In 2006, a deputy fire chief in Maricopa County, Arizona, was accused of heading over to a neighboring farm, dragging one the farmer's small gray lambs into the barn, and attempting to fornicate with the animal. The farmer went out to the barn and saw the 52-year old deputy fire chief "holding the lamb down on its side in the hay with his pants down trying to have sex with it," according to a police report of the incident reprinted in local media outlets.

When the farmer confronted him, the deputy fire chief allegedly said, "You caught me ... I tried to (expletive) your sheep." The deputy chief later then retired from the department and was accused of several misdemeanor offenses.

After the incident, Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio worked to make bestiality a felony in Arizona. He was successful in short order, with a bestiality law signed into law on May 24, 2006.

Now, Arpaio says the big sexual threat to his county's livestock comes not from drunken attacks on random sheep from but from deliberate encounters arranged on Craigslist.

In a letter (PDF) this week to Craigslist President Jim Buckmaster, Arpaio wrote that his office had just wrapped up "an undercover investigation that spanned several months during 2010 and 2011,” one that “resulted in the arrest of two individuals for conspiracy to commit bestiality." Others are being investigated.

The two men, an elementary school teacher and a handyman, were found when detectives contacted them on Craigslist. According to a separate press release (PDF), “Sheriff's detectives set up meetings through computer communications where the suspects believed they were meeting the owners of dogs to have sex with the animals at a hotel."

The letter to Buckmaster says that "numerous other posts" were also discovered in the "men seeking men" and "casual encounters" sections of Craigslist that "included specific description of criminal acts” and were “often accompanied by graphic photographs depicting a fully nude male in various pornographic situations."

Arpaio stopped short of threatening Craigslist with any action, though he did says that it was "undoubtedly providing a mechanism to facilitate obvious criminal activity.” In his view, the site's self-regulatory measures have failed, and Arpaio decided to reopen the old debate over liability for user-generated content.

"Simply posting your ‘Terms of Use,’ providing a mechanism for posters to do YOUR job, and claiming that Craigslist is 'not responsible for the content’ is thoroughly disappointing," Arpaio wrote. "I ask that you reevaluate the security measures that you utilize to prevent this type of activity and take the necessary action to improve your procedures.”

Two men who don't back down

Arpaio, who bills himself as "America's toughest sheriff," is a hugely controversial figure nationally. His “get tough on crime” approach to law enforcement has led him to put inmates in pink underwear (and then to sell pink boxers as a fundraiser), to construct large tent cities with limited or nonexistent cooling capacity in Arizona's broiling heat, and to feed his inmates as cheaply as humanly possible.

Arpaio was sued in 2003 for sticking webcams in his pretrial detention cells, putting those who had been arrested up on the Internet. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Ruled that this was illegal punishment of pretrial detainees.

Arpaio was sued again over heat and food issues in 2010. The Ninth Circuit concluded (PDF) that he was required, at the minimum, to provide "pretrial detainees taking psychotropic medications with housing in which the temperature does not exceed 85° F" and that he stop feeding prisoners "food that is overripe, moldy, and generally inedible."

(Wikipedia actually has a nice rundown on the long, long list of Arpaio shenanigans.)

As for Craisglist, the site has been dogged by more conventional sex charges for years, with numerous attorneys general complaining about the prostitution and sex trafficking in the site's personal sections. After tremendous pressure, Craigslist adopted some reforms and closed its "erotic services" section, though the rest of its personals section remains open.

Buckmaster has repeatedly blasted those who demand more regulation of Craigslist. In February of this year he complained about a competitor-funded study that allegedly found 330 crimes committed in connection with Craigslist use in a single year. "Sounds scary until you compare that number to the 570 million classified ads posted by 100 million or more US craigslist users during that same time span, generating literally BILLIONS of human interactions, many involving face-to-face meetings between users who do not know one another," he wrote at the time.

Buckmaster has always insisted that Craigslist has gone beyond its legal obligations in such matters, and he isn't afraid to clash publicly with those who attack him and his site. In 2010, after being hounded by Connecticut Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, Buckmaster took to the Craigslist blog to write, "With his senatorial race in full swing however, AG Blumenthal won’t let the facts get in the way of a good photo op. Or as I heard while in his offices 2 years ago—'The most dangerous place on earth is getting caught between Dick Blumenthal and a television camera.'"