Animals Behaving Badly

by Linda Lombardi

  Another option that’s far too obvious for animals to pass up is oral sex. It’s been seen in (of course) primates as well as cheetahs, hedgehogs, and all kinds of fruit bats. Male walruses stimulate each other, as do male manatees.

  There is even cross-species oral sex. Caribou and moose often interact, as well as bonobos and red-tail monkeys. There are also reports of grouse and geese and swallows carousing with different species of grouse and geese and swallows, fur seals doing it with sea lions, and gray squirrels getting it on with fox squirrels.

  This interspecies sex isn’t all heterosexual, either—male chimps will do it with either male or female baboons, male sea otters with both male and female seals, male orangutans with male crab-eating macaques, and male graylag geese with male mute swans.

  But none of this should be news, really. Over a hundred years ago, none other than Charles Darwin noted birds mating with birds of other species. He described one case in which a domestic goose had a brood half fathered by her mate and half by a Chinese goose. In another case, a feathered strumpet dumped her mate outright for a bird she preferred:Mr. Hewitt states that a wild duck, reared in captivity, “after breeding a couple of seasons with her own mallard, at once shook him off on my placing a male pintail on the water. It was evidently a case of love at first sight, for she swam about the newcomer caressingly, though he appeared evidently alarmed and averse to her overtures of affection. From that hour she forgot her old partner.”

  It seems that even love can’t bridge some cross-species differences, though. Researchers recently observed a seal attempting to mate with a penguin. They considered various possible motives for the seal’s behavior, from playfulness to aggression: “At first glimpse, we thought the seal was killing the penguin,” one of them said. But if it was an honest attempt at cross-order romance, he was definitely doing it wrong:After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted.

  Really, at least send flowers—or some fish—if you’re not going to call, you know?

  * * *

  GETTING IT ON—AND ON AND ON . . .

  If animal sex is just for making babies and not for having fun, then why do they do it so darn much? Even when animals are having sex to reproduce, they do it way more than necessary:• Kestrels and oystercatchers copulate 700 times per clutch of eggs. Tree swallows are more restrained—50 to 70 times is enough for them.

  • Female lions mate every fifteen minutes day and night during their four-day estrous period. They may have sex up to 100 times a day during the breeding season, for a total of 1,500 times per litter.

  • Female chimps mate an average of 138 times with thirteen different males for each infant they give birth to.

  * * *

  SEX CRIMES OF THE CUTE AND CUDDLY

  However nasty the activities we’ve reviewed so far, perhaps it’s none of anyone else’s business what goes on between consenting animals. But that kind of nonjudgmental attitude is hard to maintain when there seem to be so many animals that don’t get that no means no:■ Up to thirty cute, furry male gray squirrels may chase one female, while she expresses her displeasure by screaming, striking out, and trying to run away when cornered.

  ■ Pretty little hummingbirds engage in high-speed chases where males strike the female in midair and force her down to copulate.

  ■ In some species of geese, half of attempted copulations are not only with someone other than a mate, but are also nonconsensual. In snow geese, during some mating seasons each female is subjected to a rape attempt on average every five days. Most—80 percent—of these are directed at females that are not fertilizable, like ones who are incubating eggs.

  ■ Other apparently majestic sea birds are no better. Rape is common in albatrosses: Males will pin a female’s neck to the ground or back her into a bush to tangle her up. In one case, a female was observed being raped by four gangs of males in ten minutes, losing an eye and suffering wing injuries.

  ■ Gang rapes among mallard ducks are particularly well documented and quite unambiguous. Commonly, a small flock of males swoops down on a female, displaying none of the normal courtship behaviors. The females resist vigorously, and sometimes they’re even drowned. In a particularly charming detail, if she does survive, her own mate typically also rapes her afterward.

  One much more primitive animal has developed a particularly despicable strategy that most of us would assume was exclusive to humans: date rape via knockout drugs. The funnel web spider knocks his mate out with a sedative pheromone. After luring her close with an elaborate dance:“Suddenly the male will walk forward, and at the same time the female will collapse,” says Fred Singer of Radford University in Virginia. Out cold, males take advantage of the senseless female for between several hours and a day. Although she may wake up occasionally, the female is simply re-sedated.

  It might be only fair to note that maybe this is the rare case where the male has a legitimate defense, at least if the good of the species is considered:The sedative pheromone has probably evolved to defuse females’ tendency to eat everything they encounter. Females benefit from this too, says Singer, “if she doesn’t [pass] out, she isn’t going to mate.”

  SEX ON THE BEACH

  Many of the aquatic mammals that humans find most appealing are in fact the worst sort of sexual predators. Probably the only reason that scientists hadn’t seen a seal rape a penguin earlier is that seals are usually much too busy forcing themselves on their own kind: The breeding grounds of various species of seals are patrolled by roaming gangs of males who chase reluctant females around, attacking and raping them if they try to escape.

  Other aquatic mammals behave similarly. The offenses of dolphins will be addressed in sordid detail in Chapter 7, but everyone’s favorite noble sea mammal, the whale, is no better: Right whales form rape gangs that force a female underwater, after which males take turns mating with her. And even adorable, gentle, vegetarian manatees may form large groups of males and pursue a female for weeks at a time, even when she’s not fertilizable. The female and her calf are often injured trying to escape, sometimes with fatal results for the calf.

  DON’T KNOW WHEN TO STOP

  If you’re still hanging on to the belief that the goal of all animal sex is reproduction, consider their most counterproductive strategy of all: Some animals will keep mating with a female till she’s dead.

  Being aquatic or semiaquatic is clearly a risk factor for this sort of thing. Male frogs commonly pile onto a single female, which may end up drowning her. In some populations of mallards, 10 percent of females die per year due to drowning or other injuries suffered in rapes.

  Mating on perfectly dry land is no guarantee of safety, though. Mountain sheep may chase a female for miles, in packs, forcing her to jump to dangerous narrow ledges in an attempt to escape, sometimes with fatal consequences. And even apparently placid domestic sheep reveal these tendencies when deprived of the calming effects of civilization: In one population of feral sheep, males were observed chasing ewes to the point of exhaustion. After they took turns having their way with the ewes for hours, the females ended up battered and too weak to fight off the giant petrels that arrived to finish them off.

  It seems pretty obvious that if an animal’s goal was to continue the species, this is the worst possible approach. Take the extremely endangered Hawaiian monk seal. The main threat to their survival? Male Hawaiian monk seals, whose sexual attentions often result in females being mobbed to death. Scientists are trying to save them from themselves by rounding them up and giving them drugs to suppress their libido.

  It would be nice to think that these cases are all unfortunate accidents, but some male animals really do seem indifferent to whether their mates are alive even at the start of the process: Some will mate with females who are already dead. This has been seen in swallows, penguins, and ducks including mallards. In fact, mallards are so undiscriminating, one male was observed mating with a dead male of
his own species:On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass façade of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam and died. Another drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex.

  The paper describing this case was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for biology in 2003, and Dead Duck Day is celebrated on June 5 every year at the Natural History Museum of Rotterdam to honor the memory of the victim of this first scientifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.

  KEEP YOUR PAWS TO YOURSELVES!

  This would be none of our business if animals kept their perversion to themselves. But they often make their sex lives our problem, as anyone knows who’s ever tried to explain to a child at the zoo just what that groaning pair of tortoises is up to.

  And it’s not just that we have to watch them doing it to each other. Remember those cross-species sexual attractions? They can be directed at humans as well. Apes are frequent offenders, and they can have particular tastes—one chimp at a zoo in Florida not only preferred blonds but had a fetish for shoulders, strutting to impress lady visitors in tank tops and cajoling the female keepers to show him a little skin.

  It’s not just those big-brained creatures, either. One kangaroo stalked women of the perhaps significantly named town of Honeymoon Ridge in Australia. A victim who’ d been walking along a bike trail thought nothing of it at first when she saw a big kangaroo behind her:“I turned around and saw this big kangaroo behind me, so I hastened my steps,” she said. “It seemed a bit odd, but I continued walking and didn’t think much about it.”

  “Then on the return walk he was there waiting for me,” she said. “With his male pride on full alert, he started circling me. There was no doubt about what he wanted, the randy old thing.”

  Fortunately, the animal retreated when other walkers appeared on the trail, but he was not too intimidated to later approach a woman in a crowd of spectators at a race. She was oblivious to his intentions, but they were quite clear to eyewitnesses: “Yeah, apparently he was quite aroused,” said the object of his attention. “I’m actually glad I didn’t notice.”

  And even if humans aren’t the target of a creature’s warped desires, an innocent bystander can be held hostage to them. In Witt, Illinois, a woman was trapped in her house for several hours when a gander tried to mate with her lawn ornament, a concrete goose. Every time Joanne Martin tried to open her front door, the lust-crazed bird attacked her. Eventually six men tried to assist, without success.

  “Brent Bourke beat the heck out of him with a stick,” says Joanne, “and ran him out on Highway 16. . . . He was going pretty good, but then the goose turned around and came back at him. That was the funniest part.”

  Bourke was chased into the house, as was another man who tried the same method.

  The goose was even undeterred from its mating frenzy when firecrackers were thrown at it. Finally, in a concerted effort, a couple of the men held the goose at bay long enough for the others to grab the statue and close it in a shed. With the object of his passion now inaccessible, the frustrated suitor eventually wandered off. The story was over . . . or was it? A reporter visiting a few weeks later to photograph the concrete goose made an ominous observation:As I pulled away, the goose safely back in the shed, I noticed it wasn’t Joanne’s only lawn ornament. She has two concrete deer.

  FOUR

  Animal Family Values

  WHETHER YOU BLAME NATURE OR NURTURE OR A LITTLE OF both, bad behavior has to come from somewhere. As earlier chapters have shown, animals are often criminals and perverts, so it should come as no surprise that most of them have dysfunctional families as well.

  Much is made of the maternal instinct, but good parenting hardly seems to come naturally in nature; in fact, some animals don’t bother to parent at all. Frogs, for example, deposit thousands of eggs, figure that at least one will survive on its own, and get on with their lives. Many egg-laying animals do the same, even some birds: The scrub fowl gets out of staying home to keep the kids warm by burying its eggs in a pile of rotting compost.

  And sometimes the abandoned babies are the lucky ones. It’s better than the alternatives: The same devoted mother hamster that licks her pups clean and suckles and protects them will often chow down on a couple of the tender morsels as well.

  There was a time when scientists thought that only humans killed members of their own species. Our noble fellow creatures killed only for food, and they certainly didn’t murder their own babies. Those were the good old days. However, in the 1970s, researchers finally admitted that in many species, infanticide—and sometime cannibalism—are, as one put it, “everyday occurrences” in the animal world.

  Some offspring are killed by neglect. Lionesses may abandon litters when food is scarce. Flamingo colonies will skip breeding for three or four years at a time, and when they do decide to make the effort, up to half of the pairs may change their minds and abandon their eggs. Oystercatchers often starve their chicks out of what is apparently sheer laziness. Those with nests farther inland, instead of right next door to their feeding areas, can find plenty of food, but apparently they just can’t be bothered to transport it to their chicks, even though researchers have found that they spend 37 percent of their time doing nothing.

  In many cases, however, the perpetrators of infanticide are a bit more active. Kangaroos may dump a joey when chased by a predator. In Australian sea lions, the most frequent cause of death to babies while on land is attacks by adult female Australian sea lions; other species of seals and sea lions are no better. And being eaten by adults, even by one’s own parents, causes up to a quarter of chick mortality in herring gulls—in one study, three hundred such deaths were counted in one colony.

  SOCIAL CLIMBING

  With many social animals, the mother’s status in the community is more than a matter of popularity—it’s actually a matter of life and death. Dominant female chimps will kill babies born to other females, and in those charming, cooperative extended families of meerkats, pregnant females will often kill other females’ litters. And in both cases, the babies aren’t just killed—they’re eaten, too.

  Not all the blame falls on the ladies by a long shot, though. In many species, when a new male moves in, the first thing he does is kill the existing babies. When a cute little house sparrow who has lost her mate gets a new husband, he pecks her young to death to make room for his own. And female lions have an apparently heartwarming method of raising their cubs in communal nurseries; turns out, this isn’t because lions have socialist utopian childrearing ideals, but because lionesses that raise their cubs together can better defend them from bloodthirsty newcomers looking for mates.

  Of course, the females’ reactions to these murderous males doesn’t exactly discourage them. What do the bereaved mothers do when males kill their offspring? They often have sex with them, and not unwillingly: It even happens in the very rare species (like langur monkeys) in which rape is unknown.

  COMING BY IT HONESTLY

  Baby animals take after their parents from the very start: they kill their fellow babies too. Some don’t even wait to be born: Pronghorn antelopes may grow a kind of spike in the womb that kills other embryos, and sand tiger shark embryos actually attack and eat one other. Hyena cubs fight with their siblings from the moment of birth, often killing them. Piglets do the same, inspiring the authors of one scientific paper to write the abstract in poetry:A piglet’s most precious possession

  Is the teat that he fattens his flesh on.

  He fights for his teat with tenacity

  Against any sibling’s audacity.

  The piglet, to arm for this mission,

  Is born with a warlike dentition

  Of eight tiny tusks, sharp as sabres,

  Which help in impressing the neighbors.

  The champion sibling killers, though, are birds. In
many species, statistically the biggest risk to a youngster’s survival isn’t predation, starvation, or disease—it’s a brother or sister:■ Blue-footed booby chicks will push a sib outside the white circle of guano around the nest that the parents defend as their territory. The adults don’t allow anything to enter the ring—even their own displaced offspring—so the chick can’t get back into the nest and dies.

  ■ Kittiwakes will push a sibling out of their precarious cliffside home, and even if it doesn’t instantly plunge to its death, once it’s out of the nest, the parents ignore its cries for help.

  This behavior is not a rarity: in fact, some species practice what scientists call “obligate siblicide.” This dry technical term means that the parents usually lay two eggs, but the resulting offspring make sure that only one of them survives.

  This sort of excessive sibling rivalry might be excused when there isn’t enough food to go around, but in many cases, that’s not the problem. In one case, a black eagle chick was reported to have ignored several delicious hyrax carcasses to keep beating up on its sibling, which it pecked more than 1,569 times in 187 minutes of fighting.

  And, like the parents that ignore the cries of chicks that have been sneakily pushed out of the nest, the adults are equally unhelpful in the face of this violence. As one researcher reports, they seem to think they have better things to do:During sib-fighting of great egrets in Texas, the attending parent typically preens or loafs, frequently not even watching as the victim is pummeled.