Our Deleted History

At time of writing, it's been about a year since the Zooey Dot Pub Discord server went down. There's a lot of reasons that I'm still pretty angry that that happened, but honestly, I'm a lot more fine with it than I would have ever expected to be based off how I felt at the time. The new Matrix space that we run is better than the Discord ever was in a lot of ways. 
 
But, there is still one thing that I don't think I'll ever get over as it comes to the server being taken down, and that's just the loss of all the history that existed within that space. On some levels, it feels weird to consider a Discord server "history". It's certainly no marble statue or famous painting. But, what it was was a tapestry made up of thousands of zoos all putting their little pieces together to form a bigger picture. One that was built over three whole years. And while 2022-2025 isn't all that far back in the past, at the same time if I had the ability to go back in time and read through what zoos were talking about twenty years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, even longer, I know for a fact that I would love access to a resource like that. 
 
Unfortunately, it doesn't really exist. 
 
Speaking of history going away, a few weeks ago, Zooville, the objectively biggest zoo space on the internet, just disappeared. It's back up now, at time of writing. But it felt really strange seeing it just vanish. I'm lucky enough to have friends all around the internet in various zoo spaces, so I had some idea of what was going on behind the scenes, but I had so many people messaging me to ask what was going on. People I'd never spoken to before were sending me DM's on every single platform trying to figure out where Zooville went. I don't have anything to do with that project, outside of having interviewed the creator of it one time a few years back. So, when I think about how that must have felt for the people that were messaging me about it, I can imagine the amount of desperation that they must have had. Maybe they didn't really have any other connections to the community other than that one site, and so when it went down I was the closest point of proxy just due to the fact that I have some visibility. But, it took a while for me to know what was going on too, and so for a lot of those conversations I couldn't do anything but shrug.
 
Zooville has been around since 2019, which isn't super long, but is longer than most of the current big activism projects. It represents 7 years of zoo history. Messages, threads, people, events, research projects. It's another piece of the culture of our community that, much like the Discord server, just one day disappeared. Thankfully, they were able to restore to a backup, but it's not hard to imagine a world where there weren't people who were willing to put in the work to do that. 
 
Zooville is a direct replacement for the forum that came before it, Beast Forum. Much like the Zooville of today, there were a lot of concerns around the ethics of the forum. There was a lot of content hosted that was labeled as abusive, as well as parts of the forum that were, from what I understand, pretty disgusting to be in. And yet, it too is a part of our history. The site has been offline since 2019, just before Zooville came online, and at least from the little bit of research that I've done there aren't really any rips of the site that exist out there. In fact, even using tools like the Wayback Machine, a project by the Internet Archive to record the internet as it's grown and changed, Beastforum is an "Excluded URL", something that they've decided is history that's not worth saving. Zooville is similarly excluded, so if it did end up staying down, that road would be closed off for saving the history there too. 
 
There were, of course, places that zoos connected before Beastforum. Some of the bigger ones were places like Beast Chat, and other Usenet groups like alt.sex.bestialtiy. From talking with some of the older zoos out there, the Usenet scene was really the first place that zoos really started connecting with each other, although I've also heard stories of some frankly insane classified in the newspaper way back in the day. There might be someone out there that's saved some of those old logs. A zoo that's old enough to have been around back then, who just never bothered to wipe their hard drive in the last 40 years. But, I don't really know. It's not like there's a great way to just ask every zoo out there. I certainly can't Google "early Usenet zoo chat logs". While it's possible that some level of those records exist, I think it's fair to say that that's pretty much lost history as well. 
 
But, there were zoos before even the internet. There were zoos before the newspaper. There have always been zoos, for as long as humanity has existed. And, as much as it sucks to say, society has rarely looked at us favorably. As far as I know, there's never been a "museum of zoosexuality", that existed to catalogue historical examples of our existence. 
 
Zoosexuality is something that we know exists across our whole existence, and has been a global phenomenon. It's part of the human experience to have people attracted to animals. That's something that's just definitively true. And yet, we have so little representation throughout history. There's just enough to know we were there. From the paintings of Édouard-Henri Avril in the 1920s, to Rajasthani Indian paintings in the 19th century. Leonardo DaVinci and Michelangelo tried their hand at zoophilic art when they did their own drawings of the famous story of Leda and the Swan, an old Greek tale of Zeus turning into a Swan to seduce a human woman, leading to them getting it on, and then her giving birth to a number of demi-gods. There's even famously an extremely erotic depiction of this story that was preserved in the town of Pompeii! 
 
There were also plenty of stories in the Medieval period of zoophilia. I mean, where do you think the idea of werewolves comes from? Before all other fluff was added on top, it was all about a union between wolves and humans, beasts and maidens. There are a number of stories from that time with those kinds of themes, even though the church heavily forbade it. And while many people are familiar with the zoophilia in Greek tales, there are even more stories from that time that are pretty zooey as well. Things like Aelian’s "On the Nature of Animals", which is a collection of incredibly zoophilic stories, including things like relationships between humans and dogs, dolphins, geese, eagles, and more. 
 
Even before what most people would consider recorded history though, we were still there leaving our mark with cave paintings of humans and animals engaging intimately. There are records of this kind of art from Sweden to Italy to Russia, and in between! Some of the oldest records date somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, which is around the same time that humans started forming permanent shelters, while we were still mostly using stone tools and hunting Ice Age animals. 
 
I bring all these examples up to make a point here. Zoosexuality is something that we've always had, but realistically, there isn't much more to prove it outside of the examples that I've listed here. And, I'm betting that there are plenty of people reading this article that haven't heard of everything that I referenced either. 
 
As a culture, as a community, we don't have a history. Or, I think it would be more fair to say that our history is constantly taken from us. It's something that we're denied, as it doesn't fit the narratives that society wants to project. All the examples of zoosexuality that have survived have generally done so either because there was a rich person with a kink that could afford to give the art that they possess "cultural significance", or because people have walked back the more sexually explicit pieces of the art to proclaim it's express intention as "symbolism" or "metaphor". No, those women weren't actually interested in having sex with actual dogs, the story just uses dogs as a way to describe the passion of their coupling. It was "animalistic", but not in a zooey way of course. 
 
I think a lot about what the world might be like nowadays if more of our history survived. I think history frequently serves as a backbone for a movement. Having roots makes it easier to stay stable as you grow. But our roots are constantly cut off leaving us in a lot of ways blind, directionless, and having to start from the beginning over and over again. In the same way that I'm heartbroken that we lost access to the years of history from the Zooey Dot Pub Discord server, I'm sure there are other zoos just like me from all throughout history that have had to watch as their contribution to our communal tapestry burned in front of them. Frankly, if we're looking at things realistically, I should count myself lucky that all I lost was the history, I'm sure that there have been plenty of zoos that lost a lot more than that when society came to take them down. 
 
I hope in 20 years whatever the zoo movement looks like can have the option to see the things that we were doing today to try and make the world a better place for people like us. I hope in 100 years people can activate their brain chips and process the hundreds of thousands of messages that we've sent to one another and it brings a smile to their face knowing they weren't alone. I hope in a thousand years someone can read this article and know that even back in the ancient past of 2026 that the zoos of that time were still thinking about the past, and about the future. I hope that something that we do today can make it to the people that come after, and the people that come after them, and the ones after them too. Not because I care about fame, or legacy, or anything like that. But because I know that if I could have read about the history of zoos when I was young and alone and thought that there was nobody in the world like me, that knowing that I'm a part of a community that has a history would have made me really really happy. 
 
History is made every day. Hold onto what you can, and give the future some proof that we were here. They just might need it. 
 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (August 2026)
Find them at https://twitter.com/hereforthezoo
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