With The Editor away on his annual holidays, it falls once again to Samuel J. Snort Esq to attempt to lower the tone of ‘The Message’ – and, with a little help from my chums in Channel 4, I think that, once again, I’m about to succeed admirably.

As I was idly channel-surfing last week, I chanced upon the following conversation-stopper: “Sarah was 36 when her husband Sean first began to suspect her relationship with Myles, the family dog.”
This was just one of many attention-grabbing lines from Animal Passions, a Channel 4 documentary about people who are into zoophilia – or what, back in the day, we used to call plain old bestiality. Apart from proving that Americans will talk about anything if it means they can get their mugs on tv, this magnificent piece of public service broadcasting also revealed that, er, animal-lovers employ their own little codes, similar to those used in the personal ads. So a fan of the ponies might enthuse that his, um, mount is “JRHNBR (Just right height, no bucket required).”
The more romantic among you will perhaps be happier to learn that we also met a couple whose shared love of horses – and I mean leurve, people, as the bite marks on yer man’s back proved – actually led to marriage (to each other, not the horse – though come to think of it, the alternative would lend a precise new meaning to the phrase “the wife’s a terrible nag”).
Less happily, the aforementioned Sean filed for divorce against Sarah, who seems to be coping very well now that Myles, the family pooch, has “moved in” with her. From Myles, there was no comment but then that’s hardly a surprise – zoophilia is surely the final taboo, the love that dare not bark its name. And one can understand if not every dog is ready to come out of the kennel.
Having watched a full five minutes of Animal Passions, before going back to the football, Sam feels safe in saying that that not since Woody Allen’s ground-breaking Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex – with its touching depiction of one man’s star-crossed love for a sheep – has there been a more important contribution to the broadening of our attitudes to sexuality in all its rich and, yes, even furry diversity.
Of course, Sam understands that not everyone will have seen it that way. Some viewers must have been shocked that, for once, the usually reliable Channel 4 didn’t manage to work lesbianism or the occult or even Stalin or Hitler into the show, but in every other way this programme amply fulfilled the station’s remit to provide viewers with lurid sensationalism masquerading as serious documentary.
Sam, for one, applauds. I mean, my old mate Bubba Clinton was all over the tv like a rash last week, wringing his hands and beating his breast about blowing it – or rather having it blown – in the Oval Office. Think of how much more interesting that whole dreary “scandal” would have been if Bubba had looked the camera in the eye and said: “I did not have sexual relations with that that sheep, Miss Dolly.”
And spare a thought too for the meek, for the small farmer in his wellies, standing in a field in the soft Irish rain, perhaps admiring his cow in a not altogether strictly agricultural way. Thanks to Channel 4, he is now newly-empowered, no longer alone, freed from the repressive shackles of Mother Church – and about to get a prescription for mastitis.
And before you laugh or turn away in disgust, at least accept this: if a zoophilist says their lover is hung like mule, in all probability it’s because their lover is, in fact, a mule.