Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind: Why isn’t eating meat as bad as bestiality?

I eat meat every day. And I don't feel guilty. Perhaps I should

[Getty Images] 
issue 04 January 2014

So what I’ve found myself wondering over the festive period, again and again, is whether it would ever be OK to have sex with a sheep.

I mean, jeez, don’t take this the wrong way. I am not thinking of a particular sheep. There is not one in my shed right now, emitting worried, stricken bleats. Nor indeed am I thinking — that way — of any sheep at all. I’d be lying if I said sheep never crossed my mind at all, in the small hours of a cold and lonely night, but when they do I can only swear it is in a manner both chaste and numerological.

And yet this — sex with sheep — is where my thoughts repeatedly have ended up. Because it’s not OK, is it? Not, really, ever. And yet eating them is. And what I cannot figure out, try as I might, is why one should be so permissible as to be unremarkable, and the other not permissible at all.

It doesn’t have to be sheep.

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