Posted by In July 2005 Kenneth Pinyan, a 45-year-old Boeing engineer, died from internal injuries sustained during sex with a stallion on a farm near Enumclaw, Washington. At the time bestiality was not a crime there, so the friend who had filmed it all was convicted only of trespassing. The case led, in 2006, to a law punishing it with up to five years in prison.
Zoophilia (or rather, bestiality) is the human practice of having sex with animals. It is illegal in many states, but there are people who are sexually attracted to animals more than to humans. This is the case of Kenneth Pinyan, who died after sex with a horse, in a story that went down in history as the “Enumclaw horse sex case”.
Who was Kenneth Pinyan
Kenneth Pinyan was an engineer who had worked for Boeing for eight years, the American multinational that builds aircraft. He had been married to a woman, with whom he had children, and was building a new house with a barn in Gig Harbor, where he planned to keep a horse.
After a motorcycle accident he had lost some sensation and, from then on, he began to seek out increasingly extreme sexual practices. In the early 2000s he found a group of men online who called themselves “zoos” and met on weekends at a farm in King County, near Enumclaw.
There they had sex with horses, filmed each other and posted the videos online. Pinyan went by the alias “Mr. Hands”.
His death
One night in early July 2005 Pinyan, truck driver James Michael Tait and a third man who was never identified sneaked into the barn of a 40-acre farm about 5 miles from Enumclaw. The farm’s owners knew nothing about what went on. While Tait filmed him, Pinyan had sex with a stallion and suffered severe internal injuries, including a perforated colon.
On July 2, 2005 he was dropped off anonymously at Enumclaw Community Hospital. The man who brought him asked for help and left without explanation; by the time staff wheeled him into an examination room, Pinyan was already dead.
He was 45. According to the medical examiner he died of acute peritonitis due to perforation of the colon, and his death was ruled “accidental”.
Investigation and trial
Police traced Pinyan’s acquaintances through his driver’s license and so found the farm, which was known in zoophile chat rooms as a destination for people wanting sex with livestock. In Tait’s trailer, next to the farm, about a hundred VHS tapes and DVDs were seized, hundreds of hours of footage.
But there was a problem: in Washington State bestiality was legal. The old sodomy law that had punished it had been repealed in 1976.
Prosecutors wanted to charge Tait with animal cruelty, but the videos showed that the horses had not been harmed, and indeed they were found in good condition. Tait was therefore charged only with trespassing, for entering the farm without permission. On November 29, 2005 he entered an Alford plea and was given a one-year suspended sentence, a $300 fine, one day of community service and an order never to return to the farm. The third man was never charged because he did not appear in the videos.
Aftermath
The news understandably caused a stir. Published by The Seattle Times, it was one of the paper’s most read stories of 2005. Enumclaw residents were shocked and, even ten years later, preferred not to talk about it.
The case prompted state senator Pam Roach to introduce a bill against bestiality, passed on February 11, 2006, which also bans filming such acts. Today in Washington bestiality is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
One of Pinyan’s videos, which circulated online after his death, became one of the internet’s first viral shock videos.
In 2007 a documentary about Kenneth’s life and death and the men who frequented the farm, titled “Zoo”, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was one of 16 films selected out of 856 candidates, was screened at many festivals in the United States and was also chosen for the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.
What became of James Michael Tait
Some time later Tait moved to a farm in Maury County, Tennessee, where bestiality had become a crime in July 2007. In October 2009 he was arrested together with the farm’s owner after someone emailed investigators a photo of a man with a pony. The two admitted to sex acts with a horse and, in January 2010, Tait pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.
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very hardening. more would be enjoyed.