In 2006, Charles Mudede wrote about the infamous death of Kenneth Pinyan and how bestiality came to be illegal in Washington State:

^{Photos by Rob Devor}

The absence of a law banning bestiality was never more apparent than it was on the day James Michael Tait—the man who, according to the Enumclaw Police Department, filmed the exact moment that the horse’s monstrous penis fatally ruptured Pinyan’s colon—stood before a judge last November. The prosecutor’s office wanted to charge Tait with animal abuse, but the police found no evidence of abused animals on the many videotapes they collected from his home. As there was no law against humanely fucking a horse, the prosecutors could only charge Tait with trespassing. At the time of Pinyan’s death, Tait lived in a trailer on a 39-acre lot next to a ranch that breeds Arabian stallions, and at night he and another man would, according to the “Charges in Enumclaw Horse Case” document filed by the office of the prosecuting attorney, “repeatedly visit the [farm’s] barn and have sex with several of their [neighbors’] horses.” Because the owners of the violated farm “were not aware that [Pinyan, Tait, and others who connected with them via the internet] were repeatedly coming into their barn and having sex with their horses,” the prosecutors decided to file criminal trespass first degree charges against Tait. The other man was not charged because he wasn’t on the videotape that captured Pinyan’s last night on earth.

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