Bestiality thus resembles masturbation and other abnormal manifestations of the sexual impulse which may be practiced merely faute de mieux and not as, in the strict sense, perversions of the impulse.  Even necrophily may be thus practiced.  A young man who when assisting the grave-digger conceived and carried out the idea of digging up the bodies of young girls to satisfy his passions with, and whose case has been recorded by Belletrud and Mercier, said:  “I could find no young girl who would agree to yield to my desires; that is why I have done this.  I should have preferred to have relations with living persons.  I found it quite natural to do what I did:  I saw no harm in it, and I did not think that any one else could.  As living women felt nothing but repulsion for me, it was quite natural I should turn to the dead, who have never repulsed me.  I used to say tender things to them like ’my beautiful, my love, I love you.’” (Belletrud and Mercier “Perversion de l’Instinct Genesique,” Annales d’Hygiene Publique, June, 1903.) But when so highly abnormal an act is felt as natural we are dealing with a person who is congenitally defective so far as the finer developments of intelligence are concerned.  It was so in this case of necrophily; he was the son of a weak-minded woman of unrestrainable sexual inclinations, and was himself somewhat feeble-minded; he was also, it is instructive to observe, anosmic.

But it is by no means only their dulled sensibility or the absence of women, which accounts for the frequency of bestiality among peasants.  A highly important factor is their constant familiarity with animals.  The peasant lives with animals, tends them, learns to know all their individual characters; he understands them far better than he understands men and women; they are his constant companions, his friends.  He knows, moreover, the details of their sexual lives, he witnesses the often highly impressive spectacle of their coupling.  It is scarcely surprising that peasants should sometimes regard animals as being not only as near to them as their fellow human beings, but even nearer.

The significance of the factor of familiarity is indicated by the great frequency of bestiality among shepherds, goatherds, and others whose occupation is exclusively the care of animals.  Mirabeau, in the eighteenth century, stated, on the evidence of Basque priests, that all the shepherds in the Pyrenees practice bestiality.  It is apparently much the same in Italy.[49] In South Italy and Sicily, especially, bestiality among goatherds and peasants is said to be almost a national custom.[50] In the extreme north of Europe, it is reported, the reindeer, in this respect, takes the place of the goat.

The importance of the same factor is also shown by the fact that when among women in civilization animal perversions appear, the animal is nearly always a pet dog.  Usually in these cases the animal is taught to give gratification by cunnilinctus.  In some cases, however, there is really sexual intercourse between the animal and the woman.