zoophile

Pluralzoophiles

1. 1
   nouncountable

   Someone who is sexually attracted to animals other than humans.

   The researchers surveyed self-identified zoophiles about when the attraction first appeared.

   Under the new law, a convicted zoophile may be banned from owning pets.

   Similarzoosexual

   Note

   The word is assembled from zoo- "animal" and -phile "lover", and nothing in those parts is sexual; the sexual meaning comes from use alone. Zoosexual is the closest synonym, and the bare short form zoo also turns up. Because the animal-ethics meaning shares the spelling, a writer who means that one has to make the moral argument unmistakable.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Someone whose moral principles give animals the same standing as human beings.

   The panel pitted a radical zoophile against a defender of animal research.

   Zoophiles in the ethics department reject any moral line between human and animal suffering.

   Note

   Ethical debate is the home of this meaning: W. Lane-Petter, in the Journal of Medical Ethics (1976), sets the radical zoophile beside the anti-speciesist and the animal liberationist. A writer can also fix it as a label for an argument, as Gary Chartier does in Religious Studies (2006), naming any process thinker who holds that killing animals for food is usually wrong.

3. 3
   adjective

   Preferring an animal environment to live in, as some skin fungi do; used where zoophilic is the standard form.

   The lab identified the culture as a zoophile dermatophyte, probably caught from the family's guinea pig.

   The vet warned that the zoophile fungus on the calves could spread to the farmhands.

   Similarzoophilic

   Note

   Medical writing on skin fungi is where this adjective turns up, in phrases such as zoophile dermatophytosis and zoophile tinea. Viktor A Czaika, in 2013, warns that inflamed, sharply bordered plaques on a child should suggest a zoophile infection, one caught from an animal, so the patient's history with animals is the clue. In edited prose, zoophilic is the safer choice.

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