In light of some of the comments about this very academic article, here’s a poem by the Georgia poet James L. Dickey. He thought of himself mostly as a poet, though he’s most famous for his 1970 novel Deliverance.

The Sheep Child

BY JAMES L. DICKEY (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-l-dickey)

Farm boys wild to couple

With anything with soft-wooded trees

With mounds of earth mounds

Of pinestraw will keep themselves off

Animals by legends of their own:

In the hay-tunnel dark

And dung of barns, they will

Say I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta

Way back in a corner somewhere

There’s this thing that’s only half

Sheep like a woolly baby

Pickled in alcohol because

Those things can’t live. his eyes

Are open but you can’t stand to look

I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all

Gone. The boys have taken

Their own true wives in the city,

The sheep are safe in the west hill

Pasture but we who were born there

Still are not sure. Are we,

Because we remember, remembered

In the terrible dust of museums?

Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may

Be saying saying

I am here, in my father’s house.

I who am half of your world, came deeply

To my mother in the long grass

Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight

Listening for foxes. It was something like love

From another world that seized her

From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head

Out of dew, without ever looking, her best

Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face

Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound

Of sobbing of something stumbling

Away, began, as she must do,

To carry me. I woke, dying,

In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes

Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment

The great grassy world from both sides,

Man and beast in the round of their need,

And the hill wind stirred in my wood,

My hoof and my hand clasped each other,

I ate my one meal

Of milk, and died

Staring. From dark grass I came straight

To my father’s house, whose dust

Whirls up in the halls for no reason

When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,

And, through my immortal waters,

I meet the sun’s grains eye

To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.

Dead, I am most surely living

In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives

Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf

And from the chaste ewe in the wind.

They go into woods into bean fields they go

Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,

They groan they wait they suffer

Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

Source: James Dickey: The Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

I read an article a few years back that speculated that AIDS was introduced to humans by having sex with monkeys. I wonder.

sherifffdb (imported) wrote: Fri Dec 02, 2011 7:31 am I read an article a few years back that speculated that AIDS was introduced to humans by having sex with monkeys. I wonder.

Just as likley that some tribesman somewhere nicked himself while butchering a monkey, in fact far MORE likley.

http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv-and-men.htm HPV has already been linked to anal, mouth and penis cancer. I wouldn't be surprised to see one of the 1,500 or so variants of the virus to be implicated in this and other cancers.

Throat cancer & HPV.

My suspicion for the etiology of Michael Douglas episode.

Crazy wild life years before he got focused.

Hollywood, who you know and how.

But that's just a virus from another human bestie.

Not a non-human bestie.

Bestiality is usually reserved for the latter. I think, hhmmmm?