In some cases sexually hyperaesthetic women have informed me that sexual feeling has been produced by casual contact with pet dogs and cats.  In such cases there is usually no real perversion, but it seems probable that we may here have an occasional foundation for the somewhat morbid but scarcely vicious excesses of affection which women are apt to display towards their pet dogs or cats.  In most cases of this affection there is certainly no sexual element; in the case of childless women, it may rather be regarded as a maternal than as an erotic symbolism. (The excesses of this non-erotic zoophilia have been discussed by Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, second edition, pp. 166-171.)

Krafft-Ebing considers that complete perversion of sexual attraction toward animals is radically distinct from erotic zoophilia.  This view cannot be accepted.  Bestiality and zooerastia merely present in a more marked and profoundly perverted form a further degree of the same phenomenon which we meet with in erotic zoophilia; the difference is that they occur either in more insensitive or in more markedly degenerate persons.

A fairly typical case of zooerastia has been recorded in America by Howard, of Baltimore.  This was the case of a boy of 16, precociously mature and fairly bright.  He was, however, indifferent to the opposite sex, though he had ample opportunity for gratifying normal passions.  His parents lived in the city, but the youth had an inordinate desire for the country and was therefore sent to school in a village.  On the second day after his arrival at school a farmer missed a sow which was found secreted in an outhouse on the school grounds.  This was the first of many similar incidents in which a sow always took part.  So strong was his passion that on one occasion force had to be used to take him away from the sow he was caressing.  He did not masturbate, and even when restrained from approaching sows he had no sexual inclination for other animals.  His nocturnal pollutions, which were frequent, were always accompanied by images of wallowing swine.  Notwithstanding careful treatment no cure was effected; mental and physical vigor failed, and he died at the age of 23.[41]

It is, however, somewhat doubtful whether we can always or even usually distinguish between zooerastia and bestiality.  Dr. G.F.  Lydston, of Chicago, has communicated to me a case (in which he was consulted) which seems fairly typical and is instructive in this respect.  The subject was a young man of 21, a farmer’s son, not very bright intellectually, but very healthy and strong, of great assistance on the farm, very capable and industrious, such a good farm hand that his father was unwilling to send him away and to lose his services.  There was no history of insanity or neurosis in the family, and no injury or illness in his own history.  He had spells of moroseness and irritability, however, and had also