Which states legalized or decriminalized bestiality through court decisions or legislation since 2010?
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Executive summary
No U.S. state has legalized or intentionally decriminalized bestiality since 2010; the legal trajectory over the past decade-and-a-half has been the opposite — a steady patching of statutory gaps so that by the mid‑2010s most states explicitly criminalized sexual conduct with animals, leaving very few holdouts by 2025 [1] [2] [3]. Reporting databases disagree about precise, up‑to‑the‑day counts — for example, a 2025 Animal Legal Defense Fund briefing still identified West Virginia as a holdout while some compilations list all 50 states as outlawing the conduct [3] [4].
1. The user’s question, reframed: “legalized or decriminalized” — what actually happened
The phrasing asks whether any states went in the direction of legalizing or removing criminal penalties for sex with animals since 2010; the available legal surveys and advocacy tracking show no such liberalization. Instead, the 2010s and early 2020s were a period of legislative tightening and statutory clarification — often adding explicit bans or expanding cruelty statutes to cover photographing animals in sexual acts — not repeal or decriminalization [1] [2].
2. The hard developments: examples of new criminalization and amendment
A concrete example of tightening came in Alaska, which amended its cruelty statutes in 2010 to bring sexual conduct with animals clearly within criminal prohibitions, a model echoed in later enactments that also criminalized filming such acts [1]. Legal reviews and state-by-state tables assembled by legal scholars and advocacy groups document a wave of additions and amendments after 2010 that closed ambiguities in many states’ codes [2] [1].
3. The mid‑2010s turning point and the remaining outliers
A 2014 review found many states still lacked explicit statutes, but the landscape “changed dramatically” after that review as legislatures moved to close gaps; by the later 2010s and early 2020s only a handful of states remained without clear bestiality statutes, with advocacy groups and researchers tracking a near‑nationwide prohibition [2]. By early 2025 the Animal Legal Defense Fund publicly identified West Virginia as the only remaining state without an explicit ban — a status that underscores the direction of change was uniform criminalization rather than any state moving to legalize or decriminalize the conduct [3].
4. Conflicting public compilations and why they matter
Not all secondary compilations agree: some outlets and aggregated tables have reported that all 50 states prohibit bestiality [4], while others — both older and contemporaneous pieces — highlighted several states still lacking explicit prohibitions earlier in the decade [5] [6]. Those differences reflect timing, the narrowness of statutory language (some states rely on general cruelty or obscenity statutes rather than an explicit “bestiality” label), and the quality of the source’s legislative tracking [1] [5] [4].
5. Alternative viewpoints and hidden agendas in coverage
Advocacy groups like the Animal Legal Defense Fund frame the trend as correcting a moral and enforcement gap and press legislatures to act [3]; by contrast, sensational journalism or viral listicles have sometimes overstated how many states were “legal” for long periods by conflating the absence of a named statute with actual permissibility [5] [6]. Some academic work cautions against relying solely on the “Link” between bestiality and interpersonal violence as the legislative rationale, urging careful empirical grounding instead [2].
6. Bottom line and limitations of available reporting
Bottom line: there is no evidence in the reviewed reporting that any state has legalized or decriminalized bestiality since 2010; the recorded movement has been toward criminalization, with states amending statutes to explicitly prohibit the conduct [1] [2] [3]. The reporting, however, contains timing and definitional inconsistencies — some compilations list all 50 states as banning the act while advocacy summaries identified narrow holdouts as late as 2025 — so pinpointing the exact legislative date for any final holdout requires direct statute checks in the relevant state code beyond these sources [4] [3].