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We are now in the timeline where the journalistic integrity of the New York Times rests upon whether or not it is physically possible to train a dog to anally rape a human.
The New York Times ran an opinion article by Nicholas Kristof wherein a number of Palestinians report being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted in Israeli prisons. There’s not much in the way of physical evidence, but that is hardly unusual in rape crimes. Israel has strenuously denied the allegations, characterizing them as blood libel. It seems to be a he-said/she-said that comes down to whether you believe the Palestinian prisoners (who often have ties to Hamas or other extremist groups, hence why they ended up in Israeli prisons) or the IDF.
Certain enterprising young pro-Israel influencers think they can to better than appeal to untrustworthiness. They puport to have found a smoking gun that proves the NYT published a complete fabrication in order to libel the State of Israel, and by extension all Jews. One of the more salacious anecdotes regards a man from Gaza who alleges that he was raped by a dog.
If, in fact, such a thing were impossible, then it would prove without doubt that the paper of record recklessly printed unverified falsehoods. We are now in the “doctors arguing with the author about the medical literature” stage of the discourse. See, even though we have documented evidence that dogs can cause rectal injury to humans, in none of those reports was the initial contact involuntary on the part of the human.
I am not well acquainted with dogs, but my understanding is that it is not particularly hard to get them to hump things. I guess the people making this argument are hoping that others won’t want to think too hard about the mechanics of dog rape.
Despite calls and rumors to the contrary, The Times so far has declined to retract the article.
There's a whole internet joke about white women liking to have sex with dogs, which is a good sign that it's possible to get dogs to fuck someone without having to look it up myself. And once you get to "horny dogs will fuck humans" level, I'm not sure why its unbelievable that you could train them to do it. Heck, you probably don't even need to train them much, fucking is a natural instinct if they haven't been neutered and tons of animals commit rape. Hell bottlenose dolphins apparently even form rape gangs together. If you believe you can train a dog to chase someone down and hold them in place, why not rape?
That doesn't mean the NYT story is true, but "a dog would never do that" seems like extreme innocence at best. Yeah, a dog would never maul a child to death either I suppose.
Never imagined I'd be posting this on a Wednesday morning, but I think applying the word rape to animal behavior is unnecessarily anthropomorphic. A dog doesn't rape, it just goes with its instincts. Rape is a human term involving consent, etc.
In this context, there would pretty clearly be a human involved, so the term seems appropriate.
That's just my point though, calling it rape suggests a volition, a willful act against the consensual, as opposed to simply instinct. A human can rape, because rape is a human act, defined within human terms. A dog (or whatever we're talking about) cannot be defined within those terms, even if the human is unwilling. Presumably a dog would only have sex with a human if coerced or duped. I guess. I don't particularly want to know. Even if it did make it with a human, it would not be rape as such, though it would be a violation, and certainly unseemly and profane, if we can use those terms.
This reminds me of a time around 20 years ago sitting in a local dive, a college bar devoid of college students, with a friend of mine, he was flipping through a magazine, one of many the owner had left at the bar, some biker/art/alternative magazine. On one page was a blonde Japanese woman showing a good deal of leg, walking what appeared to be a Pyrenees or Samoyed. I was an idiot and had been drinking and made a stupid joke: "Turn the page and she'll be fucking that dog."
He turned the page. I hadn't got it quite right, as the dog was humping her. Not her leg, if you understand my meaning. I never looked at that bar's magazines after that. Anyway they closed their big swinging door about a decade later.
You can disagree about the word rape here, it's fine, it's not something I care that deeply about, just my sense. I used to be annoyed at the reddit crowd when someone would remark on dolphins' mental capacity and the tendency to be protective of humans in open water, then to many thousands of upvotes someone would counter testily "Yeah but fuck dolphins, they're rapists." This seems the same kind of naïve misconstruing of animal behavior as the people who keep chimpanzees as pets and call them "part of the family".
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