Public Silence and Police Surveillance: Conflicting Attitudes to Bestiality in Colonial Otago

When John Cole was acquitted of bestiality in January 1863 he burst into tears. The charge against him, that he “did feloniously, wickedly and against the order of nature attempt carnally to know a certain female dog and then with the said female dog feloniously did attempt to commit and to perpetrate the abominable crime of buggery,” could have resulted in a death sentence if he had been found guilty of the act of bestiality.¹

The case against John Cole, a store man, was based on the evidence of a single witness, George Smith, another store man with whom he shared quarters and who claimed he saw Cole “on his knees holding the back part of the dog in his hands.” On pushing Cole away, Smith saw that Cole’s “trousers were open and his penis in a state of erection.”² The validity of evidence in cases where there is only one witness was often an issue mentioned by Supreme Court judges in their addresses to grand juries in the province of Otago, New Zealand, at this time.³ These cases could come down to whose evidence was more believable in the eyes of the jurors. Although in this case it is difficult to determine what factors led the jurors to believe the prisoner over his accuser, the sympathetic reporting by the court reporters may suggest that Cole was more personable. As the Otago Daily Times reported:

John Cole, a very decent looking young fellow, was indicted for having committed an unnatural crime at the Dunstan. The only witness was G. W. Smith, late store man with Patterson, at the Dunstan, in whose service the prisoner also was. The prisoner alleged that the charge had been trumped up to gratify malice. If time was allowed, he could get an unexceptionable character from the mayor of Geelong [Australia] and other gentlemen in that town; in which he (the prisoner) had parents, five brothers and sisters, a young wife, whom he has left not four months ago, and an infant son.⁴

This newspaper report paints a portrait that elicits a sympathetic response from readers. Here is a decent young family man, not long in Otago, well respected in his hometown of Geelong, who has been maliciously accused of a vile crime. Specific details of the crime were left out of the report, encasing bestiality in a silence that stands in complete contrast to the detailed reporting of other sexual crimes in Otago’s newspapers at the time but reflects both traditional and contemporary attitudes toward it as a human activity.

This article examines six cases tried in Otago before 1872 to determine whether this silence in reporting cases of bestiality was a reflection of a common attitude within the community toward sex between humans and animals and whether tendencies toward silence influenced how police were able to put together cases against suspects.⁵ The cases, which came from both local magistrates’ courts across Otago and the Dunedin sittings of the Supreme Court, involved six men charged with the crime of bestiality. John Cole, whose case is detailed above, was the first person charged with bestiality in Otago in 1863. Four of the other cases involved men charged with bestiality or attempted bestiality with horses: George Henry (1865), John Gere (1867), George Ennis (1868), and Thomas States (1871). The remaining case from 1870 involved a young man, James Hutchings, who was charged with attempted bestiality with a cow.

Focusing on a colonial settlement during the third quarter of the nineteenth century provides an opportunity to examine attitudes toward bestiality within a quickly developing community during the nineteenth century, a period for which there is a dearth of academic studies. The majority of the research that has been done to date focuses on the early modern period, with some medieval, modern, and contemporary work, but there is very little on the mid-nineteenth century. Much of the early modern period is covered, with Carl Griffin’s examination of animal abuse reaching into the eighteenth and early nineteenth...