Washington- “There’s a lot of things people do not take the time to learn about,” the voice on the other end of the phone says. “Like, who is Pam Roach?”

Pam Roach, the Republican state senator, wants me to get to know Pam Roach, animal lover.

She is 57 years old, lives on a 7-acre farm near Auburn and has a llama, ducks, rabbits and more than a dozen goats.

This all goes a long way to explain why she is leading the charge to protect animals in Washington from people who want to have sex with them.

Call it bestiality. Zoophilia. Barnyard amour.

Roach calls it sick.

“This behavior is not something you run across every day,” Roach says. “For most people, this activity is not condoned, and our laws should reflect that.”

Roach says I am wrong to say she is wasting legislative time and energy. I shouldn’t be making light of her push to make sex with animals a Class C felony. More than two dozen states have legislation that makes sexual congress with animals a crime.

“Our state has nothing,” Roach says. “No deterrence. … Animals are stimulated to do this. This is not something a stallion wants to be involved with.”

I’ll leave it to Roach to divine what strikes a horse’s fancy, but a horse is the reason she called.

Back in July, a man visited an Enumclaw farm. He was in flagrante delicto with a horse, leading to injuries so grievous that the man succumbed.

Investigators were shocked to learn that people had been stampeding to the farm for the purpose of having their way with critters.

King County authorities found hundreds of hours of unseemly video and discovered that the farm was mentioned on the Internet — something that was not part of Enumclaw’s tourist-marketing plan.

Roach is riding to the rescue in part because her constituents are not happy with the reputation that has been tattooed on their community.

Everyone is running away from the farm. Few want to claim it. Depending on which officials you talk with, the location of the farm of ill repute is either “east of Auburn” or “west of Enumclaw.”

Roach is running headlong at the barnyard brothel. She is no stranger to wacky antics as a public official. (Roach once moved into a travel trailer on a friend’s driveway in what looked like a brazen attempt to qualify as a resident in a King County Council district.)

Roach says a bestiality law could save horses, cows and sheep that suffer in silence behind closed barn doors.

Call me a cynic. What the senator is doing seems more about pleasing animal-loving voters, of which there are many.

Roach believes her bill would have bite by forcing a human offender to undergo mandatory counseling in addition to prison time.

A corollary measure being discussed for the proposal would ban videotaping and the dissemination of video showing people and animals in sex acts.

“It’s pornography with animals,” Roach sums up.

Isn’t pornography of the human variety legal so long as children aren’t involved?

“Like a child, an animal cannot consent,” Roach fires back. “No animal is a willing participant.”

The senator has become something of a rock star among people who believe animals are dependent on the goodness of humankind. These people thank her for giving voice to the plaintive neighs and brays of vulnerable creatures.

But where are these caring voices when animals are being turned into chic purses, ground into all-beef patties, made to pull plows in infernal heat or poked with foot-long research needles?

Where was Roach when people floated proposals a few years ago to allow the use of hounds to hunt down cougars in the state?

The answer to the second question is no mystery. Roach was a proponent of hound hunting because cougars, in her view of the world, are evil felines that threaten people and beasts.

The senator’s perspective about which creatures are worthy of our protection is as arbitrary as her proposal to protect creatures from “rampant” human sexual abuse. One can only imagine what Roach’s take might have been had the man died after sex with a cougar instead of a horse.

The jury is out among experts as to whether sex with animals — clearly repugnant — constitutes cruelty.

But if something truly heinous is being done to animals, there are already animal-cruelty laws on the books.

We don’t need a toothless bestiality law spawned by knee-jerk lawmaking and moral hysteria.

Roach is taking animal love to extremes.