Man allegedly had sex with guide dog - Tallahasseean charged with breach of peace

Local prosecutors are apparently in a bind: How do they charge a blind Tallahassee man who has been accused of having sex with his Seeing Eye dog?

Florida, like many other states, has no bestiality statute - that is, a law specifically prohibiting sexual contact between humans and animals.

So Alan Yoder, 29, originally was charged with felony animal cruelty, but court records show that charge was dropped last Friday and replaced with a misdemeanor - disorderly conduct.

Yoder now is charged with a "breach of the peace, by engaging in sexual activity with a guide dog," according to a court document.

One of two prosecutors on the case, Assistant State Attorney Owen McCaul, did not return a call Thursday. The other, Assistant State Attorney Stephanie Usina, said she could not answer specific questions, including explaining why the charge was lowered to a misdemeanor.

Yoder, reached by telephone Thursday, declined to be interviewed. James D. Varnado, his attorney, said he has filed a not-guilty plea on his client's behalf but declined to discuss details of the case.

"However lurid the allegations may be, we should resist a rush to judgment," he said.

Yoder, who lives in a local apartment complex, last month asked a female acquaintance to join him in a sex act with the dog, a male yellow Labrador named "Lucky."

She demurred, but later told a friend about it. That person called a social worker, who called police.

Investigators spoke to Yoder on June 16, who admitted performing certain sex acts with the dog, even going into detail with them, but denied doing others. He was arrested and booked June 22, charged with animal cruelty.

An animal-control officer took the dog to Dr. Sondra Brown, a veterinarian at Northwood Animal Hospital, who could not determine whether the dog had been sexually abused.

Warren Goodwin, who recently retired after 30 years as an assistant prosecutor, said he could not recall a similar case in Leon County.

Annemarie Lucas, a New York-based special investigator for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said sexual contact with animals "probably happens more than it's actually reported."

Bestiality - illegal in New York state - is "just not a natural thing," she said. "Animals can't consent ... They're probably fearful and in physical pain. It's like any kind of abuse.

"It's a cowardly act," added Lucas, who also appears on "Animal Precinct," a program on the Animal Planet cable-television network. "It's a domination thing, something an animal would never instigate."

Stephanie Shain, spokeswoman for the Humane Society of the United States, said her organization takes a similar position.

"It's doing something to an animal that they have an inability to stop," Shain said.

Last year, an Ocala man pleaded no contest to felony animal cruelty after being charged with having sex with his then-fiancee's female Rottweiler, according to the Pet-Abuse.com Web site.

A judge withheld adjudication and ordered five years of probation and a psychological evaluation. He also prohibited the 27-year-old man from "owning pets of any kind while on probation and from having unsupervised contact with other people's pets," the site said.

Good question:

(From Snopes.com)
Claim: Multiplying your dog's age by seven will produce its equivalent in human years.
Status: False.

Origins: When
we human folk exchange information about each other, age is one of the most important pieces of data we pass along. Knowing someone's age immediately allows us to infer a great deal of information about that person with a reasonable degree of certainty: Age not only tells us whether someone is a child, an adult, or an elderly person, but it allows us to place people into much finer gradations of categories -- infant, toddler, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, middle-aged, elderly -- from which we can deduce a good deal about their physical, psychological, and social statuses. We know that a 4-year-old child should be walking, but that a 6-month-old baby is unlikely to be capable of the feat. We understand that a couple of 16-year-olds might well have a baby together, but that an 8-year-old boy is generally too young to father one and a 58-year-old woman is usually too old to conceive one. We're aware that most 9-year-olds haven't yet reached puberty, but that a 39-year-old might well have started experiencing many of the infirmities of advanced age (e.g., lessened eyesight, loss of hearing, weight gain, persistent aches and pains). We grasp that a 29-year-old is in what we would term "the prime of life," while an 89-year-old has well exceeded the average human lifespan. We can make pretty good guesses from a person's age about whether he's old enough to have finished his schooling, live away from his parents, be married, or hold an important professional position, or whether he's too old to still be working or raising children of his own. And even those of us who still have most of our lives ahead of us know all this.

When it comes to our pets, however, many of us are mystified how to relate their ages to ours. Sure, knowedgeable owners and breeders may be quite familiar with all the developmental stages of their chosen animals, but many of us casual pet owners can't do much more than distinguish between "puppy," "dog," and "old dog." At what age are kittens weaned from their mothers? What's the average lifespan of a dog? When is a cat old enough to reproduce, and when is a dog too old to bear a litter? Is an 8-year-old dog in the prime of life, or is he closer to middle age? Lacking a good deal of observational experience, many of us simply don't know.

Since knowledge and experience take time and effort to acquire, we've developed simple shortcuts to help us answer these questions, such as the well-known formula for "dog years": multiply your dog's age by seven, and you'll have his equivalent age in human terms. Although this formula might work roughly well for the middle years of a dog's life, it's too simplistic to accurately reflect a dog's developmental status closer to either end of its lifespan. Using this calculation, for example, an 18-month-old dog would be at a developmental stage similar to a 10-year-old child's, but while many 18-month-old dogs are fully grown and capable of reproducing, few 10-year-old children are. The "dog years" measurement tells us that a 15-year-old dog is supposed to be the equivalent of a 105-year-old person, but (factoring out accidents and other unnatural causes of death) a much larger proportion of dogs lives to age 15 than humans live to age 105.

As well, age is more than just a chronological measurement of years lived; it's also an expression of how our bodies have been affected by the passage of time. Different types of animals age at different rates, so we can't employ a simple, direct, proportional relationship to correlate the ages of species as disparate as dogs and humans, especially since variable factors such as genetics, nutrition, and environment play an important role in the aging process. The bottom line is that just as we wouldn't raise a litter of puppies or kittens the same way we'd raise a baby, neither should we care for our pets based on how old we think they'd be if they were people.

For those who would like a rough idea of how the ages of our canine and feline friends compare to ours (strictly for entertainment purposes), we present the following charts courtesy of ANTECH. (Smaller dog breeds tend to live longer on average than larger breeds, so no single chart can adequately represent all dogs.)

Does this count as an official source????

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