World of animal lovers has a dark, secret side

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This article was published 24/11/2018 (2873 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An eight-year journey for former Winnipeg Free Press reporter Carreen Maloney has resulted in the publication of her non-fiction book about a shocking sex scandal.

A sex scandal involving people and animals.

Her book, Uniquely Dangerous: A True Story ($35), tackles the taboo subjects of zoophilia and bestiality.

“I didn’t know going into it what I was in for or that it would take eight years,” Maloney says. “But when people kept trying to intimidate me out of doing it, that raised my interest.”

Uniquely Dangerous is also the story of Douglas Spink, a former multimillionaire technology entrepreneur who lost it all. He was a former owner and lover of a show-jumping horse, an extreme sports fanatic and a convicted drug runner who ended up living in seclusion after serving time in prison. On April 14, 2010, Spink was arrested in a dramatic raid and accused by U.S. authorities of running a commercial bestiality farm on his remote property in Washington state, just eight kilometres from the Canadian border.

Maloney used her investigative journalist skills and her experience in the animal welfare community to uncover the story.

“I’ve written about animal welfare and sometimes had trouble getting people to care about atrocities, but everyone cared about this,” said Maloney, 49, who grew up in St. Andrews and now lives in Louisiana.

Maloney will be in Winnipeg for the official Canadian launch of her book on Nov. 30 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.

“I was very upset and deeply saddened that many of the animals get killed in these cases.”

At the time of Spink’s arrest, Maloney was a longtime volunteer writer with the Whatcom Humane Society in Washington State. Spink’s seven dogs were brought to the society when authorities seized them after a video was found during the raid showing a man, who was staying on the property, having sex with Spink’s dogs.

“Why I wrote it was because I think it has wide-ranging ramifications for animal rights,” said Maloney, who reported for the Free Press from 1991 to 1994. She went on to write for the Ottawa Citizen, Business in Vancouver, Modern Dog magazine and the Humane Society of United States’ publication Animal Sheltering.

“It happened in my community and the animals came to a shelter that I was very familiar with for 10 years, the fact that my husband died at that time and there was a challenge, from a journalistic standpoint, to write a story about a secret society, because you don’t find that in life very often, a society that you hadn’t heard about,” she said, referring to zoophilia.

Spink is part of a secret society of zoophiles, where humans form their primary social, emotional and erotic or sexual attachment, preference or bonds with animals. The act of a human having sex with an animal is bestiality.

Maloney found in her research that zoophilia and bestiality, topics that most people find cringe-worthy, are lifestyles more common than many people believe.

Uniquely Dangerous reveals how she’s endured hate-filled criticism for writing and publishing material on topics society generally abhors. During the research and writing of her book, her husband, Hiromi Monro, was killed in 2010 in a loading-dock accident at their toy company’s warehouse. While she was grieving his death, someone broke into their home and left her a threatening note.

While uncovering Spink’s story, she found out about the “shadowy world of zoos” — the short form for people with zoophilia — and what happens to the animals linked to them.

Though Spink was married to a woman and had relationships with both men and women, Maloney reveals Spink was in love with his horse, Capone, a champion show jumper, and over the years with several dogs. When his animals were taken from him, his grieving was deep, dark and led him down a destructive path.

“He is not attracted to human beings, hardly at all,” Maloney says. “Zoos will partner with other people, but that doesn’t mean that the partnership is based on sex… He talks about being 12 years old and sneaking out to be with a golden retriever in the neighbourhood all night. He’s felt this way his whole life. But he lived, he said, his whole childhood fearing someone would find out about his secret.”

She said Spink was outed as being a zoo by someone when he was in his 20s, and he chose to embrace it.

“Spink is not typical of the other zoos that I met. Most of them are much less flamboyant human beings. He’s an anomaly in any context,” she said. “He’s also a controversial figure in that community because he’s bringing attention to them and they don’t want it. He was a fascinating person to write about. It wasn’t until I met him, that day on the grass in Seattle, that I knew I had a story that should be told.”

Maloney took care to avoid putting her opinions on animal safety into the book.

“I really wanted to present the facts to people and let them decide. Because it is so emotionally charged, I wanted people to look at it with their own sense of logic,” she says.

The issue of whether animals have the ability to give consent is particularly polarizing.

“People get angry at me, on both sides, for not taking a side. As journalists, we’re permitted to not take a side,” she said. “It’s not my job to decide what we as a society are going to feel about this or do about it, but it’s important that we know.”

Spink remains in contact with Maloney. He has moved back in with his mother and may have to live out the remainder of his life without any of his beloved animals.

The most recent information Maloney has is that Capone is in the care of a woman Spink was involved with. As for his dogs, Maloney worries they have been euthanized.

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca