My Lovely Horse

Last week's Newsweek carried an unusual film review by David Ansen of Robinson Devor's documentary, Zoo.

If you were to watch Robinson Devor's Zoo with no sound, it might take you a long time to realize that the subject of this eerily beautiful movie is bestiality.

. . .

The inspiration for this meditation on the wilder shores of human desire was the true story of a divorced Boeing executive and father-his Internet name was Mr. Hands-who died of massive internal bleeding after having sex with a stallion. This happened in 2005 in the town of Enumclaw, Wash., not far from Seattle, where Devor, an acclaimed independent filmmaker (The Woman Chaser, Police Beat), lived. One of the reasons the group of zoophiles congregated in Washington was that there were no laws against bestiality there. (That's changed as a result of this incident.) Unable to bring anything other than minor charges against any of the men, the state, needing to dole out some punishment, decreed that the stallion that killed Mr. Hands be gelded. Devor shows this procedure, performed on a sedated animal, and lets the irony speak for itself.