But the stereotypical portrait of the zoophile as a woman-deprived, down-on-the-farm, and poorly educated male is presently being challenged by some contemporary findings.
[..]
Earls and Lalumière report having received a number of letters and emails from people who also self-identified as zoophiles (or “zoos” as many of these individuals refer to themselves on the Internet, which has served to connect them in unprecedented ways and to attract curious researchers like flies on a barnyard wall). And many of these respondents were vehement that they didn’t fit the mentally challenged, rural stereotype reflected by Kinsey’s analysis. Some were, in fact, highly educated professionals. In other recent surveys, the majority of zoophiles scoffed at the notion that they were abusive toward animals in any way—far from it, they said.
[..]
In an effort to disentangle myth from reality, then, Earls and Lalumière published a new case study in a 2009 issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, focusing on the first-person account of a forty-seven-year-old, high-functioning (he earned his M.D. at age twenty-eight) and seemingly well-adjusted male who had had, by all appearances, a completely unremarkable suburban upbringing with loving parents and no memories of abuse or neglect. Nonetheless, from an early age, this man had struggled to come to grips with his own zoophiliac tendencies. Again, horses served as the primary erotic target.
[..]
Three years later, the teenager purchased his own mare, took riding lessons and began a “long courtship” with the female horse until, finally, the pair consummated their relationship:

    When that black mare finally just stood there quietly while I cuddled and caressed her, when she lifted her tail up and to the side when I stroked the root of it, and when she left it there, and stood quietly while I climbed upon a bucket, then, breathlessly, electrically, warmly, I slipped inside her, it was a moment of sheer peace and harmony, it felt so right, it was an epiphany.

This case study reveals that, again, it’s not only mentally deficient farmhands that have sex with animals. And neither, it seems, is it simply unattractive, unsavory men who can’t find willing sexual partners of their own species. In fact, shortly after obtaining his medical degree, this particular man married a (human) woman and had two children with her. But their sex life relied on his imagining her to be a horse and—perhaps not surprisingly—the marriage didn’t last.