until this case happened to us, we never dreamt there wasn't a law against this," Thompson said. "I guess it was one of those things that we thought was a no-brainer."

The case, and even the bill, has caused some to snicker. In Mossy Head, someone began selling T-shirts with cartoon goats that read, "Baaaaa means No!" and "What happens in Mossy Head stays in Mossy Head."

"I don't think people knew how to wrap their arms around it, so they made light of it because they couldn't conceive in their minds that this could happen," Thompson said.

And in the Capitol, Sen. Larcenia Bullard, D-Miami, become the subject of jokes when she questioned a provision in the bill that ensures animal husbandry won't become illegal.

"People are taking these animals as their husbands? What's husbandry?" Bullard asked during a committee meeting. Animal husbandry is actually the breeding and raising of livestock.

Rich and Thompson say their concern isn't just for animals, but that someone could get caught having sex with an animal, the case could get thrown out and that person could then later rape a human.

"Lock people up that commit these kinds of heinous crimes, otherwise you're leaving a person out on the streets that, if they commit sexually deviant acts in one area, it's been proven that they do in the other," Rich said.

Police in Tallahassee arrested a man after learning he was having sex with his seeing-eye dog. He was initially charged with felony animal cruelty, but prosecutors dropped that charge and recharged him with "breach of the peace."

"It's just very hard to prosecute and get a conviction on this," Rich said. "If we don't have the tools to stop it, we need to put it into statute."