In Sweden during the 17th and 18th centuries, no less than 1,500 people, almost all men, were sentenced to death. About 600 of them were executed for having had sex with animals, the last execution for bestiality took place in the year of 1778. The exposed animals were also killed. More people were sentenced to death for bestiality than for example witchcraft. From the same time period, there are only about twenty court cases involving people who have had intercourse with a person of the same sex.
During the seventeenth- and eighteenth century, God's law and the profane law became one because of the church's demands for orthodoxy and the king's need for controlling his people. Bestiality was intensely prosecuted since it according to The Pentateuch was a deadly sin. Furthermore there were ideas that the result of bestiality could be monstrous offspring. The criminalization had religious reasons until the nineteenth century, but when the penalty code of 1864 entered into force, the ideas about bestiality as a deadly sin had disappeared. In the year of 1944 bestiality was decriminalized.