At night, they slipped into the boxes or passed over the doors of the closed enclosures, thanks to a stool. For nearly a year, a sordid scenario repeated itself almost every weekend in two equestrian centers in Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique). Two young men, then in their twenties, spent their Saturday evenings at the Sabot d’Or and the Landes pony club to subject mares and stallions to caresses, penetrations, and other sexual abuse. “It’s my way of loving them, it won’t change,” said one of them, after his arrest, in February 2016. Because the two college friends, who were acting together, quickly recognized and assumed facts. Just like their impressive frequency, “about thirty, even fifty times”.
This Tuesday, the tone is no longer the same. Six long years after their little merry-go-round stopped, following the installation of video surveillance cameras in the stables, only one defendant appears at the bar of the court. The raw language that he had been able to use, claiming to like “kissing only with horses, and nothing else”, turned into supported excuses. “I totally regret what happened, we hurt and traumatized the horses,” mutters Nathan*, a 27-year-old dark-haired young man, visibly very uncomfortable but “ready to accept it”. In a letter read by her lawyer, her friend says “her shame” which prevented her from appearing at the hearing, coupled with the fear of being recognized.
“No consent in the animal”
Why were these two teenagers, who discovered sexuality in front of zoophilic images from the age of 12 and masturbated together in front of the My Little Pony cartoon, able to develop such sexual deviance? This is what the court tried to understand, rather than dwelling on the acts as such.
“You say you wanted to give them pleasure, but there is no consent in the animal. You imposed abuse on them, they were your sexual objects, because they can only suffer, ”insists Mathilde Defretin for the public prosecutor, although there was no mutilation or blows given to horses.
The defendant present, who was also on trial for possession of child pornography, speaks for his part of “a passion for poorly managed horse riding that has become attraction”. “At the start, it was a bet, says the lawyer for the absent defendant, Maître Olivier Couespel du Mesnil. Then a kind of envy was born in him. He said that in animals, unlike humans, there was no risk of rupture. But it is a completely different person that we are judging today. »
Nathan, the suffering teenager whose bisexuality was not understood at the time by his adoptive parents, has he also really changed? The court doubts it while the young man, who claims to have carried out an “introspection”, has not embarked on a real course of care and is struggling to integrate socially. In 2020, an expertise also detected in the one who was described as the instigator a persistence “in zoophilic attraction. »
Six and twelve month probation
Still in a thin voice, he swears that he frequently meets horses again without any recurrence. “He seems to have thought about it, but we don’t know what tomorrow will be like for all the animals that will cross the road of the two defendants”, estimates for his part the lawyer of the SPA, who is part of the half-dozen animal protection associations which have joined as civil parties in this extraordinary case.
The two men, who have kept ties, are sentenced to six months suspended prison sentence for the absent defendant, twelve months suspended probation for two years with an obligation to care for Nathan. They were also banned from keeping a pet and will have to pay several hundred euros each to the civil parties.
* assumed first name