Enumclaw horse sex case

In the 1970s, many statutes that had criminalized certain sex acts in various U.S. states were repealed, largely since they had criminalized some consensual sex acts between adults that were no longer considered appropriate to forbid (e.g., criminalizing all oral and anal sex). In Washington state, a law was repealed on July 1, 1976, that had said: An effect of the repeal was that bestiality became legal in the state of Washington. Kenneth Pinyan had worked for Boeing for eight years. He had previously been married to a woman and had children with her. He had moved from Seattle to Oak Harbor, Washington. Pinyan had been building a new house and a barn that he planned to keep a horse in, along the Key Peninsula Highway in Gig Harbor, Washington. He was about to begin making payments on the property's mortgage. ==Pinyan's death==

The incident that killed Pinyan occurred at a farm located in an unincorporated area in King County, Washington, northwest of the city of Enumclaw. On July 2, 2005, Pinyan was dropped off anonymously at the Enumclaw Community Hospital. Medical staff wheeled Pinyan into an examination room before realizing he was dead. ==Investigation==

After Pinyan died, the authorities used his driver's license to find acquaintances and relatives. Earlier news reports stated that the authorities had used surveillance camera footage to track down Pinyan's companion. Using the contacts, the authorities found the farm where the incident occurred. The police tracked down the rural Enumclaw-area farm, which was known in zoophile chat rooms as a destination for people wanting to have sex with livestock, and seized 100 VHS tapes and DVDs amounting to hundreds of hours of video of men engaging in bestiality. One of the videotapes featured Kenneth Pinyan shortly before he died on July 2. ==Media reporting==

Jennifer Sullivan, a Seattle Times staff reporter, said that originally the King County Sheriff's Department did not expect the local newspapers to report on the event because of its gruesome nature. However, after an Associated Press report stated that the farm where the event occurred attracted a significant number of people who sought to partake in bestiality, the Times decided that it needed to write articles about the case as multiple people were involved. ==State of Washington v. James Michael Tait==

The videographer in the case, 54-year-old James Michael Tait, Judge David Christie gave him a suspended one-year sentence, a $300 fine, one day of community service, and ordered Tait never to visit the farm again. ==Aftermath==

Charles Mudede wrote that at the time of the incident, the residents of Enumclaw were shocked and angered by the event. In 2015, ten years after the incident, he wrote that Enumclaw residents were still unwilling to acknowledge what had happened. The video was nicknamed "Mr. Hands" or "2 Guys 1 Horse". The video, intended originally to sexually gratify the viewer, became one of the Internet's first viral shock videos and was featured in the documentary Zoo. On his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan showed the video to two guests, Iliza Shlesinger and Josh Zepps, on two separate episodes. The Hodgetwins also reacted to the video. Zoo A documentary of the life and death of Pinyan, and the lives led by those who came to the farm near Enumclaw, debuted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival under the title Zoo. It was one of 16 winners out of 856 candidates for the festival, and played at numerous regional festivals in the U.S. thereafter. Following Sundance, it was also selected as one of the top five American films to be presented at the prestigious Directors Fortnight sidebar at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. James Michael Tait and later events of 2009–2010 Some time after the events in Washington, James Michael Tait moved to Maury County, Tennessee, onto a farm owned by a man named Kenny Thomason housing horses, pigs, goats and dogs. Tennessee explicitly banned bestiality with the enactment of Tennessee Code § 39-14-214, which took effect on July 1, 2007, making it a Class E felony punishable by up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $3,000. Despite this, Tait did not relocate to another state that decriminalized bestiality, like he had done with Washington. On October 13, 2009, a woman associated with them, Christy D. Morris, was arrested and charged with three counts of animal cruelty. Two days later, an anonymous person e-mailed investigators a photo of a man sexually abusing a Shetland pony from Thomason's farm; Tait and Thomason were arrested that same day. Tait was charged with three counts of felony animal cruelty, while Thomason was charged with two. According to Tait's arrest warrant, he had been engaging in sex acts with a stud horse over a span of several months. Tait and Thomason admitted to engaging in sex acts with a horse. In January 2010, Tait pleaded guilty in a Tennessee court to engaging in sexual acts with animals and was placed on probation. Section 16.52.205 of the Revised Code of Washington After Pinyan died, a Washington state senator, Pam Roach, crafted a bill to ban bestiality in Washington State. == See also ==