Media Mastery 2024

Please note that this transcript is automatically generated and contains many inaccuracies

Disclaimer

Stallion: The Zooier Than Thou podcast contains adult concepts and language and is intended for a mature audience. So if people are arguing about whether or not you should be allowed to go to pride parades, maybe sit this one out.

Theme

Kynophile: Hey, what can I say? You’ve got me howlin’ at the moon! Whoa, don’t you know that love is wild when you’re a zoo? We’re Zooier Than Thou! Oh yeah!

Intro/Emails

Toggle: Greetings, fellow zoos, and welcome to another savvy episode of Zooier Than Thou. I’m Toggle, a rat who howls at the moon to mark his territory,

Aqua: And I’m Aqua, an orb who is iridescent with pride.

Toggle: and we’ll be your hosts for this episode.

Aqua: Welcome back to the hot seat. How’s it feel to leave an episode entirely in someone else’s capable paws?

Toggle: Honestly it’s both nerve wracking and a relief all at once. Although, honestly, I have no idea what happened in the last episode because I didn’t touch any of it.

Aqua: Wait. Are you saying you didn’t listen to your own podcast?

Toggle: Who has time to listen to podcasts? Hopefully it was good, though.

Aqua: I think that’s ultimately up to the audience to decide.

Toggle: Yeah. But I think it went well. I’m proud of everyone who took charge and made it happen, and a special shout out to Ryder for producing his first episode on his own.

Aqua: Yeah, if you didn’t know, Ryder’s been our production assistant for a few months now, and we really haven’t given him the recognition he deserves.

Toggle: he’s editing this right now and probably hasn’t seen the script, so he likely had no idea we were giving him a shout out. Hi Ryder!

Aqua: We think you’re pretty great. Thanks for working the podcast mine so rats don’t have to.

Toggle: Of course, me and Aqua didn’t actually have a month off as it turned out.

Aqua: No, indeed. But we can talk a little more about that later. How about we take care of some emails first?

Toggle: Our first email is from Rainy Forest, who is another zoo asking about therapy.

Aqua: I don’t mind more zoos asking about therapy, actually.

Toggle: Likewise. Rain E. writes, Hello! My apologies if this is a bit long. I recently had the privilege of speaking with my therapist about my zoo feelings, along with my fears and feelings about how people respond to our existence. To my surprise, they responded very positively when I came out to them, stating that it does not make me a bad person, that these feelings are kind of normal, understanding my feelings about people attacking and harassing us.

and they even spoke a bit about how in the past, zoophilings were considered more normal and far more normalized in cultural depictions. Unfortunately, however, consent to the point it became the focus of the session. I felt at that moment that I might be entering a minefield, so I gave a tepid answer of I think animals largely can consent since they are adult sexual beings and have body language and can refuse, et cetera.

Whilst they agreed with the statement, they said that non humans can’t actually consent because they cannot verbalize it. In the end, they sent me home with a couple of videos about consent, after saying that they think I have a good understanding of consent, and that they don’t think I’m out to be harmful towards dogs, and saying that I should refrain from thinking sexual or romantic thoughts about dogs and instead focus on kink.

Now I feel like I’m at a loss about how to talk with them about these feelings since they want me to focus on consent And whilst saying suppression is ineffective, tamp down these feelings by not focusing on them or fantasizing about them Should I just nip this in the bud and stop these discussions with them about zoo?

Or is there a better way to navigate the minefield of a therapist and consent with non humans? Also, what do you feel are good discussions to have with zoo in general With a therapist on zooey topics Thanks. Rain.

Aqua: Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here.

Toggle: Yeah. Absolutely. First of all, it does sound like she’s a little bit further ahead than your average person in terms of getting it to some extent, right?

Aqua: Maybe a little bit, but it should be standard practice for a therapist to make their clients feel validated and safe to talk about whatever it is they have going on. Is true that paraphilias are super common, it turns out, I think it’s, what half of all adults have something like that going on?

Toggle: Something like that.

Aqua: Is it really abnormal if it’s half of everybody. I’m not so sure that depictions of zoophilia were more normalized in the past but it’s kinda hard to tell because I’m not that old

Toggle: I think

perhaps we’re looking in the distant past like on the ancient Greek urns and stuff like that.

Aqua: Sure, but in our current society I don’t know that’s really a useful observation.

Toggle: Fair enough.

Aqua: This is definitely not the worst response I’ve ever heard but it sounds like their specialty is somewhere else and they don’t really know what to do with zoophilia.

it sounds like they’re just using the playbook that they would for like pedophilia or something and hoping that it lines up well enough to do some good.

Toggle: I think what’s interesting about what Rain said here is that at some point they acknowledged that you can’t tamp down and suppress these feelings, but then ultimately that’s what they told them to do, or at least that’s what Rain came away with feeling like they were being told to do. So somewhere there’s a disconnect between knowing the right thing and not knowing what to do with it, right?

Aqua: And they said to focus on kink, but not on romantic or sexual thoughts about animals, What’s wrong with romantic thoughts? They said focus on kink what kinks are we talking about here?

Cause if their goal is to try to divert their clients away from behavior that might be harmful or illegal there’s plenty of kink out there that’s very zooey. so like, where’s the line here?

Toggle: But then you’re also still fantasizing about it, right? So that’s kind of weird. That’s weird.

where’s the line here for this therapist? I can’t really tell. And I think maybe actually that’s the problem with Rain here is that they can’t tell,

and they now do not feel comfortable talking about it because they feel like they were robbed of their therapy session because the therapist really wanted to focus on consent, which doesn’t sound like that’s what they were hoping to talk about for that session.

Aqua: right. And actually, this is the first time I’ve heard of any therapist immediately focusing attention on the consent issue. None of mine ever have. Yeah they did some questions in the beginning to assess whether or not I was a threat to anybody, but consent really didn’t come up at all.

Toggle: I’ve talked with a therapist who’s non zoo before, and they did me , they would have definitely gone to the consent thing pretty immediately.

Aqua: all right, maybe it’s just me but also uh, some of the reasons that the therapist gave like an animal can’t consent because they can’t uh, I’m going to call bullshit there. Most of the acronyms that we have for remembering consent between human partners, like Fries and RCR,

Toggle: Yeah, RCR,

Aqua: Yeah, what is RCR?

Toggle: Reciprocal, continuous, and revocable.

Aqua: Yeah, so FRIES if I remember correctly, is F R I E S so it’s Freely Given, Reciprocal, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific? I think, and human animal relationships can clear those pretty easily. Informed consent with a non human is a bit of a sticking point, but really, it doesn’t depend on verbal communication.

That’s a higher standard than we hold most humans to.

Toggle: right.

Aqua: I think that’s a giveaway that maybe zoophilia is a little bit outside their wheelhouse, which is not necessarily a problem. It also suggests to me that maybe their background is more geared toward kink and BDSM because in BDSM really carefully communicated and negotiated play is essential, and that definitely doesn’t translate to animals at all. Maybe that’s the tool that they have, so that’s what they’re using here.

Toggle: let’s get down the question here is, Should Rainy Forest stop talking to their therapist about zoo stuff, or is there some other way that they should navigate this? And if they are navigating this, what kind of things should they talk about? I think it comes down to the fact that you probably aren’t Uncomfortable with being a zoo and your sexuality.

And that’s not really what you’re there to talk about. Perhaps what you’re there to talk about is how the stigma affects you. And it feels like that door got closed a little bit because the focus became consent.

Aqua: Yeah, that tracks. Certainly for myself every time I’ve brought up zoophilia in therapy, it’s always been for context. My therapist was pretty quick to point out, actually, this isn’t the issue here.

Let’s work on this other stuff. And it was fine, but,

Toggle: right,

Aqua: it does, bothered Rain enough to write in. And that tells me that the relationship did suffer with their therapist. And a therapist really isn’t going to be much good to you if you don’t feel safe to talk about basically anything with them.

I don’t know how long, you’ve been seeing your therapist, but I think in your position, I would ask to have like a timeout. Where you talk about the trajectory of your time together and restate your goals, and also double check what your therapist believes their moral and legal obligations are.

So this would be like their duty to report. and you should be able to ask that safely whenever you want. It’s a prerequisite, there’s that informed consent thing again, it’s one of the first things that you’re made aware of before your first session begins. This is what I have to talk about or I have to report everything else is fair game.

And depending on who you’re talking to, once you get to trust them, maybe some stuff that’s a little closer to the line is also okay.

Toggle: The trust here clearly suffered because you now no longer know what you can talk about with them. And so reestablishing that and then establishing, okay, do you, after having that kind of baseline discussion again, do you feel comfortable doing it? And if not, maybe they can give you a referral because ultimately you do need to trust them.

It doesn’t necessarily require them to get on board with. your feelings about consent, but it definitely requires them to get on board with being able to talk about it without hijacking the session

Aqua: yeah. And if your therapist has a background in queer sexuality, or kink or BDSM, or if your therapist has a background in paraphilias, then they should be able to help you through your situation without moralizing it or without introducing their own

Toggle: Miss

Aqua: their, yeah, their own positions on this that is a necessary skill to be a therapist.

but yeah, be honest. Tell them you really want to be able to talk about zoophilia, but you didn’t really like where the conversation was going and now you don’t really feel safe bringing it up again.

I also didn’t hear any distinction between zoophilia and bestiality if their concern is consent, that’s about an action, which may or may not happen. Just deal in hypotheticals, deal in feelings. That’s what zoophilia is.

Toggle: Thanks for writing in, Rainy Forest, I hope you’re able to get the therapy you need and sort it out with your therapist here.

Aqua: Next up, this one is from Furlorn. Who is feeling forlorn. Forlorn writes, Hello Zoot Crew! I’ve thought about writing in for a long time, and I’ve decided, it’s time to just do the thing. Whether the message comes out polished or not. This little message happens to be for the rat.

The reason I’m writing is because at the end of your most recent unscripted episode, which, if my ears don’t deceive me, featured an appearance from the ephemeral Zooey,

Toggle: Correct?

Aqua: I surprised myself at how sad I became to hear your stepping back, Toggle. Your voice has accompanied me for a long time.

That’s the thing about parasocial relationships. While in reality we’ve never met, to me, it feels like losing a friend.

Toggle: Aw. All

Aqua: Than Thou has been a secret source of joy I’ve kept in my pocket that’s accompanied me through a lot of life changes. And I’ve held along with the end of every episode.

I even started working on some podcast art. Something about listening to it has felt like home. The show wouldn’t be a shadow of what it is today without all of the talented voices who have joined the podcast along the way, or the people who I’m sure have been pitching in to make this thing possible from the start.

But the rat and dog who started this little project will always hold a special place in my heart. Though Doug was always a stallion in my head canon. That’s beside the point. I hope we’ll still get to hear your voice every once in a while, even if it’s less scripted. It’s actually a lot of fun just to listen to you all zoot the breeze.

Anyway, thank you heaps and mounds, if you do read this. I suppose it’s selfish to want to keep a good thing exactly the way it is. May you all, rats, cats, donkeys, dogs, danes, dragonets, pigeons, and disco balls for hire, continue to do work that fulfills you, whatever shape that takes.

Toggle: Gosh.

Aqua: Aww,

Toggle: As of right now, I’m not really like leaving. I’m still around. there Have been a couple of episodes where I’m not in it. This is just more like I’m not producing it either. That does bring a little bit of change, but I think over the past few seasons, we’ve been changing the format up every now and then.

Trying to break the formula and just keep things interesting and keep them interesting for us as well. Yeah, change isn’t always a bad thing. And as of right now, I haven’t gone anywhere. I will let you know if for some reason I do, but I appreciate all the really kind things you said here.

I’m really glad the podcast has been this kind of source of happiness to keep in your pocket.

Aqua: that’s super sweet.

Toggle: Doug definitely would love being characterized so that definitely checks out. , I’m glad you wrote in. Finally we’re glad to hear from you and hopefully you won’t keep feeling forlorn.

Aqua: Yeah

I, for Lorna, I don’t think you have much to worry about there’s every new season we sit down and we talk about what’s working and what isn’t working, and you can see that in the shows that result. It’s been a goal for a long time for Toggle to reclaim some free time for some other things. and it was never supposed to be Toggle’s show or Doug’s it’s ours.

so this is normal. We’re not losing anything you’re just hearing more new stuff from more people. And I’m not going anywhere. I don’t think Toggle’s going anywhere.

Toggle: when we first started, it was really important to Doug because obviously he was dying. It was really important that the show doesn’t die when someone leaves. We knew Fausty would eventually not be here anymore to contribute.

And the idea was that I should be able to leave at some point if, down the road, my voice becomes stale, or, I just need to do something else, and new voices should be coming in, new people should be contributing, it shouldn’t just be reliant on me, and the bus factor has been really high, and that means if I die, the show dies. And that’s not good. It shouldn’t be that way. So this season really is the first time we’ve ever been able to go, okay, you go away, Toggle. And the show continues, right?

Which isn’t something we’ve had yet, so Actually, it’s exciting that we’re at the point where we can do that.

Aqua: Yeah, and it’s really important. This has been on our mind for a long time. At first it was a safety precaution. If the worst happens to one of us or something that can’t be the end. Really the most important thing was that we try to do it on our own time and get good at it, so that if there is some event, even if it’s just like a, a hospital stay or someone gets dragged out of town to take care of some family business, whatever it is

Toggle: actually. I’m just gonna say, I have actually produced this show from the hospital before.

Aqua: oh my gosh,

Toggle: Legit, I took my computer to the hospital,

Aqua: man, that’s like a, Really fucked up version of, that type of guy. You know the guy that brings an entire computer to Starbucks and just stays there all day?

Toggle: a tower, and an actual monitor, uhhh.

Aqua: one coffee? But yeah business as usual, if you’re hearing less of Toggle, that is not bad news, that’s good news. Alright? Cool. We appreciate your email, Furlorn. Worry not. And we hope you won’t remain Furlorn for long.

Toggle: Next up, here’s one from Werby, who writes in about self love. Werby writes, Hey, Zoot Crew. I wanted to say thank you from the zooey city of Seattle for your role you’ve played in my journey of self love.

I have known I was zoosexual since I was a kid, but your podcast helped me finally accept that I am allowed to be happy and myself in this world, specifically the interview with Lovecat’s dad and the coming out episodes. since then, I’ve come out to my partners, I’m Polly, with mixed results that have resulted in some harsh life changes like my partner demanding I move out ASAP and losing access to my canine partner.

On the bright side, yeah, somehow there’s a bright side here. On the bright side, I’ve found my other two partners are zoos, and they’ve been instrumental to my well being over the last few weeks. I know I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t lie to them anymore. I’ve been telling myself that these are growing pains for me to grow and live a life I can be proud of.

Lately. I’ve been longing for a sense of community outside of my partners. Any advice for meeting other zoos, ways to do it, red flags to look out for, it would be appreciated. Also. How can I get my paws on those stickers? Thanks again. Whereby.

Aqua: Oh, man. Seattle is crawling with zoos. There are so many fuckin zoos in Seattle it’s ridiculous you picked a great place to be I think for advice on how to meet zoos safely, I’ll refer you to our episode called The Safety Dance.

Toggle: 2020.

We

Aqua: but just a quick overview just start hanging around on Zoo Telegram or maybe Zoo Community.

Zoo Community has rules about disclosing location, they don’t really permit it but if you make friends there I don’t see a problem with asking them at some point later on, hey, you know, where are you located, roughly, and would you ever want to hang out in person? And then if they say yes Now you just have to find some place that is relatively public and open and safe, it could be a Starbucks, don’t be the guy who brings his whole computer with him, But,

Toggle: going to play Starcraft at the Starbucks.

Aqua: I’ve actually done that. I’m, I’m not sorry.

Toggle: Awesome.

Aqua: Yeah, do you remember Brood War? How you could spawn a multiplayer copy with your single install disk and it was okay for local play? We made heavy use of that. Not always in Starbucks. We did that once and then we got asked to leave after about three hours and

Toggle: I’ll bet you

Aqua: yeah.

Toggle: did.

Aqua: but yeah, it can be a Starbucks.

It can be really any public place. It can be a park bench. It can be a furry convention, or it can be something else that you both have in common that you enjoy doing that is gonna have you around other people and not, alone with each other and then just, forget about being zoos for a little bit, and see whether or not you click with them as as a whole person outside of it I’ve said for a long time that being furry is basically just an icebreaker It’s really not a guarantee that I’m gonna be friends with every furry.

I’m definitely not. It’s a useful first step. And this should work the same way.

Toggle: Red flags to look out for. If they’re really pushy about meeting, there’s something a little unsettling about that. It may not mean that they’re like, anti zoo or, something like that, but it probably is a red flag just as a general person thing. If you ever feel uncomfortably pushed into doing something you don’t want to do, that’s a red flag.

You should just be like, look, I’m not comfortable with this. Don’t feel pressured to meet up with someone or to do something that you don’t want to do.

Aqua: Yeah, there’s no such thing as too slow, there is definitely such a thing as too fast. Don’t go to somebody’s house the first meeting. As cool as that might sound maybe they have some super awesome mansion or whatever and they’ve got a huge backyard and they got dogs

Toggle: Maybe they have a McDonald’s in their, in their mansion.

Aqua: Maybe their mom lets them have Sega and Super Nintendo. Who knows? Don’t do that. Meet somewhere in public. Make sure that, the amount of effort that you are both expending is fair. Don’t do all the hard work. Don’t spend all the money. Just, treat it like you would a normal date.

Actually, you could probably pull a lot of useful tips just from online dating advice. And there’s miles and miles of blogs and entire books about this. If zoo is just an icebreaker or icing on a cake, then, it really shouldn’t be any different.

Toggle: Yeah, all the rules for meeting someone that you’ve just met online apply here. The other thing that I would suggest is maybe Just as a general thing, maybe there are some situations where this is fine, but I would avoid people who try to get you to be their friend by offering sex, whether that’s with them or with their animals.

Like they feel like that’s the way to make friends and it’s just not there’s some kind of something that, happens organically, that’s fine. But I’ve definitely had someone who was like, yeah, I would, if you’ll hang out with me, I’ll let you have sex with my female dog.

And I was like well, I mean, like, that’s up to her.

Aqua: Yeah,

Toggle: to, I don’t want that to be the reason that we’re getting together. I want

it like Know you as a person.

Aqua: yeah, I don’t like that transaction,

Toggle: Yeah,

Aqua: yeah, and just I guess keep in mind that whoever you’re meeting is probably thinking about the same stuff but if you feel like you’re being tested or if they’re fishing for information, or if they’re dropping names, or if they’re volunteering a lot of interesting stuff that would be weird for a stranger to volunteer.

Outside of the zoo context, then, eh, okay,

Toggle: there’s your red flags. Yeah, They may not be like the end of the play depending but you know as they stack up,

Aqua: yeah, and trust your gut, if you get a bad vibe, then pay attention to that.

Toggle: Yeah, don’t be so desperate to meet someone that you ignore your gut. That would be bad.

Oh, how can I get paws on those stickers? You can email steve at zoostories at protonmail. com he’s on Twitter at Storyzoo. Either way, you’re just going to be reaching out to Steve. Steve is the one who’s got the stickers.

Steve is the one who can hickey up. Now, that said, if you’re in Seattle,

there are plenty of Seattle zoos making their own stickers. You might, once you make friends in Seattle, you might just end up with some unique stickers.

Aqua: Yeah, there are so many there that once you make some friends arranging a blind drop might be practical and funny. That’s a thought. If there’s a particular sticker you’re interested in, then uh, You know, it might take a little while to source, but because of where you are, yeah, you’re gonna do fine.

Toggle: All right. We appreciate you taking the time to write in, Werby. Hopefully this helps.

Aqua: Lastly, here’s an email from Timber, who’s been through an emotional tilt a whirl. Timber writes, First, I want to say thank you for all the support and kind words for my last email. It’s now the new year. The nomadic lifestyle is working well for me. I’ve been on the road for several months now. It’s really nice to skip winter.

I’m now living in my fifth state. I have met so many people along the way, including a zoo or two. By the way, if you hear this and you know who you are, I had a great day. It was amazing to finally meet another zoo. Being able to talk about whatever and joke about whatever and not having to worry about a weird look or a missed humor punchline is a great feeling.

Thanks for taking the time to meet with me. I’m planning on meeting a few more people in the future along the way. my traveling companion seems to love the adventure we’re on. She’s loving all the different dog parks, trails, food, beaches, and sights. She’s having the time of her life. She’s seen woods, mountains, waterfalls, rivers, and most recently, the ocean. It was kind of funny when she first tasted salty ocean water.

She absolutely loved rolling around in the sand. However, my camper didn’t like it. The holidays were a little lonely, but I did have a video group chat during Christmas dinner, and being in a state where fireworks are legal was a big change.

45 minutes of continuous rumble of fireworks at New Year’s was amazing. From inside the camper it almost sounded like it was raining really hard. Now that I got all the good stuff out of the way, here are some of the not so good things. I’ve been home with my traveling companion almost every day, all day long, for the last three months.

When I left for work, I was gone for nearly nine hours, and she did fine at home. Now though, if I leave the camper for two hours, or even five minutes, she’s suffering separation anxiety, barking, howling, and extreme excitability when I get home. It takes her about five minutes to calm down after I walk through the door because she’s so excited to see me, as if I was gone for days.

I’ve tried leaving her with calming music playing, YouTube videos for dogs, playlists, and even leaving a little pile of laundry on the bed for her to lay by, which did seem to help a bit. I guess it’s not just her, it’s also me. I’m having illogical worries about her when I’m gone. I’m having a hard time leaving the camper because I’m too worried about how she feels when I’m gone.

if anyone has any suggestions that would help her and I in this situation, that would be so great. I also wanted to say, great job with the last three podcasts. You all have a great knack for tackling these issues.

Thanks again in advance.

Toggle: Yeah, I guess I should start the last three episodes. I don’t quite remember. But they wrote in some time ago. Not a lot of these get done immediately when they write in. So there’s a bit of a time delay. Yeah, I do want to answer this, Timber, because Lovecat had this problem and Lovecat gave me some advice which I used on my dog who has had separation anxiety for all 11 years of his life up to the point that we did this and it worked.

And it was as simple as this. We’d leave him out, leave the house, come back after a very short amount of time. And shower with praise and have some kind of treat waiting, whether that was to bring something back home for him to sniff or to eat, or I had some ice cream in the fridge that I would just be like, okay, here you go, here’s ice cream.

As soon as I get back in the door when I come home, you’re getting ice cream. And then just progressively making those trips longer and always coming back with praise and good feelings and some kind of treat. And after that, my dog seemed to associate me leaving with some kind of good happening later on.

And, I don’t know what to tell you, but that worked! I can now leave my dog at home for the first time in 11 years. By himself, for hours. Without any problem. it’s as simple as that. And I also suggest, if your dog is really excited for five minutes like when you walk in the door, give your dog five minutes of your time, completely, like no other, like just all the attention is on her.

Because they’ve missed you. They’ve been waiting for you. Just give them a little bit of your time there, right when you walk through the door and always do that as a way of just You know, coming back home. I think those two things combined will probably solve your problem over time. Give it a couple of months.

Aqua: Yeah my advice was basically gonna be the same thing. I’ve had to do this before I think it basically just comes down to taking the anxiety out of you, leaving. And trying to replace it gradually with anticipating you coming back with something good. Like everything else you have to be persistent.

And it’s gonna take a while, and there’s gonna be setbacks. Progress is not linear don’t feel like things aren’t going well, or you made a mistake if there is a particularly bad day, or maybe for some reason you’re caught out of the house longer than you expected, and you kinda broke that slow progression that you were working on it sucks, but that’s gonna happen, and you can recover from that.

Aqua: just keep at it.

Toggle: Yeah. And even if you don’t have to leave, leave for like five minutes, leave her in the camper, go out and I don’t know, set up a lawn chair, but leave her in the camper for a few minutes and then come back in do the ice cream trick, or whatever it is that you would do to celebrate you coming back in.

It can start as easy as that, because I know that when you’re traveling, you’re not going to always have days where you’re leaving. But that’s actually the perfect time to do those small gradual progressions.

Aqua: Yeah, and just like everything else that we talked about in the emails this is not a zoo problem. This happens to everybody. If you’re traveling right now try hitting up a vanlife forum. You’re not the only person out there in a camper with dogs. it’s a thing.

So certainly you’re going to run into people, other dog lovers that are on the road a lot and they take their animal family with them but they still have to deal with being gone a while. And dogs struggle with this. An animal’s life a dog in this case, but an animal’s life is, Constrained by the human world everywhere they turn. Some people are really aware of this, and they try to find ways to accommodate them, and they come up with solutions because they still want animals in their life, even if it’s not the easiest thing to manage. And not all of them are zoos.

Toggle: And honestly, after the pandemic, there’s so many regular people who are having this issue. If you wanted to seek advice from someone about this, it’s so common right now.

Aqua: Yeah, the pandemic was a tough time for dogs.

Toggle: There’s one other thing that we forgot to touch on and that’s your separation anxiety. But I really think that this is going to be the same thing for you. Knowing that your dog feels better when you come home because of the treats or, the anticipation without them freaking out about it.

I think that’s going to help your separation anxiety because it really sounds like you’re just worried that she’s, Lonely.

Aqua: Yeah, and she’s definitely picking up on your anxiety about leaving too. If you’re wearing that around the fact that you don’t want to leave but you have to she’s noticing that and responding to it. There’s going to be an attitude adjustment on your end that’s necessary here.

When you do leave you need to be able to do it with some confidence.

Toggle: I feel like if you were reassuring her, just even vocalize it like, Hey, I’m going to be gone for five minutes. I’m going to come back. I’m going to give you a treat and you’re going to love it. And it’s going to be great. So I’ll be right back. I love you, don’t worry, Because when you say it for yourself, she’s going to pick up on the other vibes, maybe not exactly what you’re saying, but the way that you’re communicating,

Aqua: you’re writing into a zoo podcast, so I probably don’t need to tell you this, but dogs and humans tens of thousands of years of co evolution? Dogs know what’s going on.

They know what’s going on with us before we do.

Toggle: Yeah.

Aqua: Thanks for your email, Timber. I hope you and your girl are able to overcome your separation anxiety. In fact, I’m sure you will. Just be patient, be persistent. You can do it.

Toggle: That’s all the emails we have time for this time, but it was really hard to narrow it down. We have so many, so please be patient if we haven’t read yours on the show yet.

Aqua: for this month’s episode, we thought we’d revisit the topic of media mastery. Which is something we haven’t really talked about since Season 1 with Fausty.

Toggle: And a lot has changed since then. At the time, most of our media experience was colored by how news outlets mishandled Fausty’s arrest in 2010, Uncritically accepting the false story that he was running a bestiality farm in Washington, as well as other negative run ins with the media.

Aqua: But now though, we’ve had a lot of time to learn and grow as a community, and we have more resources at our disposal, and more experience. We felt it was finally time to give this topic another look.

Toggle: But first, we have a word from our sponsors, and then we join a group of gods hanging out in the break room.

Aqua: All this and more on Zooier Than Thou, right after this.

Sponsors

Announcer: Support for Zooier Than Thou comes from Epiphiny Pipeworks. Epiphiny donates 10% of all proceeds to Zooier Than Thou, so supporting Epiphiny supports us! Check out Epiphiny’s work at his telegram channel @epiphiny_pipeworks, that’s E-P-I-P-H-I-N-Y.

This episode is also made possible by the media! Need to have constant entertainment mainlined into your system? Would you prefer to be told what to think rather than waste precious braincells forming your own opinions? Try the media! Visit us on the web at zoo.wtf, and subscribe using rss.zoo.wtf to get notified every time we’re on the air.

Office Gods

Set: Making pizza bagels. Making pizza bagels, yeah.

Kmithnrir: Hey Set.

Set: Oh, hey Kmithnrir.

Kmithnrir: Whatcha making?

Set: Pizza bagels.

Kmithnrir: Oooh, nice.

Set: I’ll be done with the microwave in a minute if you need it.

Kmithnrir: Nah, don’t mind me, cold lunch today. I gotta be out of here pretty quick anyways to get back to bestowing knowledge on the oracles and prophets, it’s the holy day and they flip if they get left hanging. Your divine domain pretty busy today too?

Set: Uh, yeah, I am swaaaamped, with, stuff to do, also.

Kmithnrir: You know who you don’t look a thing like?

Set: Ugh… Yeah?

Kmithnrir: You, Set, do not look a THING like Set from Egypt.

Set: Yeah, I get that a lot.

Kmithnrir: I’m serious, it’s uncanny how NONE of the symbology matches.

Set: Yeah, he and I are, two different dudes, just, happen to have the same name.

Kmithnrir: Is the owl eternally hovering over your head new?

Set: No, but I just had Romnath add a glowing aura around her!

Kmithnrir: Ohhh, I love it. That’s cool as hell man.

Set: What is hell?

Kmithnrir: Oh. My. Asmononoth. it’s this new one I just heard about, so it’s kinda–

Asmononoth: WELCOME BACK TO MY PRESENCE.

Kmithnrir: Oh hey Asmononoth.

Asmononoth: Ooh, pizza bagels.

Set: Hey!

Asmononoth: Hm?

Set: Those were, I was, making, those.

Asmononoth: Who are you?

Set: I’mmm Set?

Asmononoth: Hm?

Set: You appointed me god of god of chamomile tea and earthworms and limestone.

Asmononoth: Pff.

Set: Alright, well, enjoy.

Kmithnrir: Hey uh, Asmononoth, while I have you here, could I ask you about what the mortals are writing about you? I’m sure it’s nothing, but did you go down to earth, assume the form of a sled dog, and knot with a maiden causing her to later give birth to a litter of immortal puppies?

Asmononoth: Yes?

Kmithnrir: Wh, um, wh, c-, uh, can I ask why?

Asmononoth: I thought it would be cool if there was a litter of immortal puppies, so I peered into the thoughts of all men and she was already fantasizing about the exact same thing so I went and did it.

Kmithnrir: Uh hhhhuh. Okay sure, moving on, I’ve been fielding a lot of questions just today about a mare who won a race across the desert, decimating every previous record. The word is that you, in the form of yourself actually, went in unto the mare’s mother and sired this illustrious racehorse, which is why she’s so fast. Any response on that one?

Asmononoth: I thought it would be cool if there was a very fast horse, so I peered into the thoughts of all horses and she was already fantasizing about the exact same thing so I went and did it.

Kmithnrir: Was she into that?

Set: He brought me along to take pictures, I’ll vouch, she was unbelievably into that.

Kmithnrir: Well, um, your world, Asmononoth, we’re just living in it. And the one I heard just before lunch about you and a donkey on the temple steps–

Asmononoth: Yes.

Kmithnrir: Coollll. Alright I guess we’re one of THOSE pantheons now. Eh, all the same to me really, actually sounds like more fun, just would have appreciated a memo or something so I could keep it in mind. So, all of what we just talked about, you want me to report all of that to the oracles and prophets?

Asmononoth: Are you… Kvor…

Kmithnrir: Kmithnrir.

Asmononoth: Kmithnrir! Did I make you the god who always tells truths or the god who always tells lies?

Kmithnrir: You made me the god who always tells truths.

Asmononoth: Hmm… THAT sounds… like something… that the god who always tells LIES would say…

Kmithnrir: I feel like we’ve been over this a lot, sir.

Asmononoth: There’s only one way to settle this.

Set: Oh boy.

Asmononoth: I will peer into the thoughts of alllll… goats!

Set: Yup.

Kmithnrir: Uh huh.

Asmononoth: And find the she-goat who is THE most down right now.

Kmithnrir: Sure.

Asmononoth: And in the form of a… well, let’s see what she’s in the mood for!

Kmithnrir: Great.

Asmononoth: And I will ask you, after you have borne witness to our acts, what you observed her to think of these acts. Only then will I know whether you tell truths or lies.

Set: Or we could just–

Asmononoth: Silence! This is the only way! Come, Kmithnrir, come, Set–

Intern: Hey guys, sorry to interrupt. Asmononoth, Loki was looking for you, says he might assume the form of a mare to seduce a giant’s horse to distract the stallion from his work, but he wanted your thoughts first.

Asmononoth: Well Set–

Kmithnrir: It’s, Kmithnrir. He’s Set.

Asmononoth: Whatever, switch names, and tell the mortals whatever you want. I have other business to attend to.

Kmithnrir: Great…

Topic - Media Mastery 2024

Villain: The moon is full. School is out. Now it’s time to see how my anti zoophile minions are doing at advancing the anti zoophile agenda. Good, gooood! This minion has just tricked a zoophile into an interview! The foolish zoo TRUSTED him! One GLANCE at this minion’s content would have shown that there are shock pieces and anti-queer hooks for acres and acres, not a single truly empathetic piece to be seen!

Ahhhh hahahaha! Our task is so easy. Say that animals can’t consent, say that bestiality is disgusting, compare bestiality to pedophilia, and allow people to ignore the meat and dairy industry because humans are allowed to eat meat, and nobody really WANTS to think about it that much. Mwahahahahaha, yes, zoophiles will NEVER be accepted, and they know it.

–

Toggle: welcome back, fellow zoos! That was a little over the top, wasn’t it? Obviously there’s not really a secret evil villain masterminding the entire media narrative around bestiality, but sometimes it can feel like there is. And it can feel like we’re up against some kind of all powerful evil, but we’re really not.

Let’s talk a little bit more about what we actually are up against and everything else. So first, I want to say thank you, Taro!

Tarro: Do I get to do like a fun intro? I feel like that’s my favorite part being on the show.

Toggle: yeah, do a fun intro. What’s your fun intro today? Hi, it’s me, Taro, and I’m here as the queer representation to celebrate Pride Month.

You are the queer representation, the

only queer person on this episode.

Tarro: only person.

Aqua: What am I, chopped tofu? Come on,

Toggle: Taro, our token queer person I think what we really want to do is start with where we were four years ago, where we are now, and what’s changed and what hasn’t. Does that sound about right?

Aqua: sounds good to me.

Toggle: All right. We looked back at our previous episode of Media Mastery, which was like season one, episode 6. 5, I think.

And I think a lot of that was colored by Fausty’s experience with media, which was very negative. For those of you who have been not listening to this podcast the entire time, or somehow have missed this detail, Fausty was arrested in 2010. And the media reported that he was arrested for running a bestiality farm in Whatcom County in Washington.

Of course that was wrong, that wasn’t true, but the media published that narrative because it’s what the police told them. And it was never critically analyzed, no one ever followed up to see if that was actually the truth.

Aqua: Yeah, you know it’s not good when your home is referred to on the news as a compound? That’s never good. It wasn’t a compound, it was a shack. blue tarp so that he could sit outside.

Tarro: To this day, I still hear tweets about the mice in Vaseline.

Aqua: Yeah, never happened.

Toggle: that never happened. A lot of, almost nothing happened. He did get arrested in 2010. It was because he violated parole, stupidly, and went and did some kind of conference in New York. And that’s why he was arrested, but the bestiality made it really convenient to spin the narrative that the police wanted to do, so that they could do this raid on his home.

Aqua: And it gets even worse than that. Cause while he was in prison he wrote to the editors at all of the papers and media outlets that were covering his story just trying to talk to them to give them his perspective on what was happening, and absolutely nobody answered him.

They were not interested.

Toggle: and generally speaking, that followed him throughout the latter half of his life.

Aqua: Before we move on, I want to point out just how unusual that is. As a journalist part of your code of ethics is to investigate leads. If somebody comes to you and tells you, hey, there’s more to this story than you’re getting you don’t ignore them. You go see what it is, and then decide whether or not it’s bullshit.

They did not even give him that opportunity.

Toggle: right, there was another incident in Butler County, PA, which is actually not very far from here, where Fausty had an encounter with the police, which we talked about in one of our bonus episodes, what happened there. And The police reported that he had held a machete to his dog’s neck, and they had gotten him on all these different kind of charges.

Fausty went to court and actually successfully got all weapon charges dropped, because there was no evidence that any of that stuff actually happened. And when he went to the to have the story corrected, they wouldn’t run a correction, which is something they normally would do. so, our Experience with the media up to that point, Bye.

Was very negative and that’s on top of Vulf and sometime in season one had Walked into a trap on YouTube

with Lucid Creator, right where some asshole came in and just kind of roasted him. It seemed like it was going to be a friendly interview, it was not, so there was a lot of this kind of small content creator wanting to make a big splash with a gotcha video.

While interviewing a zoophile it felt a lot like the friendly menus really only existed for anti zoos, or to allow for shock humor such as on things like Family Guy, and if someone wanted to interview someone about zoophilia, usually they were going to go to people like Jenny Edwards, or before Edwards, Randy Pepe, or Mike Rowland as his pseudonym was when he was working with ASAIRS.

And if you don’t know those names, we’ve talked about them on the show a bit. But just in case you are just joining us for the first time Edwards is a criminologist. Mike Rowland is someone who persecuted zoos for fun.

So that’s basically who they are. So we had this hugely negative perspective on what it was to interact with the media. So our advice at the time was basically to assume any outside interest is going to be adversarial, and you’re about to be fucked if you go and talk to them. There are going to be unfalsifiable dead ends like animals can’t consent, and of course tenuous comparisons to other bad things

and you’ll notice that of course zoophilia is never bad enough on its own. So they always bring out these comparisons to worse things tying them to violent crime and child sex abuse, and things like that. And we basically said, you know what, fuck it, make your own stuff. And we did do that.

Aqua: Just a little nitpick. the statement animals can’t consent is easily testable. It is falsifiable,

um,, the one that isn’t falsifiable is animals can’t consent to sex.

That’s much, much more challenging. So that’s a difference,

Tarro: mean, I think it’s a healthy nitpick.

Aqua: Yeah, it’s an important one. It’s a really clever slogan, like it sticks, and it’s memorable it collapses down a really complicated thing into something that is actually provably false and a disservice to animals.

Toggle: Right, absolutely. I think just my general advice, even for zoos, is to really kind of avoid slogans. We can use them, and they’re useful to get an idea across, but be careful that the slogan you use doesn’t wash over obviously we have a few things that we say.

Exposure is the

solution. Stay defiant. And, sometimes those things can be okay, but just Be careful about what slogans you adopt. Okay, so make your own stuff. We made a podcast. Taro, you, and I believe it was Lycon, made a magazine. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a little while. But both of these things, and also on forums of course, but all of these things allow us to tell our own story, and eventually someone who matters is going to notice and pick that up.

And a lot of the stuff that we were saying about the media actually echoes other groups, right?

Aqua: Not just zoos. If you’re furry, this should sound familiar to you.

If you’re gay, particularly if you’re an older gay person, this should sound really familiar to you. We have a long history with this in American society. I’m furry, so my favorite example of this is Uncle Kage’s Media Interaction Panels. He brought a lot of his public relations chops to how to present the fandom to the general public in order to put everybody’s minds at ease who would need to take our money in order for us to have nice things

and was very important for a while. The problem is It requires a very careful, very delicate balance between outright lying, and just omitting or redirecting questions away from the seedier or more difficult aspects of the fandom.

Toggle: Yeah, you know, I actually remember going to some of these, and some of the advice is actually really good, and fairly nuanced. And I would actually still recommend some of those things The whole thing about if you’re approached by the media, you never give them the bad thing.

you never do like, oh, you know, everyone says that we like to fuck all night in fursuits and do drugs, but that’s not true. You never give them that quote.

Aqua: right, because they’re gonna go look for the furry who stays up all night and does drugs and fucks,

Tarro: And they’re out there.

Aqua: oh yeah,

Toggle: Oh yeah,

oh yeah. And then the other one that he said that I really liked was you don’t lie. But you also don’t give them what they’re looking for. So if they ask you something about sex, you might say something like I don’t know anything about that, but for me, it’s really more about the creativity or whatever it is.

And you never say, No, there is no sex in the fandom. But you also never give them the quote that they want. And so that kind of media savvy stuff is really interesting to me.

Aqua: Yeah, and he’s right, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Toggle: As much as I, as much as we totally liked to dunk on him, that was some pretty good stuff.

Aqua: I’ll dunk on him for a bunch of other reasons, but yeah,

Who else does this relate to?

Toggle: Transgender people for sure.

Aqua: definitely.

It’s not really my wheelhouse but I can watch the news and I can read the news just like anybody else. And,

it’s super shitty what’s happening in the United States at least concerning trans people and trans rights. I don’t even know where to start.

Transgender people are somewhat further ahead on the course that zoos are probably going to be following in that they get hourly media exposure from certain outlets that have a particular bias, which also happens to be plugged into local and national level politics and results in scares like litter boxes in classrooms and bathroom laws yeah, and the whole litterboxing. I know we’re getting back into furries, but that one just made my blood boil.

Toggle: it’s been around since 2012, this story about like it’s a, it’s an internet rumor about kids asking for litter boxes in because they identify as cats. It’s an old story,

Aqua: yeah, and then it got hijacked as Basically a wedge issue or like a foothold to attack trans people through furries.

And who is overrepresented in the furry fandom? Trans people.

And it’s like all the others. As soon as you sit down and actually read about what’s really happening, you discover. For example, the litter box story. Yes, there is exactly one classroom that had a litter box in it. It was a bucket of kitty litter, and it was in the corner of the mass shooting shelter built into the classroom.

In case somebody had to go to the bathroom while they were under a lockdown.

Toggle: my god This is a hellscape. Please save us send refuge We need help. We are not safe.

Aqua: Yeah, we just want to pet dogs and live in, walkable cities that don’t require cars

Tarro: Not 15 minute cities, though.

Aqua: and have fashionable jeans.

Tarro: eat

hot chip and lie.

Aqua: All zoos want to do is charge their phone and eat hot chip.

Toggle: This is the zoo agenda. what we’re basically saying is that’s where we left it last time. You can’t trust the media, and they’re never going to work in our service, so make stuff for ourselves and see where we go from there.

. So things have changed in our past four years So let’s talk about what’s happened since then. Number one that I want to mention We did an interview with Russia Today It’s a controversial decision it was one where we kind of went in there and knew that there was going to be a gun and we wanted to put blanks so that when they shot, it didn’t go anywhere.

Toggle: And it did exactly what we were afraid it was going to do which was they talked about furries and zoophilia. As the next queer thing coming up, and then put all of their anti gay articles down on the sides.

And we went into it knowing that was going to happen, but we just felt like, if we don’t do this, we’re going to get someone else who’s not as savvy to say what they want them to say and just totally eviscerate them.

Aqua: Yeah, we had just been coming off of, what, two decades of having other people tell our stories for us, in the worst way possible, and it happened that this was one of the first opportunities that came along. I don’t think anybody was comfortable with this. it was a tough choice to make that decision to go ahead with it.

Toggle: we talked about it a lot, like a whole lot. And I got to be honest with you guys, we actually lost someone who used to contribute to Zooier Than Thou because of it. They didn’t agree that with our decision and they stopped writing for us because they felt that we had basically just in their face

Aqua: I get it. I totally get it. I don’t blame them.

Toggle: But um, that was the thing, we felt like, they’re gonna tell our story whether we’re here or not, we have an opportunity to get in front of it and do something about it, and, it’s gonna be these shitty tabloid papers that are gonna start looking at us before anyone else does.

That’s kinda how we were feeling about it.

After that happened, we actually got reached out by another media outlet, and you haven’t heard of this probably, we were reached out to by the Daily Beast, who wanted to talk about the zoo community and the online community and things like that.

The interaction was pretty good. We did answer their questions, but basically it never got published because the author was getting death threats about some of their other work that they had done because they worked on other controversial stuff. But one of the other big thing that’s happened in the past four years is we got to interview Hanne Maletzky Which is something we wanted to do from the beginning and that really helped us kind of round a corner like okay We are established enough to have legitimate information Experts come in and talk on our podcast. So that was really exciting

Aqua: Yeah, that was super cool.

Toggle: It definitely changed how we felt about what we were able to do and accomplish with the podcast and as zoos acting as individuals as well.

Tarro: Also, just from a media perspective, you were talking about how like creating your own media is beneficial. With every other example, it’s been other people reaching out to you and you having to participate on their terms, whereas with this, you had the platform and the reach to be able to interview someone.

For your content, that, obviously, you know, the tone was positive, the interview was cordial, but you were better able to prepare going into it with the sort of message that you wanted to put out as opposed to doing someone else’s show.

Toggle: right, exactly.

Tarro: It’s no more less stressful, but definitely it’s it feels much more secure, and I think it you get to control it a lot more.

Toggle: And Taro, of course, you would know about that, because in the past several years, you have a magazine. You’ve interviewed people like Alexandra Zydenberg, right? That

Tarro: And that was such a fantastic experience. What I think was really cool for me going into that was uh, this was just after she published her first paper where she was talking about the metrics and ways that you can measure zoophilia when compared to sort of other things. And that paper was super cool, but it was very scientific, it was very heady.

And I know, I’d seen a lot of people around the time saying, I don’t understand what this even really means what is this saying about us? And so having a platform where we could interview her and get her to explain it in terms that are much more approachable for the everyday person or people who might be like English as a second language was so cool because it got to spread that message more accessibly.

Toggle: Is awesome. And that’s the thing we get to do, by having our own media, where we get to decide what’s important to us. And as a part of that, by the way, during this time, since the last time we did a Media Mastery episode we’ve been involved in research. Aqua has been particularly involved in speaking with Dr.

Statina, who we’ve interviewed, and Dr. Zeidenberg as well. There was also research in UMass

Aqua: yeah, that was the LOL campus.

Toggle: yep, we also have worked with Bailey and Sue. There’s research happening, even if

we’re not participating in it.

So on top of all that, there’s all this other stuff happening that we’re not directly influencing in any sort of way. Joanne Burke writes Loving Animals which was basically a literature review of a bunch of stuff that Already existed about zoophiles.

Aqua: I don’t know if she was working with any zoos in particular when she was writing this book.

Toggle: I didn’t

Aqua: Um, no.

Toggle: There is another one that did They did actually reach out to the zoo community to write their book. It was a Japanese writer who wrote a book which translates to Saint Zoo. She worked with the Zetaphrein in Germany.

So that was written by Chihiro Hamano and she actually went and stayed for a couple months in Germany and actually interviewed and followed around those zoos and zetaphyroid which is pretty exciting. There is not an English translation

of this book, which fucking sucks, but there’s a German one and there’s a Japanese one.

So.

Aqua: That

One’s worth taking a look at, even just mechanically translating the foreword because she was approaching this from like a perspective of a survivor of sexual violence, I think.

Toggle: she found what she didn’t expect to find. I believe I remember that.

Aqua: yes

Toggle: on top of that, there’s the article that was published anonymously in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. This is far more recent which is a positive idea. I think it was basically zoophilia is morally permissible. I

think that’s what it was

called.

caused quite a stir, but it was very muchly defended by Peter Singer. Who had, took a very utilitarian viewpoint

Tarro: if you look at his commentary around it as well, he’s very clearly using that as like a sort of jumping off point. That’s not like the crux of his argument as much as it’s just to say like, this is the bare minimum that we could ask.

Toggle: right,

Right, so I wouldn’t go and say Peter Singer is a zoophile supporter, but we can say at least he recognizes some utilitarian principles when it comes to this. So, was published in his journal of controversial ideas.

Aqua: Yeah, that was, last October.

Toggle: and then of course there’s Cynny’s video. I think they are furry influencer. Is that what you might call them?

Tarro: They make adult videos. Yeah.

Toggle: Yeah,

Aqua: pretty hot. Yeah.

Toggle: So Cynny did a very personal and moving But also a very entertaining video about zoophilia based on their experiences, which had culminated in a lot of online abuse. It was actually very good and it was surprisingly well received. Of course, Cine still got hate for doing that video because the internet is a hateful place, but their perspective was very nuanced and opened a lot of people up to asking questions.

That they weren’t able to ask before.

Aqua: Yeah, I think Senny’s video is gonna hold up to time pretty well,

Tarro: Yeah, it’s also worth mentioning that their video is not, Hey, I’m Senny and I love zoos or anything Their stance was very much about their own experience with auto zoophilia, is I think the term that they use, where they have fantasies about being an animal, having sex with people but it just feels worth mentioning on Zooier Than Thou that it wasn’t necessarily totally coming out of swingin In that regard.

Toggle: what I found important about this is it very much was like, we need to be able to have these conversations. Because if we’re not able to have these conversations as a community of furries, we’re in trouble, folks.

Aqua: Because

everybody else is.

Tarro: It’s a fantastic video. If you haven’t seen it, it’s on their YouTube, it’s on their Twitter, you should definitely check it out.

Toggle: Yeah, Ciny is C E N Y, and they are fantastic, they’re a very kind and thoughtful person. And then, of course Taro, you know more about Pup Davey’s video and the pole.

Aqua: Oh yeah,

Tarro: yeah,

that was, oh boy, that was really interesting. Basically, there’s another adult content creator named Pup Davey, who’s uh, really big into the sort of fisting and puppy play kind of space but Pupdavey ran a poll on their Twitter account, which I feel like it’s worth mentioning has 30, 000 followers. This is not like a small account by any means and of that they got 8, 619 votes. The question was the past few days the debate on zoophilia has sparked massively in the furry fandom, can animals consent and argue a furry?

And then there were

four options.

Toggle: to Cynny’s video,

Tarro: This was in response, yeah. So you could pick, are you a furry, can animals consent? From that poll basically, quick math, of the 8, 619 people that voted, 52. 4 percent of all voters said that animals do have the ability to consent.

To sex.

Aqua: What’s wild to me there is that furries who said that animals cannot, are dead last, by a lot.

Tarro: By a huge margin, yeah.

Toggle: And then Pupdavy actually did a video analyzing the results,

Tarro: for the article that we wrote about it, we actually talked a lot with Pupbaby. Just to make sure that we were keeping the spirit of what they wanted to get out alive. Cause they had a lot of concerns about us taking the story and being like, hey, the whole world thinks animals can consent.

And they were very nuanced, they really wanted to stress this is one part of the internet with a very specific audience already, that, was to some degree influenced by the sort of people that were able to find the poll and that it is not necessarily reflective of the general population if you like, stood in a park and asked the same question, but even with that, I think the numbers are very interesting.

Toggle: Yes. like, you don’t want to draw a picture. Conclusions about the furry fandom or society at large, but it is very interesting that those results were probably not what you might have expected,

and then, um,

we caught the attention of Elagirl for some reason and I don’t know what it was. I think it was because of the results that she was getting from her poll about bestiality. And furries, and things like that.

Aqua: It was two polls.

and these are gonna go down in

history right up there with some drill tweets like, facing God and walking backwards in the hell.

They’re so good,

um,

Because they just lay bare the hypocrisy better than, I think anyone else has ever done the first poll was

which is worse? Eating an animal or eating out an animal. And the poll went exactly the way you think it might have, right? Most people would’ve said, oh, eating out an animal is way worse. But then she followed it up with another one, which is. If you were the animal, would you rather be eaten or eaten out, and it reversed, by the same amount?

Toggle: Basically, yeah, so most people would have preferred to be eaten out. So that was interesting these are, areas where, we weren’t involved, research efforts weren’t really involved so in these past few years, people are interested in, thinking about and talking to and exploring the zoophile community and a lot of this stuff has just started happening Are asked about it or not, which brings us to two juxtaposed things that happened to us.

And you have heard about one of them very slightly because we poked fun at it in our Dear Non Zoos episode of

last year.

Aqua: a little bit.

Toggle: Just a little fun. we were approached by the Animal Control Report. Which was a gentleman named Daniel. believe he’s got a background in criminology. He does seminars and teachings for animal control officers.

And his entire show is about humanizing animal control. We’re not monsters. We love animals, very much. It’s very interesting how many parallels there are to his message about ACOs and A zooier than thou’s message about zoophiles. Key reached out to us and said, Hey, I want to have you guys come on your show and talk to us about your zoophile lifestyle and just basically tell us why you think it shouldn’t be illegal.

And if that raised a few red flags right when I just said that, it should have, because it raised red flags for us too. I wrote back that it’s not a zoophile lifestyle, it raises our sexuality. I thought it was interesting that we might have the opportunity to speak our story in front of the kinds of people who might actually be the ones who carry out orders to remove our animals from our care.

Aqua: Yeah, there’s potentially really high value in doing that.

Toggle: right. So we looked at it and even though there were a couple of red flags, we thought, okay, we let’s see what this is about.

Aqua: Give us a reason to say yes. Dun,

Toggle: basically was the entire conversation. Just please give us a reason to say yes. We listened to the podcast. A lot of the stuff that we listened to at first really felt good.

There was a lot of good stuff, but then of course there was a lot of really difficult stuff to wade through.

It was interesting hearing advice to law enforcement officers about the exact procedure for how to properly take animals from other people’s care. They had differing. Opinions on killing animals biting and things like that, which some of them were a little uncomfortable for me, but overall, it was a really interesting podcast in my opinion.

So we were, had a bit of a back and forth and we asked him a few questions and sent him a bunch of stuff. We were like, Hey, look, if you’re gonna talk to us, you’re already on the wrong foot. We’re not going to talk to you about why our actions should be legal. We’re not on trial. Here’s some stuff you should know a little bit about us, here’s the kinds of things that we might like to talk about, what can you offer us that’s a little bit better than, come and defend yourself, right?

His answers were always really short, and we chalked it up to, okay, this guy probably just doesn’t have a lot of time. He’s very busy, he’s teaching all these courses, he’s got his podcast that he’s doing. We give him a little bit of grace, and we bombard him with information anyway, so some of it was understandable. But in exploring the available podcasts, one of our Zooier Than Thou team found an interview with the infamous Ginny Edwards. And

we,

we knew we had to listen to that before we made the decision. And we stalled and stalled because none of us wanted to listen to it, I didn’t want to listen to it by myself, I couldn’t get other people to come and listen to it with me, so finally, Aqua and I said, okay, we’re going to sit down together and we’re going to listen to this together.

Aqua: Yeah, that was tough.

Toggle: when

I tell you that it, was worse than I expected it to be, you have to understand how bad I expected it to be

Aqua: It

was

catastrophically worse than I expected.

Toggle: it was so bad. Jenny Edwards comes on there and basically railroads the conversation, says all kinds of insane shit. So much of it was just like Off the wall bonkers. She introduces the term Belfies, which are bestiality selfies. She’s like, I like to call them Belfies. And we’re like, no one’s gonna call them that.

Tarro: It is kind of catchy to be honest.

Aqua: didn’t we, we had a fake sponsor about it, didn’t we?

Toggle: I know that we wrote one. I don’t know if we actually made it because I don’t think we were like, no one’s gonna know what a fucking Belfie is.

We might’ve put it on there. I don’t know if we did or not.

Aqua: Yeah, I don’t remember either.

Tarro: We have to reclaim Belfie’s.

Toggle: No, we do not

give her any validation.

Aqua: The Jenny Edwards episode was way worse than I expected it was going to be. It was almost like a mask off moment for her. And it also showed us, the limitations of their ability to host and control a conversation because they basically lost control of their own podcast.

they didn’t push back on any concepts they didn’t really ask any tough questions it was really just, It was like filler language, like reactions Oh, my mind is racing, what do you think? Oh, this is terrible, oh my gosh.

Toggle: Yeah, the whole time.

Aqua: And it was so different from all of their other topics that, that told me, they’re probably not ready for us.

They don’t know anything about zoophilia, and that was the first taste they ever got.

Toggle: Yeah, it became really apparent and there was a point where we just realized that what she was saying was dangerous. Not to zoos necessarily, but to queer people and to furries.

And

Aqua: person.

Toggle: I’m going to, I’m going to do this. I’m going to play a clip from this episode. It’s about three minutes long and during this three minutes she is going to implicate Regular queer people and furries as potential things for animal control officers to look for when they’re trying to pin someone down as someone who would be committing animal sex abuse.

ACO Ashley: where do we begin?

Jenny Edwards: Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good, uh, really good point. You begin with what you’ve got.

Um, and, and a lot of times what you’ve got is just your gut feeling. Uh, if you go and this, and this is another part of the class that I teach too, uh, Protection officers specifically, uh, if you’re in a home and you saw a lot of things that just didn’t strike you like, right? Uh, the person is like overly interested in their animal.

Uh, they want to talk with you about why spay neuter is absolutely a verboten thing. That’s something you should never do. Um, they may have a lot of animal related stuff. Like, uh, if we, if we were doing this live and I was showing you images, I would show you pictures from an investigation that I helped on where the offender had, I mean, everything in the hou, every room in the house had Amal stuff.

It had anime, caricatures on the refrigerator wall. He had posters on his walls. He had his bedspread, had a sexy, Tiger on it. Uh, so there was just a lot of excessive interest.

I’ve got a whole class on this actually. Um, but the, the high spots are, uh, like I mentioned earlier, you want to look for any unusual interest or, language or imagery or whatever, if there seems to be like an overabundance of enthusiasm,

Jenny Edwards: in the initial interview with them way before you go to the process of seizing the animal, they’re gonna be really resistant to that, uh, abnormally resistant, I mean, nobody wants to give up their dog, right?

But they’ll be abnormally resistant to that. And if they do release the dog, you’re gonna have random people come to the shelter trying to say, take. Charge of it. Say, well, I’m a family member, I’m a friend, I’m a whatever. And typically those people are gonna also be in the lifestyle. So tho so some of that’s circumstantial, but those are just triggers.

Those are, are just some things to look for. Um, specific physical evidence to look for are butt plugs. Do you know what I mean by butt plugs?

Daniel Ettinger: Oh yeah. We know what those are. Yeah. Some of ‘em have tails.

Jenny Edwards: Course everybody does, right?

Daniel Ettinger: They have tails on them, some of them.

Jenny Edwards: Yeah, they do. They’re horsey tail ones and Doggie tail ones and yeah, they’re fun things.

So if you see those, that’s the big indicator. Yep. Because those are used as training aids. Um, they also, they frequently will start with baby beads, which are the little tiny, uh, tiny beads that you insert that are pedophiles use. So, uh, so you, you wanna look for those kind of random things, things that are out of place.

Like if you see a mounting, uh, breeding stand in somebody’s bedroom, well that’s kind of. God, like dog fighting or legitimate animal breeding. Yeah. I call them rape stands, but yeah. I say, but if they’re in an unusual place, uh, you know, I had one officer call me and say, Hey, you know, I’m investigating this guy and I’m here in the bedroom and, uh, sorry, not the bedroom.

It was in the living room. Um, he’s got this like, it looks like a little, like a little wooden bridge you would put in your garden. And so I, I said, turn that camera around. Show me what that is. And it was a rape stand. Yeah. I’m like, okay, there. That’s a clue. You, you want that, you, you want that,

But, uh, you should also be aware, since you already know about butt plugs, um, that some people have stretched their anuses to the point or vaginas to the point that, uh, you could drive a car up in there. I mean, so it doesn’t require any special equipment to put something in there that shouldn’t be in there.

Daniel Ettinger: I, I don’t even know. Bishop, what do you got on that?

ACO Ashley: Nothing. I, I, my mind is just racing.

Aqua: Wow, fuck. That doesn’t get any easier.

Toggle: right,

it’s I’ve heard that and it’s still terrible.

Sometimes I go back and think, maybe it’s not as bad as I remember it being.

Aqua: Nope, it is.

Toggle: It is.

Aqua: Yeah, I should point out that like, when Toggle and I sat down to listen to this, we had to pause it a bunch of times, so that we could just vent. About what we just heard and how stupid it was or how dangerous it was And just like calm ourselves down and then sit back down and go okay here We go deep breath press play let’s try again

Tarro: it’s kind of crazy to me because I had heard lines from this. In a bunch of different places and different contexts almost like jokes with how like absurd they are and Realizing that all of them came from the same podcast was so insane for me

Toggle: , We, what we did, we were like, okay, clearly we are biased here. we need a reality check. Let’s send this to non zoo furries, and to queer people that we know, and see how they feel about this. And these are some of the things that we got back.

Non Zoo 1: I’m so fucking upset right now. This is everyone I know.

Non Zoo 2: Jesus, okay. Arrest all furries, I guess.

Non Zoo 3: How does this all make you feel? Because I’m feeling a little threatened.

Non Zoo 4: Obviously, a lot of people would fit this profile, I think. Like, furries, obviously. And then it just gets more puritanical as she goes on to where it’s like, this could just be anyone not vanilla.

Non Zoo 5: That sounds like anti furry bullshit up till they get to the breeding stand. I also found the subtle mention of pedophilia to be a little alarming. Just sounds like she’s talking out of her ass. She’s not authentic and she has ulterior motives.

Non Zoo 6: I think the person they describe, I can see where they fit the description they’re looking for, but I also think that could probably describe some people I know. Arguably, myself. If having kinky furry art on your wall is a tell, they might investigate me. I’m really invested in my cats, so I don’t know what disproportionate passion for a pet looks like to them. If someone took her, I’d be heartbroken. It Does seem like a very broad description for a very specific suspicion, and they do seem pretty ignorant of things they probably shouldn’t be.

Toggle: And so those are the types of things non zoos were getting from this clip that we just played. And so we knew This is dangerous, and you guys have to be able to answer for this a little bit. And we asked a few questions that we were like, We’re not doing this unless you can answer these adequately.

And their answers were not adequate to say the least.

They were really short, they dodged culpability didn’t seem to recognize the problem that we found with what they had talked about. And we were just like, these people are not ready to talk to us. We still thought there might be a little bit of value in talking with someone in front of animal control officers and humanizing ourselves.

And then we said, okay, look, at this point, you’re not making this valuable for us.

So we didn’t know how many subscribers you got. What is your audience? What can we get out of this basically? And they were like, you know what? We rescind our invitation. And we said, you know what? That’s probably for the best. And so we did not do an episode with the The Animal Control Report.

we turned them down because we knew that they could not handle the nuance that was necessary to talk to a queer minority like us. And we walk away with that without any guilt either. I don’t feel bad about it.

Aqua: Nope. I feel pretty good.

And leading up to that moment I remember when I was thinking through it and trying to weigh the cost of doing it. Cause, they were asking for a lot. Our time is worth something.

Toggle: We spent a lot of time on this too.

Aqua: Yeah, we did. Which we’re, I think we’re gonna have to talk about again later because we’re not going into any of these things blind. So just an invitation results in person hours. But I remember thinking about like, okay, what’s the payoff here, right? They get a boost, right? Because anytime, anyone, anywhere.

With a YouTube channel or a podcast that talks about zoophilia, they get a boost in listenership. what Are we gonna do with it? And how does our past experience with, for example, Russia Today what did we learn there? Like, how do we adjust what our requirements are before we agree to do something or say no thank you?

Can we afford to say no thank you? It wasn’t that long ago don’t think any of us understood that yes, even now, we can afford to say, no thank you, this is not gonna work,

And that something else would come along later that would be better and that’s exactly what’s happened, it’s not like this is your one chance.

so yeah, my conscience is clear.

Toggle: This set a sort of baseline for us to be thinking about what do we really require? And we have been approached by other people there’s nothing solid yet, but the things that set them apart were, they recognized, hey, we don’t really know anything about you.

You’re the experts in being a zoophile. And so that’s why we’re coming to you to talk about this. If we have safety concerns, they’re willing to acknowledge and like, okay, we want to accommodate your safety concerns, basic things like listening and understanding and being empathetic during that initial, like, Where we’re basically interviewing them before they interview us, makes a huge difference in whether or not we’re interested.

And I think, we’re mentioning this right now because these are things you should be thinking about if something comes along, and we’re going to talk about this in a more summarized way in a little bit. That happened, and then the most recent thing, Which you may have wonderfully been aware of now, if you follow us on Twitter or Blue Sky we were on the Taboo Science podcast. Aqua actually turned me on to this podcast shortly after we were thinking about this animal control one and like, you know, what went wrong there and why it wasn’t going to work. Aqua, what drew you to this podcast?

Aqua: Whatever creepy algorithm Apple Podcasts uses. I didn’t go searching for this. I was just doing my usual thing, listening to my usual shit, in the car. And at some point, Taboo Science popped up in one of the categories, and I went, oh, those are two words that I like and then just played an episode.

I think the first one that I played was Eating Animals which is awesome and you should definitely go listen to it yourself if you haven’t heard it. And I was immediately impressed with the production quality. And the host, who is Ashley Hamer her ability to produce a short show, and it’s only about a half an hour long, but still touch on all of the important and interesting subjects that a general audience that is not an expert would care about.

But also not just make it like a fluffy introductory course that doesn’t teach you anything. There are moments where you have to really think. And so I was hooked and then over a course of a few weeks, I started listening to all of them and she had some pretty heavy duty stuff in there already she had an episode about necrophilia, also very good, a little bit queasy, but worth it there was another one about animal testing And her guests were scientists from PETA.

So that was a nice reminder that PETA is more than just Ingrid and her craziness. PETA actually has a really well funded and respected research arm. So that was cool. I forget how things happened after that, but I wouldn’t shut up about it.

I felt like, all these episodes seem to form like a dotted outline where zoophilia should be

Toggle: right. And so we’re in the middle of putting together season six, episode one, the big research one that took us for fucking ever. And I wanted to use clips from the necrophilia one. And I did. I reached out to Ashley Hamer and asked if I could use them. She very graciously let us use them. But we had also talked about, hey, maybe we should reach out to her and see if she wants to do a zoophilia episode.

And she would just happen to also have just announced that she was doing an entire series on philias, basically kinks paraphilias. She talked about BDSM and furries, and she just released one about ABDL, which I’m excited to listen to. And I was like, look, we have access to these researchers. We have access to people who will talk on audio. we have access to all of these resources and we can give them to you to do an episode on zoophilia. If you want to do that,

Aqua: yeah, when the Felia series was announced, I’m like, okay, cool. We need to get in on this. But again, going back to the idea of if we’re gonna tell our own story in our own voices in our own way We need to make ourselves available for this and my concern was that a zoophilia episode was already in the pipeline

And we didn’t have anything to do with it We don’t know we didn’t know who was involved didn’t even know if it existed, but it seemed like it was A possibility.

Toggle: it turned out that it didn’t exist,

This was an interesting thing from our conversation when I mentioned this. I. Basically took Aqua’s words and sent them as part of it. One of the things Aqua did say is there seems to be this dotted line where zoophilia fits into this thing. And she said, you know what you’re right.

There does seem to be that dotted line in all of these episodes. And I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea, zoophilia, but that’s exactly why we need to talk about that. And, whew, that felt really good because that’s exactly the ethos of this podcast. It’s this is uncomfortable, let’s talk about it.

Aqua: yeah, it was neat to see her lean in.

Toggle: And so collaborating with her was really interesting because, we didn’t have any control over the editing process. We introduced her to all these different people to talk to, she chose who she wanted to speak with, she talked with Zydenberg, and she talked with Steve, we actually like, set up a whole bunch of different other people that we could have introduced her to. She preferred to talk to us, and we agreed. We interviewed at the same time, we both felt like we sucked at the interview, which was another thing that we learned is, oh, we talk about this all the time on our podcast and now we’re in this interview situation and we’re going um,

Aqua: Yeah for at least the first half hour, I thought I was a a blithering idiot. It ended up being really good, and, it’s kinda miraculous.

Toggle:

It’s really good. If you haven’t heard this yet, you have to hear this episode. It is so fantastic and I think what’s really important, it’s not the episode that we at Zooier Than Thou would have made. We had a lot of stuff that we talked about that did not make it into the episode that we really wanted to see in there.

Taboo Science has a format and it has its own modus operandi.

where it’s like, Hey, you know, this podcast is a little bit of a bait and switch. I lure you in with the promise of peeking into these people’s juicy kinky sex lives and then BAM! I hit you with the reality that these are real people who think about sex very carefully and you feel empathy.

And that is exactly what this episode was for zoophilia. it’s fantastic.

Aqua: I was really impressed that she managed to do that

At a couple of points she said some really affirming words that a lot of zoos need to hear, and that is It is a sexual orientation.

Toggle: She said it three times.

Aqua: Three times.

Tarro: Yeah, a good friend of mine messaged me as soon as he heard it saying like, I heard her say that and I, I literally started to cry because it was like the first sort of external validation towards our community that really feels like it is like, Positively moving us forward.

Toggle: Yeah. Check it out. Taboo Science. Listen to everything that she does. Her series on philias has been really enlightening for me.

Aqua: Yeah, same for me. I had an idea about these concepts, I just didn’t know how any of it worked.

Tarro: Also, just purely from like a media perspective the episode on zoos is her second most watched video of all time two weeks into its existence. So, Clearly it is a topic people are excited about.

Aqua: ABDL episode got legs too, though.

Tarro: It’s coming up. It’s coming up fast.

Toggle: I, here’s the other thing. We mentioned earlier baby legs.

little baby diaper

legs that waddle. All of this is to say let’s talk about where we are now. All of this stuff happened in four to five years. Holy fucking shit, right? This is probably the strongest and the most organized and the best prepared American zoos have ever been, right? We have a much better idea of what works and what doesn’t.

Aqua: There’s a pretty sharp contrast between Fausty’s episode about media mastery and this one, and I’m wondering if there is some some tension there would Fausty have actually liked any of this stuff that we’re doing or would he have actually been more of a hindrance because of his experience and how incredibly negative it was because we haven’t really encountered that yet.

We’ve had to make some tough choices. there hasn’t really been a meaningful hit piece about us that we actually care about, you know what I

Toggle: right,

Yeah, and the fact of the matter is that we’re poised to attract attention from larger media outlets at this point. I think it’s gonna happen. I think it’s gonna happen soon, and I don’t know that we’re gonna be ready for it, but it’s, gonna happen. And what is that gonna be like?

And are people gonna look at things like this Taboo Science episode favorably? If, for instance, it leads to some bad press later on I don’t know.

Toggle: But yeah that’s a good question that you ask about Fausty though like, I don’t know that he would be angry about this really. I think he would just be surprised that this was happening. He would have his own ideas of how to approach it whether or not Fausty would be helpful in this moment or whatever, I think we’re here because what he laid out for us to be able to do allowed us to get here, right? So regardless, this is the consequences of his actions and our actions and everyone else’s actions. And the fact of the matter is, is that things are moving really fast and it’s very scary.

I gotta be honest with you. It’s very scary the idea that some mainstream. Production is eventually going to talk about Zooier Than Thou, or talk about the zoo community at large because there’s a weight that comes with that and I feel like, we need to be ready for that.

Aqua: Yeah, social media is ephemeral by nature. Conversations there don’t last and there’s no expectation that they’re gonna remain available for any length of time.

But we’ve said before that interfacing with researchers is much more useful and important because whatever we help them produce becomes part of the scientific record, which is important. It’s permanent. It’s as permanent as we can hope to make it and then media stuff like this, and bigger projects that may be in our future, those also have some permanence but it’s a trade between academic research, which might be paywalled, or it might be written in a way that’s not so approachable and have a smaller audience because of it, on the other hand, you’ve got media, which could be very far reaching, and it could stay at the top of the search results page it could be link number one on the ten blue links, and it could be that way for a really long time, until something else comes along that replaces it.

So yeah, there’s a gravity to participating in those projects and being prepared for them, because they’re gonna stick around, and we’re not the ones making them.

Toggle: right, and the other thing we gotta remember is that all of these different media outlets that potentially might reach out to us, they have an agenda. Just like we have an agenda on Zooier Than Thou, the Daily Beast has an agenda, Russia Today had an agenda, Taboo Science has an agenda, it’s just a good one.

So being aware of that and understanding that some places might not approach you in good faith, but some places are going to, and how to recognize the difference between those. It’s going to be important. So here is what we think you should keep in mind if for some reason you go out there and you are approached by a media entity to talk about zoophilia. And I think a lot of people are going to more likely run into this thing if they’re somewhat visible, say on social media or something. And a lot of the first things you’re going to get are small creators. Or, like small accounts doing very small things, maybe a tiny podcast or a YouTube channel that has a hundred subscribers

Tarro: Or

potentially,

a really blank account that’s claiming to be a zoo, but with no history and no evidence of that, just saying that they’re starting a project.

Toggle: So the first thing you need to do when someone approaches you and says they want to talk to you in any sort of interview capacity, You should research them, find out who they are, what they’ve done find media that they’ve produced, and if there is none, that’s probably a project to walk away,

Aqua: yeah, you don’t want them to launch their brand on your back.

Toggle: right, and then look and see if they have media that exists, but, are they anti queer, like Russia today is obviously anti queer, we knew that going into that, we probably wouldn’t do that interview today, because we don’t have to and, a small YouTube creator who is controversial, who seeks out controversy in order to, gain an audience, there’s plenty of these drama mongering YouTube channels.

Avoid them. You don’t have to ever talk to them. You can say no, thank you. And, aren’t obligated to take every interview that comes your way, and especially if they’re small creators and small accounts, small YouTubes, small podcasts. Just avoid them and unless they have some kind of track record.

Aqua: Yeah

Toggle: that said, you can’t always find someone who’s gonna be nice, right? You’re not always gonna have a taboo science where the mo happens to, to balance what you are. And there may be some situation where you feel like there’s something at stake that you have to participate, that the story’s being told without you and you want to have a chance.

To be a part of that. And I will say first of all if you don’t feel prepared, or you feel like you’re not a very good speaker, or you feel like might have some performing in front of a mic,

pass that invitation along to someone you can trust.

Aqua: by the way,

I’m concerned for anybody who says that they’re gonna ace it,

because

you’re not.

Toggle: Oh, no, we, we wouldn’t ace it either.

Aqua: Yeah, as soon as the recording light is on, and you’re not in charge anymore, 80 percent of your faculties, just go away,

Toggle: It’s

true.

We should have been totally prepared for this fucking taboo science. obviously she asked about consent and things like that stuff You would think we’d be totally prepared for and you know to some extent we were but at the same time It was like this is not coming out the way that I wanted to like this is not how I rehearsed it You know, this is not, why

Aqua: what did I say?

Toggle: dumb?

Aqua: I had some really snarky opener for that. It was like, oh, the Consentivate. Yeah, we’re done with that.

Toggle: You’re like, God

Aqua: Boy,

Toggle: I shouldn’t have said that.

Aqua: we’re clearly not done with it. We’re talking about it right now.

Toggle: we had someone who was willing to handle that interview with care and understanding. You might not have that, so

don’t Think that you’re going to go into it and ace it. have some rehearsal, adversarial rehearsal. Get someone who’s a zoo to ask you the questions that you know you’re going to get, that you’re not thinking of right now.

Because you’re going to get questions about consent, almost certainly. And some of the things that they say, you might already feel like you have the answer to, but most likely they’re going to say it, they’re going to ask you questions you’re just not quite ready for. And having someone else who can be that adversary, help check you make sure that you’re ready for those kinds of things,

Tarro: And when you’re doing that practice, make sure it’s not someone that’s softballing you, and also make sure that you’re recording it. Because when that’s done, you want to be able to listen back to it and see, oh, they asked this question and I wasn’t prepared and I sounded like an idiot. Or they asked this and I wish I could have worded this in a different way.

That resource is going to be so helpful for you, especially if the person that you’re practicing with is like really trying to grill you.

Aqua: yeah. you.

know who else does this? Politicians. You know who else does this?

Defense attorneys.

Tarro: Mhm,

Aqua: It’s the same thing.

I’m gonna caution everybody a little bit here. It’s good to be ready for an interview to turn adversarial. Or have some sharp language in it. But be careful about recognizing the difference between somebody who is actually being malicious and somebody who is a professional and is actually just channeling the thoughts that are probably going through the minds of their viewers

when It airs.

Um, ‘cause it may not be their opinion. It might be like. This is what I know from experience, most of my audience is going to be thinking right now, so this is where we should take it.

Toggle: right. Basically don’t freewheel into an interview, don’t be like, you know what, I got this, I’ll be fine, I’m not going to prepare let’s say it’s taboo science and you know that to some extent it’s taboo science. You’re going to be granted empathy and you just don’t prepare.

Don’t do that.

Aqua: Yeah, I feel like taboo science is gonna turn out to be the exception to the rule. That was a very friendly, cordial, cooperative scene.

Tarro: yeah, very likely even other people looking to showcase us somewhat positively are still going to have pushback questions for the sake of their audience.

Toggle: Right. And their MO is not going to be, let’s foster empathy. Their MO is going to be, let’s look into this thing that people think is weird. And then talk about all of the things that those people feel, that kind of a thing.

Aqua: Yeah, or just straight up conclude with some kind of judgment.

Toggle: If you’re not confident and prepared, pass it along to someone you think is, right? People with Zooier Than Thou at least are in front of a mic a lot. you might go to someone at Zitterverein because they actually have people who are studied and talking with the media.

Tarro: It’s also worth mentioning that people that are on social media a lot, getting into arguments with antis or whatever that’s its own thing, but doing an interview on mic with someone is such a different ballgame. So you need to make sure you’re taking that into consideration before you’re sort of picking the person who you think might do this interview well.

Toggle: The social media anti zoo is not savvy. An interviewer for Fox News is savvy, and they know how to turn your shit against you,

so be prepared for that kind of a thing.

Aqua: Yeah exposure might be the solution, but it turns out being seen is still uncomfortable.

Toggle: yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Let’s say you decide you want to do this. You’re like, okay. I’ve looked into them. This looks like legit. This looks like something I want to participate in. I think I would do well. So have a back and forth with these people. I recommend doing an actual planning call.

Like you’re like, okay, I agree to talk to you, but we have to hash some things out and I need to understand that you have my boundaries and my safety concerns and all of these in mind. I want to talk to you off the record. No recording. Let’s just talk about this and make sure that this is the right idea.

Like this is something we should do. You should be able to do that. If someone’s unwilling to have that conversation with you, walk the fuck away, leave the room, don’t do it.

Aqua: You’re totally in your rights to do it.

Toggle: You should be able to set boundaries, talk about your safety, make sure that you feel comfortable. You should be able to get a general idea of what kind of questions are going to be asked. You should have the expectation that you’re not going to be thrown a curve ball, that you’re not. And to be fair, someone who wants to get the right story, wants you to be prepared to answer their questions.

They’re not trying to get ya, right? You should have an understanding of where it’s going and you should be able to keep your anonymity while doing this. News outlets probably want to talk on the phone. I don’t recommend that because then your phone number is exposed and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Signal is free and has aliases now so your phone number stays hidden. There’s lower risks there, but there’s still a little bit of risk. But, Signal protects your anonymity a little bit.

Aqua: Yeah, it’s substantially lower. And it turns out a lot of journalists already use Signal.

Toggle: Right. Because they deal with vulnerable groups all the time. They deal with people in Countries that have oppressive regimes, they deal with people like us who are queer minorities who might not want to be seen, or who might have some kind of security risk. An actual media organization should really be aware, or at least be aware of, that they need to be aware, of your safety concerns. I would also recommend knowing the recording laws for all parties. Some states in the United States allow one party recording without the consent of the other person. that’s really bad faith. Most news outlets wouldn’t do that, but you should be aware of it. You should probably know a little bit about what the non consenting recording laws are. Most places are two party states, like everyone has to know.

Aqua: I think the caution around this is justified here because of our past experience with the media.

Toggle: Right.

Aqua: I hope it’s not necessary, but it is something to think about.

Toggle: I think you should feel comfortable being allowed to record the conversation you have with them as well. You can request that. There is a chance that some media outlets won’t let you do that because they have some kind of proprietary concern. Sorry. But most places will, and they should allow you to do that.

So that’s worth asking about, it’s something that’s not necessarily like a Fox News or a CNN or anything like if you’re going on someone’s YouTube channel and you ask can I record this as well and they say no that’s a red flag

Aqua: Yeah, at the level we are operating at right now, it should be fine.

Toggle: right. We’re not really on Fox news yet.

Aqua: And by the time

you

get into live broadcasts it’s live. You almost don’t need to record it

anymore

Toggle: Jesus Christ. Oh, be careful with live. I can’t even, we’re not even at the live broadcast discussion right now. You

better have, you better really have some kind of media savvy before you. I don’t feel like I could do a live anything. we’ve been told before like, Hey, you guys are.

Impressively media savvy compared to other people we’ve talked to. I do not feel that we are savvy enough to go on live television and talk. And won’t do that. I don’t recommend, so we’re not going to going there, but I think the point of this initial call where you talk to them and you go over your boundaries, you go over your safety concerns, you set the rules and the terms for the interview.

You learn about the questions. Basically interviewing them. You’re interviewing to find out are these the kind of people I can trust with the story that I want to tell? Is their agenda in my best interest? Do I feel like they’re going to give me a fair shake? If they aren’t willing to give, they’re like, Oh, we don’t want to give you the questions.

We want to have you answer off the cuff. That’s a bad sign. they’re intending to come to you with questions that you can’t answer. That’s what they’re going to do. A true media outlet that has your interest in mind and who wants to get the right story, Want you to be prepared.

They may not give you the exact questions, but they’re gonna give you at least some kind of direction like, we’re gonna be talking about consent or, we might ask questions about some difficult topics or This is really just a fluff piece. We just want to know a little bit about the community.

Whatever. They should be able to tell you that kind of stuff. So you’re interviewing them to decide whether or not they are worth your time. Do not pass that opportunity up.

Aqua: Yeah, I’m gonna add one more thing that isn’t that hasn’t come up yet.

Toggle: mhm.

Aqua: If you do get stumped by a question, and you don’t know how to answer it, it’s much better to find a way to say, I don’t know how to answer that, than it is to just make up some bullshit.

Toggle: Yeah.

And that’s hard. That’s hard to say. You know, I don’t know how to answer that question. People feel that pressure. I have to know this. I have to be the expert. The true expert is the person who says, I don’t know how to do that. Let me come back to you and maybe see if I can find some resources on that or, whatever. Don’t

answer questions you don’t know the answer to.

So, if you do agree to do some kind of interview with, whether they’re a small creator that you feel confident about, a podcaster like Taboo Science, Or, the daily fucking beast, right? Go into that with some notes, have a cheat sheet, you don’t want to read your cheat sheet on the air, you want to internalize your points, but having them there to reference is good. You should have practiced with someone else, so that when you are giving an interview a spoken one that is, that you have time to, to know what you’re about to say. Now, a written interview is a lot easier because you can take your written answers and then send them to someone and go, did I do this right?

Is this good? Can I get a little bit of feedback before you reply? So like with the Daily Beast one, that’s basically what we did. we wrote our answers, we shared them and said, look, this is where I’m going with that. And it was like, no, that sounds awful. Or you should reword this. Or, oh yeah, that’s really good.

I like that. Get feedback on those written ones, the spoken ones, you don’t get to have feedback. You really need to have been prepared beforehand.

Aqua: yeah, and hold on to those questions and your answers. Because you will be able to refer to them later.

Toggle: Oh yeah. With your cheat sheet, for sure. There are some questions you’re going to be asked all the time. Questions about consent are going to come up for a while. Even if on the podcast, we basically acknowledge that we’re beyond that point, most media outlets aren’t beyond that point at this point.

And so for someone who’s operating a good faith. It may be necessary to have those kinds of conversations, which we’re really tired of having with people on Twitter. Because internally, our community should probably be talking about things beyond that. Like how do animals consent? How can you tell?

Aqua: What’s the difference between consent? Enthusiastic consent? Acquiescence. Is acquiescence good enough?

Toggle: it’s not.

Aqua: not.

Toggle: the answer is no. But these are kinds of conversations we should be having at zoos, but media outlets aren’t there yet. They’re not with us yet. And, We don’t need to have these microaggressions where these people ask us to answer these questions all the time.

But, if we’re gonna be talking to a media outlet, you have to be ready to have that conversation even though it’s annoying. And, honestly, ultimately, don’t be afraid to say no. We don’t need to participate in everything. Not that long ago, like I said, the RT article was the biggest thing we had to deal with, we were, it was like, this is huge, this is massive, now it’s tiny,

Aqua: Yeah,

we got pretty wound up about that.

Toggle: yeah, and, we have all these oh, should we not I’m worried we know this is not gonna be great do we need to be in there, that conversation would be so different today now, because the stakes that we’re operating at are higher than RT

Aqua: Do you think we would have just said no to them today?

Toggle: I would say no.

Absolutely.

Aqua: Yeah, I think I would too.

Toggle: I would say no now. I understand why we said yes the last time. I don’t need RT anymore.

Tarro: and if you’re someone that’s like a zoo with a smaller following who’s really excited to spread the message and have a positive impact with the community and everything, like I can promise you the time spent working on a better project is going to do more for the community than going on a hostile interview with a twitch streamer.

Streamer that has 10 followers like there’s no benefit to the greater zoo community from doing that Spend your time on something that’s more positive.

Toggle: Right.

Aqua: Yeah, maybe that’s the lesson from the last five years or so, is yes, it’s shitty that we haven’t been part of every conversation about zoosexuality we’re still not a part of certain very important discussions around zoophilia and bestiality in particular. We can’t really change that yet,

Toggle: but,

the, the

thing that we’ve really learned is that there’s always gonna be more opportunities.

Aqua: Yes, there’s always going to be more, you can be picky, and if something comes along and you don’t like the smell of it, fine, go work on something yourself that you own.

Toggle: Yeah. Ultimately, we’re in a better position than we’ve ever been, at least as US zoos. To have these conversations with interested parties, we have researchers that have done actual research that we can point to and, at least for Zooier Than Thou, we can go to those researchers and say, Hey, this media outlet wants to connect with you.

Do you want to talk with them? And most of the time they’re excited to share their work. We have that now. We did not have that when me and Fausty started this podcast and did this first episode. We now have positive media that we can point to. We have the Taboo Science Podcast, which is a non zoo podcast speaking in empathetic terms about our community.

Aqua: Even better than that, we’re in people’s contact books now, so they can come back to us later if some new thing comes along or some new question. That’s already happened to me a couple of times.

Toggle: And for you, who’s listening to this and being like, I’m never gonna be interviewed by anyone. But I do want to participate in advancing us towards better things. We have our own media outlet. zooey. pub is always looking for other written submissions.

Tarro: Oh, yes, we are

something that’s been really cool to see is that obviously AI has a lot of limitations, has a lot of issues. A lot of the language learning models that are out in circulation right now are using the zooey. pub website as their source material for a lot of what they understand about zoosexuality.

And pretty much any zoo question that you asked any of these models, they’re gonna list us as part of what they’re referencing. And, from pretty much all accounts, unless there’s a hard coded limit to what it can say responses from AI about it are very positive.

Toggle: that’s huge. We’re unfortunately moving in a direction where AI is powering our search engines. they’re finding us, and our words to have these conversations.

Aqua: yeah, be careful though, because the language models that we have right now are also recommending that you glue your pizza cheese to your sauce you know?

Whether or not AI sucks, it kinda doesn’t matter because people are using it. And, depending on how you ask the question, you might get a pretty positive answer out of it. At least concerning us and what we’re doing.

Or it’ll tell you to drink piss to stay hydrated. Who knows?

Toggle: but it means that if you contribute to the zooey. pub Body of work, you’re contributing to the AI language model. So fuck yeah, we have some control with our own media on what happens there. So the point being is we’re in a really great position right now to start having conversations outside of the zoo community, but we still need to be careful. We still need to be thoughtful. We still need to be prepared and we still need to know when to say no.

Aqua: Yeah, and it might be saying no because it’s the wrong thing at the wrong time, or you’re just not prepared for it, or you don’t have good confidence in the person who’s sending you the inquiry. It might also just not be your thing at all. Not everybody has to do what we’re doing.

Toggle: Right.

Aqua: there’s, unlimited ways to contribute here, and they’re all going to be important. .

Tarro: Anything that you can have passion in, there’s an angle that you can create something with it that would be super cool for people to see, whether it’s like an article or even just like your own thing.

It’s not all about interviews. Media mastery is about taking the thing you’re good at and using it to, the advantage of the community, creating media, participating in media and Knowing what your strengths are and what’s best to contribute to and when to say no to something that either isn’t beneficial or just isn’t quite your cup of tea. I want to thank you, Taro, for coming and sharing your perspective on the Zooey. pub side of things.

Tarro: Thank you for allowing me to once again come onto your podcast and plug my magazine for an hour.

–

Villain: What in the world do you mean by that?

Minion: Well, it’s still taboo, of course, but

Villain: Out with it!

Minion: As I said, sir, some shows are beginning to represent zoophiles as Real people who think kindly of animals. How can this be? The zoos are talking to these shows, sir.

Villain: No!

Minion: I’m afraid so, sir. The zoos who are not media savvy defer to the expertise of zoos who are, so that zoos aren’t just bullied around. There are healthy, thriving communities of zoos on multiple platforms, where zoos can accept themselves and freely discuss their orientation with others.

Villain: But we’ve made rules! Bestiality is disgusting! Animals cannot consent! Humans are superior!

Minion: We have not lost everything. The act is still illegal. These activism efforts have yet to breach the mainstream news bubble.

Villain: Yes, but for how long?

Minion: It remains to be seen, sir.

Villain: How far we have fallen and how much they have stood in only these few years.

Outro

Aqua: Thanks, friends, for listening to Zooier Than Thou.

Toggle: Our next episode is on July 21st, and we’ll be celebrating Zoo Pride!

Aqua: It’s bound to do you proud, so don’t miss it!

Toggle: You can subscribe to the podcast via our zooey RSS feed: just point your favorite podcast client at rss.zoo.wtf. You can also check out our extensive bonus content at bonus.zoo.wtf! If you want to show your support financially, head on over to donate.zoo.wtf. Find us on Bluesky at… you guessed it, @zoo.wtf.

Aqua: Our podcast’s website hasn’t changed, and you can find a form there that enables anonymous submissions to the podcast! You can also simply email us at [email protected].

Toggle: Share this podcast with someone who’s thinking about doing a Zooey interview or something!

Aqua: I’m Aqua, your media savvy orb of wonders.

Toggle: And I’m Toggle, and I just like listening to the sound of my own voice, and you’ve almost finished listening to Zooier Than Thou! Stay Defiant, fellow zoos! We’ll see you next time you feel like howling at the moon!

Both: (Howl!)