Enumclaw, Washington: the town where you could legally fuck a horse
To work in the legal system is to see humanity at its worst. I’m sure there’s the occasional day that you see humanity at its best, too, but let’s be real here. How the people involved in that system at any level don’t lose all hope in humanity at a base level is a genuine miracle.
Not only for the obvious reasons of watching people commit (and often get away with) some of the foulest things you can do to another person, either. Honestly? If that’s going to fuck with you in a way that you can’t get through with therapy, then perhaps a career in law isn’t for you. No, it’s one thing to lose faith in humanity based on what humans will do to each other. It’s quite another thing to lose faith in humanity based on what humans do to themselves.
There may not be a better example of this than a case that made international headlines in 2005 and put the city of Enumclaw on the map for all the wrong reasons. The kind of reasons that could make the best adjusted person with all the faith in the world in their fellow man put their head in their hands and go “what the fuck are we even doing here?”
After all, this was a story that was reported the world over with the deeply disgusting headline of “the Enumclaw horse sex case”.
Tragically, yes, I am still talking about things that humans have done to themselves so if this is the first time you’ve heard about this…well, now’s the time to tap out if you’re feeling nauseous, it doesn’t get better from here. What’s more, it all begins with a change to a law that most would argue is unabashedly good. You see, for a long time, it was (technically) illegal in the state of Washington to give or receive oral or anal sex as part of their sodomy laws. So, when those sodomy laws were repealed in 1974, high fives all around, right?
Well, no. You see, the phrasing of the law was such that oral and anal sex was classified as sodomy. As was necrophilia and bestiality. So when the sodomy laws were repealed, it wasn’t just giving head that was legal in Washington state.
Wait, fucking a horse was completely legal in Washington?!
That it was, dear reader, that it was.
In complete secret, several men in rural Washington began gathering online and meeting in person to take advantage of these lax bestiality laws in exactly the way you’re thinking they would. Finding a farm in an unincorporated area of Washington that would host them. In 2005, one of these men was Kenneth Pinyan, an ex-employee of Boeing who had more or less lost the ability to feel anything in the lower half of his body in a motorcycle accident.
In trying to feel something, Pinyan had disappeared into a dangerous world of extreme sex practices, culminating in him receiving anal sex from horses on multiple occasions. Best job in the world, this.
Eventually, the obvious happened, and Pinyan received severe internal injuries from this act and on July 2nd, 2005, he was declared dead on arrival at Enumclaw County Hospital due to acute peritonitis due to perforation of his colon. Somehow, what happened next was even more sick in a strange way.
The authorities descended on these communities of self-described “zoophiles”, seizing over a hundred VHS and DVDs of men like Pinyan engaging in sex acts with horses. However, none of these animals had been injured by the abuse they’d suffered. Since no one had thought to amend the sodomy laws, the only criminal act they’d committed was, in a truly gruesome irony, breaking and entering. Needless to say, the law was changed shortly afterwards to outlaw bestiality in Washington, in what was reported as the easiest law to pass in state history.
I’m not putting a video that could even allude to the events I’ve just described, so here’s a Kacey Musgraves song instead. I need a drink and a shower.