Love Doesn't Make us Harmless
I think zoo ethics has a habit of losing the animal at exactly the moment criticism gets uncomfortable. A conversation starts with a question about welfare, behaviour, boundaries, risk, or what an animal might actually be experiencing, and somehow, a few minutes later, everybody is talking about whether the human involved is a good person.
I don't mean antis coming into a space and telling everyone they're disgusting, or somebody beginning from the assumption that zoophilia itself makes a person abusive. That's its own conversation. I'm talking about the much more ordinary disagreements that happen between people who already accept that zoophiles are people, that attraction and behaviour aren't interchangeable, and that relationships with animals are more complicated than the outside world usually gives them credit for.
Someone questions a practice, raises a welfare concern, or says they think we're being too confident about what an animal's behaviour means. Maybe they don't even have a particularly strong conclusion yet and are just uncomfortable with something and want to pick at it for a while. Then, somehow, the conversation changes.
I've watched a discussion begin with somebody questioning whether a particular sexual practice was safe for dogs. Within minutes, the discussion had become about whether the people practicing it were being called abusers, whether their years of experience counted for anything, and whether the criticism itself was basically anti rhetoric. The original question -- what does this mean for the dog? -- was suddenly somewhere in the background.
We started with an animal and somehow ended up talking about ourselves again.
I understand why this happens. Most zoophiles don't exactly grow up surrounded by nuanced ideas about zoophilia. The categories tend to arrive already glued together. Zoophile becomes fetishist, fetishist becomes animal abuser, animal abuser becomes horrible person, and attraction, behaviour, ethics and character all get condensed into one ugly thing.
Finding zoo spaces can involve pulling those things apart for the first time. You realize that an attraction doesn't tell you what somebody does, that people can have complicated relationships with animals which don't resemble the caricature you've been given, and that animals themselves aren't passive objects sitting around waiting for humans to decide what everything means. I think all of that is valuable, and I don't want to minimize how important it can be for somebody who has spent years believing that one part of themselves makes them irredeemably awful.
What I'm less sure about is whether rejecting that conclusion means we've completely escaped the structure underneath it.
We reject the idea that being zoo automatically makes somebody abusive or bad, obviously, but I think we can still carry around the assumption that causing harm would reveal something catastrophic about what kind of zoo, or what kind of person, we really are. If "zoophile" and "animal abuser" have been treated as interchangeable for long enough, then even after separating them intellectually there can still be this sense that discovering you've harmed an animal would collapse the distinction all over again. Criticism of something you did starts feeling like a judgement on what you are.
I've been calling this "internalized zoophobia" in my head, mostly because I don't have a better phrase yet. I'm not completely happy with it. "Internalized X" can become one of those annoyingly convenient explanations where somebody disagrees with you and, rather than engaging with them, you diagnose the disagreement as evidence that they've absorbed some kind of prejudice. I don't mean it that way. I'm thinking about something much more ordinary: you can sincerely believe that being zoo doesn't make you a monster while still being terrified of discovering something about yourself that feels like proof that everyone else was right.
There's another side to it too, though, and I think it's just as important. Zoo spaces don't only tell us that society's caricature is wrong. Sometimes we replace it with another absolute story: zoos love animals more, zoos understand animals better than normies, zoos wouldn't or couldn't hurt animals because loving animals is supposedly the whole point.
I understand the appeal of that story. If you've been told your attraction proves you must be cruel, hearing that actually it proves how deeply you love animals can feel like finally being allowed to breathe.
The problem is that neither story leaves much room for ordinary human fallibility.
If being zoo is supposed to make us unusually loving, particularly knowledgeable, or somehow less capable of harming animals, criticism becomes threatening all over again. "I think you may be wrong about this" can become "you think I'm abusive" before either person really notices the jump, because admitting the first possibility feels dangerously close to accepting the thing you've spent years reassuring yourself could never be true.
I wonder if that's part of why "but I love them" comes up so quickly.
I don't think people are usually lying when they say that. In fact, I think the opposite is often true. A lot of zoos love the animals in their lives enormously, and the possibility that somebody might look at that relationship and see harm instead of love is probably genuinely painful. I'd be hurt too. If somebody told me I'd seriously misunderstood an animal I loved, I doubt my first internal reaction would be some wonderfully serene appreciation for constructive criticism. I'd probably feel defensive and want to explain everything they hadn't seen, all the context, all the things I knew about that animal which they didn't.
That's probably part of why I don't think love is a very good answer to the question. Love obviously matters and can tell us something important about attachment, motivation and the place another being has in somebody's life, but it doesn't make us harmless. That isn't particularly controversial anywhere else. People hurt partners they love, parents make terrible decisions for children they love, and somebody can adore an animal while still misunderstanding them, frightening them, missing something important, pushing them too far, or convincing themselves that something is fine because they really want it to be fine.
None of that necessarily means the love wasn't real, and I think it's important that we allow both things to be true at the same time. Otherwise love ends up having to do an impossible amount of moral work for us. If I love somebody, then whatever I did must have been loving; if something I did was harmful, then apparently the love itself has to be called into question too. I'm not sure why.
"I love them" tells me something about one side of a relationship. It tells me how the human feels. It doesn't tell me, on its own, what the interaction felt like from the other side, and that distinction bothers me more the longer I think about it.
An animal doesn't have access to the story in our head about our intentions. They experience whatever actually happens around them and to them through their own body, sensory world, expectations, preferences, relationships and history. They don't suddenly gain access to the elaborate explanation inside our head for why we did something. That doesn't make intention irrelevant; somebody who cares about an animal and somebody deliberately trying to hurt them are morally different people in some important ways. It just doesn't make intention the whole story.
I keep coming back to the animal's side of things, or at least as close as we're capable of getting to it. What are they actually doing? What options do they have? What usually makes them comfortable or uncomfortable? Is there another plausible interpretation of what we're seeing, and are we giving greater weight to one interpretation because it's the one we want?
Taking those questions seriously doesn't require pretending animals can't communicate. They communicate all the time, and it's up to us to listen to them. We're simply capable of misunderstanding them, which doesn't strike me as particularly insulting when humans manage to misunderstand other humans every day despite having spoken language. It would be strange if crossing a species boundary somehow made us more reliable.
Knowing an individual well obviously helps. Anybody who has spent serious time with animals knows that. You start noticing things that would mean absolutely nothing to somebody else: tiny changes in posture, routines, the difference between two superficially similar behaviours, the particular way one individual asks for something or tells you they've had enough. That's real knowledge, and I don't like arguments that pretend it isn't. Familiarity still isn't telepathy, though.
The same thing goes for experience more generally. Zoo spaces have people who have been around animals for decades and people who have been part of the community longer than some of us have been alive. It would be ridiculous to act as if that experience counts for nothing. I'm just not sure experience always means what we think it means.
Twenty years of experience could represent twenty years of learning, changing your mind, noticing mistakes and becoming much better at understanding animals. It could also mean you've had twenty years to become very comfortable with the same interpretation. Usually it's probably some messy mixture of both.
This happens everywhere humans deal with animals. Training methods change, husbandry changes, veterinary standards change. Things that were once completely normal start looking questionable as people learn more, and occasionally things that seemed questionable turn out to have been misunderstood too. I'd be pretty amazed if zoo ethics somehow turned out to be the one area involving animals where we'd already figured everything out.
I'm suspicious of intelligence doing too much work here as well. Being smart is useful, being able to reason carefully is useful, and knowing a lot about animals is obviously useful. None of those things make somebody immune to wanting an answer to be true, though. Sometimes being clever just gives us a larger vocabulary for explaining why the conclusion we wanted was correct all along.
I include myself in that. I'm suspicious of ethical conclusions which happen to end with me getting exactly what I wanted anyway. That doesn't prove they're wrong, but it does make me want to check my work twice.
Maybe that's part of why "I don't know" has become such an appealing answer to me. I don't mean it as an excuse to never decide anything, because sometimes we have to make decisions with incomplete information and sometimes the evidence is strong enough that pretending uncertainty would be dishonest in its own way. There are other times where I genuinely don't know what an animal experienced, though, and I don't think filling that gap with confidence does the animal any favours.
There's something else mixed into all of this which I think has less to do with animals and more to do with self-worth. If discovering that you caused harm would completely destroy your understanding of yourself as a decent person, there is a very strong incentive not to discover it. That seems like a terrible condition under which to reason well. If being wrong about one thing threatens your entire identity as a loving or ethical person, it becomes much harder to seriously consider the possibility that you might actually be wrong.
Someone questions something you did and, instead of first wondering whether they have a point, your brain is already busy proving that you're loving, responsible, experienced and nothing like the people society warned everyone about. The original question is still sitting there somewhere, but now it's competing with much more frightening questions about what this says about you, whether you're being called abusive, whether your relationship was what you thought it was, and whether you've somehow become "one of the bad ones."
I don't think the answer is necessarily some grand journey toward loving every part of being zoo. Maybe some people get there, and good for them, but I'm not sure everybody has to. Being basically okay with yourself might be enough: okay enough that finding out you were wrong about something doesn't become an existential emergency, and okay enough that admitting a mistake doesn't immediately turn into deciding you're secretly horrible.
You might have done something wrong yesterday or been wrong about something for fifteen years. Either way, the useful part starts once you can actually look at it without needing to destroy yourself or deny it ever happened.
I think this applies to the people around us too. One uncomfortable thing about abuse is that abusive people don't necessarily look like monsters. Sometimes they do, obviously, and cruelty can be deliberate and unmistakable. But somebody can also be funny, generous, caring, affectionate and deeply loved by the people around them while still doing something abusive. Somebody can sincerely love the being they harm. Your best friend can hurt somebody. A person you respect enormously can have a blind spot that would horrify you if it came from a stranger.
I think people sometimes resist that idea because "abuser" gets imagined as a species of person rather than a word for something people are capable of doing. Once abusers become monsters, discovering that somebody you love has behaved abusively gives you two horrible-looking options: either the thing wasn't really abusive after all, or the person you knew has to be rewritten from top to bottom as secretly terrible all along.
I'm not convinced either is necessary. A loving person can do something abusive, a kind person can rationalize something ugly, and somebody can get something badly wrong without every good thing about them turning out to have been fake. That seems much closer to how people actually are.
It also makes "but they love their animal" considerably less reassuring as an answer. Maybe they really do love them, and maybe everything they're telling you about that love is sincere. The question about what actually happened can still remain.
This is where I start noticing the animal disappear again. A conversation can begin with what an animal might have experienced and, without anybody deliberately deciding to do it, gradually become a conversation about whether the human deserves to feel judged. Then we're discussing the human's intentions, identity and reputation, whether criticism was sufficiently respectful, whether somebody is secretly anti, whether somebody's relationship has been insulted, and whether the human involved is fundamentally good.
I'm not saying those things never matter. We are humans having conversations with other humans, unfortunately, so somebody's feelings are going to turn up sooner or later. I just sometimes wonder when exactly the subject changed.
There's an animal there whose experience started the whole conversation, and now they're almost functioning as evidence in a debate about somebody else's moral character. I find that strange, especially in spaces which talk so much about animals being individuals rather than extensions of us.
Maybe we spend too much time asking whether we're good zoos. I understand why, because most of the outside world has already decided the answer, often without knowing anything about the individual person, so naturally people want to argue back. There's something reassuring about categories like good zoo, bad zoo, ethical zoo, abusive zoo, loving zoo; once you've found the correct one, maybe you can finally settle into it.
Animals don't live inside those categories.
They're already doing whatever they're doing before we name any of this, with their own lives going on while we're busy deciding what our relationship means, what our identity means, whether we're ethical enough, and whether somebody else's criticism threatens any of it. Their relationship with us may be enormously important to them, and I don't mean to minimize that, but it still isn't the entirety of who they are.
I've started wondering whether some zoo conversations become anthropocentric in exactly the places where people least expect them to. Not because people don't care about animals, but because caring about animals gets tangled up with everything the relationship means to the human: love, identity, desire, shame, the need to be understood. None of those things are trivial, but they're ours.
I still don't know whether "internalized zoophobia" is really the right explanation for all of this. Maybe it's part of it. Maybe there are three different things going on and I'm lazily sticking them under one name because it saves me the trouble. I'd actually be interested in somebody pulling the idea apart.
Mostly I keep noticing the same change of subject. Somebody asks what an animal experienced and, eventually, we're discussing whether somebody is a monster.
So no, I don't think the most interesting question is whether you're a monster. I understand why that question follows zoophiles around and why we're so eager to answer it, but I'm starting to think we've spent too much time doing so.
I can believe you when you tell me you love them. I can believe your intentions are good, and I don't need to decide you're secretly a terrible person before I can still wonder about the other animal in the relationship. I want to know what the world looks like from over there, as far as we're capable of knowing it, and I want us to notice when a conversation about animals quietly becomes a conversation about ourselves.
Eventually, "am I a good zoo?" stops being a question about the animal, and I'm starting to think that should bother us more than it currently does. If zoo ethics is supposed to mean anything beyond reassuring ourselves that we're good people, then we need enough confidence in ourselves to hear criticism without collapsing, enough humility to keep re-evaluating what we think we know, and enough curiosity to keep looking back toward the animal even when the answer isn't the one we hoped for.
Whatever else we disagree about, whatever labels we use and however complicated these conversations become, I think there has to be one thing underneath all of it: put animals first.
Article written by R.V.W (September 2026)
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