[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to spill the tea. I'm Brigitte.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: I'm Lara.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: And we're here today to talk about square behavior in the animal kingdom.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Your fault. You started me on this.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: I know. I sent you down this rabbit hole kind of on purpose.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: You made me do the work. I got lots for you. So, you know, as always, I feel.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Like we should put in a warning here that there is going to be conversation about sexual behavior, considering the topic. So if you are under 18, either skip to the next episode or go get your mom and dad and see if they're okay with this. So, Lara. Yeah? What sent you down this rabbit hole? Other than me going, we should do an episode on queer behavior in the animal kingdom?
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I do remember the first two things I said to you. One, I grew up on a farm with a kennel with dogs. So this is not abnormal behavior. I saw it on the regular fucking behavior system.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: You know, that is true. And the boys will hump the boys.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: When the girls in season when they can't get at the girl. It's just reality.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I've known people who've said the same thing about other animals on the farm.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah, it's reality. When you grow up. When you grow up with a livestock, reality. It's reality.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Sometimes it's a lot. Sometimes it's a dominance thing, sometimes it preference thing.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Sometimes it's an overwhelming hormones thing.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: I can see that.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Especially when the females in heat, the females in meat.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: But then there's also the fact that I have. They were all male originally cats at this point. My. My last female unfortunately passed away recently. But poor DDE, my poor deedles is gone. But the males, I have two of them that, you know, they groom each other, they sleep snuggled around each other. One holds the other like a freaking teddy bear. You know, that doesn't. Look, if that isn't bonded, I don't know what exactly.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: And I could, and I see that behavior in cats who come from the same litter, but these two definitely did.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Not come from the same litter. One's a Maine coons and one's a Maine coon and one's a eurobro. I mean, you don't get much more different than those two either.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: My sister had a couple of male cats who would take turns trying to hump each other. And I'm not 100% sure, but I think that was more of a dominance thing than anything. But they were kind of the same way. They groomed each other, they snuggled with each other, they slept with each other. They kept an eye on each other.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Just like an old married couple. The two of them, at this point, are just like an old married couple, I swear to God.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: And, yeah, I mean, Lovejoy, I think Sherlock went first and, yeah, Lovejoy comforted him pretty much until he died.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's what I think. I think part of that is what's going on with mine.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: So what sent you down this rabbit hole research wise? Where'd you start?
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Of course I start with Wikipedia, because this is going to be something I know nothing about and it's at least something.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Exactly. And there again, there's that lovely reference section at the end, which tells me where to go next.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Beyond that, because I have the background. I do. I understood that I wasn't going to be searching for queerness in the animal kingdom, despite that. That's what we're calling the episode.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: I was going to start with searching same sex pairings because that is how it would be talked about in the science community and I wanted actual research information.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: And that's a good idea. That's a good place to start.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: But once I started poking around, then I decided, well, wait a minute, queerness isn't just same sex. So I started looking into the ones that never mate. Yes, they are out there.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: They live solitary lives and they're happy. I started looking at the ones that are not monogamous, that are group monogamy, or are some variant that we don't understand as monogamy.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: So I went all over the freaking map with this one, and I'm not.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Gonna lie, monogamy and polyamory is absolutely gonna be another episode in concerns of humans. But that's not for today.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: No.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: So what did you learn about same sex pairings in the animal community?
[00:04:25] Speaker B: That it's beyond complicated. As with anything relating between more one or more individual entities, whether they're sentient or not, is immaterial.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: It gets complicated.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: One of the key points that I thought was painfully the case, we have so biased our ability to study this that we have taken it all out of proportion.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: A common problem with scientific study. It's not a new thing. The original purpose of Egyptology from England was absolutely to prove that the things in the Bible happened. That was exactly what Queen Victoria ordered them to do.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, in this case, it's not to prove that same sex is. Is wrong, is not to prove one way or the other on that. It's the language that they use to describe what they're observing that says it's wrong. And it's like they're animals. They don't care about morality. Get off your moral high horse.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: No, they really don't. Believe me. I've got cats that have absolutely no sense of propriety whatsoever. So.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that and the other key factor on this. This is not new. I cannot stress that enough. Let me see. Homosexual behavior. This is straight from Wikipedia, folks. Homosexual behavior in animals has been discussed since classical antiquity. That means ancient Greece. In other words, the earliest written mention of animal homosexuality. Emphasis added, appears to date back to 2300 years ago, when Aristotle described copulation between pigeons, partridges, and quails of the same sex.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: It made it into hieroglyphs in the fourth century, when an egyptian writer mentions what he calls hermaphroditism. Easy for me to say, right? In hyenas and homosexuality. Back in the partridges, we are hung up on the birds. What can I.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Wait a minute. Hyenas are not birds.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Nah, nah. But we're back with the bird.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: But I have heard of some species that. Not so much hermaphroditism, but actually switching gender if needed.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: So that's a whole different mess because that's parthenogenesis, and that is exclusively females. And so far as I've. Because I went down that rabbit hole. I was in here, too. And it's exclusively females and exclusively species that lay eggs. Oh, as near as I can found.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Okay, that makes sense.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: So it's lizards and birds and frogs.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Okay. Avian and reptilian. Makes sense.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: So. Yeah, but that was. I did go down that rabbit hole while I was down this one, too. It was a side branch. We're not going there.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: I did find that piece. Yes, mom, I did find that piece. I swear. And I did poke, because I'm always curious. But the first actual review, according to Wikipedia and another source that I found elsewhere, happened in 1700. So, folks, this isn't new.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: No, they've been. We've been studying this, apparently for a long time.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: We've at least been commenting on this and studying these in this in some measure, in some way.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Well, I can see how it could easily be an observation. Like you and I have seen with our cats.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Right?
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Or you've seen with yours. I've seen with my sister.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Except these are scientists writing it down as scientific notes rather than, you know, pet owners talking about the vagaries of their beloved friends.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: That's fair.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: I mean, there is a distinction.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: We are taking a guess here with. With, uh, with the cats. So there is that. I. I did notice and. Okay. Yeah, it's an article from the Guardian. And I know they're a little. They're a little opinionated, but that's okay. No, no, I take that back. This one's from popular science. I was wrong.
It talks about how this is common in primates. Apparently, behavior is particularly prevalent in. I'm gonna try to read this, if I can actually read out loud. The behavior is particularly prevalent in non human primates. It has been observed in at least 51 species, from small lemurs up to bigger apes, for one population of male maka keys. Maka macaques. I have no idea.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: They're a japanese snow. They're known as the japanese snow monkeys or white monkeys.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Oh, those.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Those.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Okay. Same sex sexual behavior may even be a common feature of reproduction and is related to establishing dominance within groups, handling a shortage of different sex partners, or even reducing tension following aggressive behavior. I could see that, which is a.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Very limited sequence of it, though, because even gorillas, some of the most peaceful primates in existence, have same sex behaviors. What I ended up finding, and this is a cross spectrum out of all of the stuff I looked at. I can't point to anyone. One of them did mention it, but it was buttressed by everybody else, is that it's mostly females. It's as much grooming and social support network for the pairings. It's not pairings in terms of two. It's pairings in terms of small group.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: So, okay. Things like a lion male with a pride, a grouping of females where the females do the hunting and everything else.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: That they're also helping raise each other's young.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Yes. And what one of the interesting things I found with the male lions, even male lions do engage in homosexual interaction.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Well, same sex interaction.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: I'm sorry. Same sex. Thank you for correcting even male lions. So, you know, there's the stereotype of the male lion has his pride, and the young male lion comes in and he's gonna take over the pride. That is not 100% how that works. Sometimes a young male comes in, and the older male accepts him and makes him part of the group, and they groom each other, and they love each other, and they snuggle each other and all that.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: I can actually see how, from a genetic standpoint, that can make sense concept, and this is something that has always confused me with the whole lion pride or wolf pack concept, is you have one male mating with multiple females, you're gonna start having some serious shrinking of the gene pool going on. It's gonna get shallower and shallower. I can see it makes sense to have a young male come in to actually diversify the gene pool.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Yep. And that's one of the other conversations that, oh, if we could even find it at this point. I have too many windows open, folks.
One of the. One of the comments or conversations I found was talking about how this same sex pairing interacts with darwinian concept that the subtle concept of you only would mate to reproduce, you only would pair up to reproduce.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Pairing up to reproduce makes sense, but.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah, but the interesting thing is there are actually three definitions dealing with grouping, pairing up, or they're calling it monogamy.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: We'll get to that in a bigger section.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: That's a whole nother section on that. But there are three different types that they look at, so there are different angles that the natural world groups up. Sometimes it is for social stability. The bonobos are a huge one. On that one, you have almost exclusively female bonobos raising the young. They dump the males out and don't let them back because the males are too damn violent.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Well, there are several species that are like that. Rabbits will do the same thing. Rabbit females will absolutely chase males away from their nests because they know that the males will kill the babies.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Oh, same with Mama cougar.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: They'll eat them.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Actually, same with Mama Cougar. She has the cubs, she hides the cubs so that daddy can't get near them. Daddy comes near him, she's gonna rip his head off.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Well, and barn cats will do the same thing. I mean, when you look at barn cats, just your standard everyday felis canis, I think it is canis felis, your standard barn, your standard house cats.
When you have them out in a feral situation, out in colonies, the females will absolutely hide the kittens from the males and will defend them and will actually fight back to defend the kittens. That way, they actually live long enough to become cats.
That makes sense. I can see that happening a lot.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: In the feline, but the bonobos have always caught my attention because they are such a close cousin. They are one of the closer primate cousins to humanity.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Makes sense.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: So they've found this was, this was a. This one might lead into a different, later topic, too, but they have found that the culture of the bonobos is extremely peaceful because it's all female bonobos. It's all a positive female support network, because the second the male is old enough to go through human equivalent of puberty, right, once they reach their sexual maturity, they're allowed to breed. They literally get kicked off the island, the female bonobo species is in a small space.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Oh, the original amazons.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Yes. Because the males prove themselves far too violent to be able to continue having a healthy, productive, safe species. I always found that one very interesting. I don't know why it's a thing. It is kind of interesting that, again, across the spectrum, across the mammalian spectrum, at least, it's predominantly females that end up in the same gender groupings living together.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: So have we concluded that it's just social or. Because I know scientists. I know scientists are having a really hard time trying to understand why this happens completely, because, let's face it, we can't ask for them.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: No.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Oh, it would be so simple if we could. But I mean, like, I know that there are sometimes, when genetics come into play, male fruit flies, if they. If they lack a gene that gives them the ability to tell the difference between males and females, they will try to mate with anybody.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: Yeah, there's genetic factors, but think about how simple the genes are for fruit fly.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: The farther up and more complex we get genetically. There was another article I was reading that was talking about, about the science of same sex pairings. Can't.
We've known this one was dated 2009, so it's older, but at the same time, it's not invalid because it's still looking at genetic theory relative to same sex pairing. And that is that, honestly, there is no gene. It doesn't exist. When you deal with human level complicated.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Genetics, that's not a fun thing to hear.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: There is no single gene like there is with fruit flies.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: That doesn't mean that there isn't a genetic component.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: There might well be a genetic component, but it's kind of. It's kind of like the fact that, you know, I'm very heavy, I'm genetically predisposed. That doesn't mean I would necessarily end up there. My daughter is not very heavy.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: She's genetically predisposed, but she's not. And it's not necessarily life choices, even. It just depends on what genes activate when in your life.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: I know someone who is genetically predisposed to high cholesterol. Her family comes from an area where living on a higher saturated fat diet. Absolutely. Which there are studies that show that saturated fat doesn't actually affect that kind of thing, but that's a different subject all around. But her family comes from a place where living on that kind of a diet and having that higher cholesterol level actually helps them survive.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Even though she eats a healthy diet and exercises and does the things that she's supposed to. She has a higher cholesterol level.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: That's where I am with weight. So, you know, it is what it is.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: So genetics can be weird, and we still haven't mapped out the entire human genome yet.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: And that's. And the interesting part there is this. This probably leads off into a different tandem, but one of the interesting parts is how much does environment and development and how we treat any individual instance alter our own genes?
We are in the process of altering our own genetics as we live.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Yeah, evolution is continuous.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: So how we choose to live. I mean, I do taekwondo, I work out. I do an awful lot, and I'm still very heavy, and yet it's not a problem. My blood works happy, everything's great. Because my genetics have altered during the course of my life.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I can see that.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: And it's not anything I'm intentionally doing. It's just how I'm living my life. It's altering me down to a genetic level that's reality.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: I can see. Not finding out what my food allergies were until my late thirties. Yeah, late thirties has probably altered my genetics because of the amount of exposures I've had to allergens I didn't even know about.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Yep. But that also goes back to why it's almost impossible to say that there's a specific genetic indicator for homosexuality.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: That's not a fun thing to hear in the queer community why you want.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: To be able to turn it off. Because that's what. That's the whole reason that they're doing that research. You know, that. That's why they're doing that research.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Well, there. I remember back in the nineties. Well, yeah, I believe it was the 1990s, there was that whole. That was. There was that whole argument of, is it genetic? Is it a choice? And that camp still kind of exists today. Not gonna lie, I'm firmly of the opinion. Never mind. I won't say that that might be a topic for another show too.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: On the happier note, relative to, is it genetic? Is it a choice? It doesn't fucking matter. Because the abnormality in nature is pure hetero, folks.
Yeah, it is completely abnormal for pure hetero in nature.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: I can see that. Because, I mean, you're gonna have to be able to survive in the environment.
You have to be able to adapt.
Holding on to a single rigidity is death. Is death, exactly. If you cannot adjust to your environment, adjust to situations as they come, you are not going to survive.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: But the research, conclusively, everywhere, every single piece of scientific evidence I managed to find, and I found a fair amount, including genetic discussion of. Of same sex pairings. Every single piece of research indicated that our understanding of same sex pairing as unnatural in some way is wrong, because our understanding of same sex pairing as normal, as prominent, as dominant, is beyond wrong. It is statistically, I would venture to say.
Granted, my daughter knows more about statistics than I do, but I would venture to suggest that it is statistically negligent, if not a full on statistical outlier, to say that absolute, absolute heterosexuality is a thing that that is so far out on the statistical line to be beyond abnormal because of all of the species that are out there and how normalized it is amongst every single species, mammalian through insect through amphibian, to have the same sex pairing happen commonly.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Did any of your research find that heterosexuality is abnormal?
[00:20:08] Speaker B: I didn't go looking for that particular tidbit.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Okay, that's fair.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: That was an angle I did not investigate because my focus was focusing on same sex, not different sex pairing.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Okay, so we are going on conjecture. That's. Okay.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: That is a conjecture. That is a conjecture. But based off of all of the information I found about same sex pairing, all of the species they've studied, how normal it is, what percentage of the population engage it does. It engages in same sex pairing versus the very, very narrow piece that doesn't, because they did. Look at what? Who doesn't engage in same sex pairing?
[00:20:44] Speaker A: So who doesn't?
[00:20:45] Speaker B: Well, it was like two or 3% of the population total, out of any given particular population they were looking at.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: Out of the entire kingdom.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Like I said, statistically negligible.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: And obviously humans are on that list.
[00:21:01] Speaker B: Yes. Yes, we are.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: Right. We're not on that list because we do have same sex pairings.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Right. And yet we still consider it anyway. Nevermind.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Although, do we consider it same sex or do we consider it same gender? Because sex and gender are a big thing. And probably also another podcast, a whole.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Nother ball of wax. When you're dealing scientifically, you're dealing same sex.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:21:27] Speaker B: When you're dealing, the only reason gender comes into it as a concept, as a human, is because we want to add in that social dimension. We want to combine biological with the social into a single concept.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: I can see that. I can see that. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's perfectly good. So you have, I say, as a member of the queer community.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: Well, you're not.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: It's okay to blend the sexual in.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: The social, but you're not the only one sitting here. It's all good.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Always forget the aces. Whatever.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: Considering the fact that I'm demisexual and that is on the asexual spectrum. Not really.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: I always forget it's weird aces that can get married and have kids, but, yeah, that's fine.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Oh, that's yet another punch.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: That's a whole other weird issue. I have issues, folks. In case I hadn't mentioned that, I'm very real about the fact that I have issues.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: So actually, perfect segue into the asexual.
I. You told me you found a very interesting list of animals that prefer to stay single or will only get together long enough to mate and then just really seriously want to leave each other alone.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Well, and this is far from comprehensive. Oh, I'm sure as a couple of the ones that we've mentioned, relative to like, like the hyenas and. And the mountain lions, the cougars, this. They aren't on this list. This is just a 21 examples of animals. How does this I put it?
[00:23:03] Speaker A: Who know?
[00:23:03] Speaker B: Being single is awesome.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: I'm not gonna disagree with them.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Okay, so ranking number one on the list is one of the most adorable animals in existence that I didn't even know existed until a few years ago. Thank you, kung fu panda.
I freely admit, I did not know red pandas existed until kung fu panda.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: I didn't know until you handed me the. I didn't know until you handed me that article that lemurs were primates. So that's okay.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: Yes, lemurs are primates, but that's. Thank you, wildcrats and my kids. But that's.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Again.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: But yeah, red pandas only get together to meet and keep and have cubs and then, nope, we're happy on our own. They're too shy to actually me.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: They're too shy to actually hang out with each other.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Ah, the penultimate introverts.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Unless, of course, unless of course, they're in a zoo, and then you can have more than one living near each other, but they still don't nestle together kind of thing. They still don't exhibit pairing behavior.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Okay, I can see that they are.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: Still solitary, even within being forced together in a small enclosure.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Makes sense. Kind of like the side by side play concept that you see with autistic children. Yeah, and sometimes adults.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Polar bears. I had no idea that polar bears were. I mean, I know they're antisocial. They really don't like humans still killing human on site. I get that, but I didn't realize they didn't like other polar bears, they'll.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: Kill just about anything on site. Not gonna lie.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: So that was a new one. So. And when they're not meaning to mate or raise cubs, they're like, leave me the fuck alone. So. Okay, that's fair. All right, you go. You a platypus? You would think that they are so unusual that they would want to spend time together. Not so much.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: They.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Oh, some of their. Some of their living spaces can overlap for the areas where they range to. To hunt and stuff. But other than that, no, no, they're very solitary, I guess.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: Darwin's little anomaly.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Well, considering the fact that we cannot pigeonhole them. No pun intended, we cannot pigeonhole them in any one freaking category, you know?
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Then we have the birds that travel in groups, like sandpipers. They travel in groups. They flock, but when they lay their eggs, they go alone. And they're nest borrowers. They don't even build a nest.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Of course not.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: They borrow other bird nests to lay their eggs. So they go off by themselves to actually start the family.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:25:38] Speaker B: Skunks. They'll get together when it's that cold out. But I can kind of understand.
I can kind of understand those poor little things have really strong noses on them and they don't want to be smelling either.
Well, like I mentioned, mountain lions are cougars earlier. Leopards. Oh, leopards.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm seeing an awful lot of. I'm seeing an awful lot of that with the world.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And they hunt solitary, too. It's not. They are not group hunters. They are just. They are. Just leave me alone. I'm by myself. I'm happy.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: That makes sense. That makes sense. Wonder panthers do the same thing.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: I don't know, but tigers do. Tigers are on this list, too.
I know.
I love tigers. I really, really. There was this cute meme I saw. That'll be another episode, too, folks. But there was this cute meme I saw about dying happy with. With a big bear hug with a lion. So, you know, I could die happy that way. That would be my happy dad. I could give the big bear hug to the lion and die happy. Moles build these insane, elaborate tunnel systems and no one else is allowed in.
All for them.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: No one allowed, including other moles.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: I love that.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Well, and we all hear the stories about how violent orangutans are. Guess what? They don't like each other either.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: But again, we're dealing with apes. We're now into an ape, and we're now that step closer to humanity.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'm not gonna lie. I know quite a few humans who don't want to have anything to do with anyone else either.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: But it's not fair. The cuddliest looking critters don't want anything to do with anybody. Cuz koalas are there too.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Oh yeah. Koalas are mean. Though they are only cute in image.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: They hug so well. Anteaters. I don't know why anybody would think of an anteater. Oh, and then not unexpected. You know how they call birds birbs and snakes snacks? They have a unicorn. Something for this unicorn tank or something like that. For this? It's a black rhino. Oh, rhinoceros.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Oh, the rhinoceros.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: A unicorn tank.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: The original medieval unicorn.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: Oh no, the armored unicorn. That's right. They're calling it an armored unicorn.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: Armored unicorn.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Speaking of armored, armadillos are on the list too.
They're not exactly stubbly. So I kind of understand that, you know, expected tasmanian devils. Would you really want to shack up with something like that? That looks like it's gonna rip your face. They're very. They're very. They're very shy.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: I'm seeing a lot. I'm seeing a pattern here. An awful lot of animals that are either incredibly violent or at least aggressive to practically everything.
I could see that being I only want to put up with you long enough to mate, and then you can.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: Bugger off the tasmanian devils. It's long enough to mate. Maybe if I'm feeling very generous, you can. We'll share a haunch for a minute. For a minute.
But then you have sloths.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: I know very little about sloths outside of jokes. So.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah, when one, they gather in groups to mate. So that's an interesting thing.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Sloth orgies. Oh, my goodness.
[00:28:51] Speaker B: They apparently gather in groups to mate, but other than that, they spend all their time alone. Don't know why. Maybe just because you can't have more than one sloth fertilizing a tree at a time. I don't know.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: I don't know. Again, I don't know a whole lot about sloths.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: There's a lot of these. I don't know a whole lot of about. You know, I don't know much about armadillos. I'm not a southern girl, and I don't live in the Texas.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: I was gonna say neither of us.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Are from Texas, New Mexico area. So. Yeah, they. They're alone. Except when coming together to meet, you know, you've got the expected sea turtles. They don't even come together to mate. They lay their eggs.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: I was just saying, you see a lot of that. I mean, you see a lot of that in the ichthyos world anyway. I mean, in the fish world.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: A lot of amphibians and fishies, they don't get together and mate. Females lay eggs. Males fertilize.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: But interestingly, in the fish world, you do still get some measure of herring because you have, like, certain fish that tend to pair up in the coral reefs and things like that.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Oh, true.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Or you have fish that travel in schools so they at least group together.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: Then you have the lionfish. It's a big old poisonous spiny. Beautiful. Oh, yeah, that one looks beautiful. Looks gorgeous.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: Looks huggable.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: No, no, no. Doesn't even remotely look huggable. Cause there's a few too many spikes.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Fair.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: But, yeah. Tigers and pandas. The giant pandas.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: They're very social. Yeah. Pretty solitary.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: Fairly solitary.
And then expected. Wolverines, honey badgers. You know, the ones with really bad attitude problems.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: We're back to the. I can barely stand being around myself.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: But, yeah, but these are. Like I said, this was a fun look at some examples from.
This is far from an exhaustive list. It was. But it was just really funny. I stumbled across. It went, all right, the aces are represented.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Not necessarily the true ace, like you have with amoebas and cell organisms. That is it meiosis or mitosis. They actually reproduced by. I don't remember.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: I don't remember.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: Oh, lord have mercy. That's way too long ago for science class, but, you know. Yeah. And this is an example of asexual behavior that a lot of people don't think about, is the fact that aces don't always say, I never have sex. It could be like you said, I am married to someone. I love them.
I will happily have sex with them if they drop dead tomorrow. I'd be perfectly happy to never have sex again. That's totally a thing.
And that's a side of asexual that a lot of people don't see or don't think about.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Mm hmm. It's. We're subgrouping amongst the aces. We're a very small subgrouping because I hate. I understand. Respect that. Takes all kinds.
[00:31:45] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:31:46] Speaker B: So part of the rabbit hole ended up being, okay, fine. We've looked at the ones that don't spend any time around anybody. What about the ones that are traditionally known to only spend time with one another? It's a lie.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right. Because you said there were different types of different types of monogamy. And I know of a couple of different types of monogamy.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: And there, some of them are just really polite terms for really, really shitty behavior.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Um, well, that's within the humans.
[00:32:14] Speaker A: And that was 100% judgmental on my part.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: That was within the humans.
But interestingly, amongst the animal world, there's three different types of monogamy that they talk about.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:32:26] Speaker B: There's sexual monogamy, which is, of course, only one breeding partner.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: Right?
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Or in, as they put it, only one breeding partner at a time. It opens us up to our serial monogamists. There are certain birds that that's what they, that's what they are.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: They.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: They are cereal monogamists.
They are only ever with one partner, and they are completely with that one partner for that entire season, and then it's done, and they'll find another partner, and they'll only be with that one partner for that one season.
[00:32:57] Speaker A: Okay. And that is a much nicer version of serial monogamy. Yes.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Then there is in humans, because, quite frankly, another word for serial monogamy is actually cheating.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: Yes, I know, but that's because we're dealing with sexual monogamy in a bird versus sexual monogamy in a human.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: This was an interesting thing I learned when I, when I entered into the realm of polyamory again, after so much more research had come out, was the concept that, yeah, serial monogamy is exactly the term that social scientists use for people who continuously cheat on partners.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: And there have been quite a few people in the polyamory world that I have talked to or read information from who have said, yeah, I was a serial monogamous because I thought monogamy was how you had to be. And it was something I couldn't live in. I just, I couldn't seem to live in it. And when I discovered, oh, polyamory is the thing, and all I have to do is be open and honest with my partners, and I can have more than one. I want to do that instead, because I don't like living the lie.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: Right. Whereas, interestingly, when I was younger, serial monogamy meant someone who dated one person and had sex with them and then stopped dating that person and moved on to the next person. But they were always monogamous when they were with that person.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: That can be another form. Yes.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Which is more like the birds.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Exactly. Right.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: And that was, that was why I wasn't surprised with their conversation about serial monogamy and related to the birds. That was my understanding of it. So what you just shared is actually a new understanding for me, and I love it.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Although I wouldn't dating someone, breaking up with them and then dating other person, serial monogamy, I would just call that dating.
I know serial monogamy kind of comes into play, but when longer term relationships or things like marriage come into play.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: But the distinction in that case was they were completely with that person, so much so that they weren't looking at other people while they were with that person.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: That's why I use the dating concept.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: Is because it feels more like dating.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: I get it.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: To be fair, I didn't date a lot in high school and college, so I had other things on my mind. We're back to that demisexual.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: Another term that they have you just touched on. Social monogamy. For them, social monogamy is when animals form pairs to mate and raise offspring, but still have flings or x or scientific language, extra pair copulations on the side. Okay, it's a little less poly so much as you have a marriage with accepted, an open marriage, little less poly.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: A little more swinger.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Kinda not gonna lie. Kinda. No, that's the next one.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: That's why I'm chuckling.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: That's the next one. That's genetic monogamy where only the DNA can prove that one parent.
No, I'm serious.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Would DNA test genetic monogamy?
[00:35:54] Speaker B: There is. They have genetic monogamy when DNA tests can confirm that a female's offspring were sired by only one father. Okay, so yeah, there is genetic monogamy.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: Am I remembering correctly that with cats, I'm back to house cats, they can be fertilized with more than one father for a pregnancy. That's how you end up with a white kitten, with black cats and orange cats and.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Yep, that's back to the genetic monogamy and the reason for it existing in the research world.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: Okay, interesting.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: One of the things that I found from the same pair relationship situation discussion, the same sex pairing conversation, that kind of fits in here too, is the only way they got same sex pairing happening in lab was when they were doing experiments that damaged the brain of the animal or experiments that messed with the hormones of the animal.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: So we see it naturally in nature. We don't necessarily, we're not necessarily able to in the lab unless we seriously screw with it.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: I suspect that relates to one of the other factoids that I found out through all of this mess, too, is that it most frequently, this most frequently starts happening in the larger population. The larger the population gets and the more imbalanced the population gets in terms of genders. In terms of sexes. Mm hmm. Then you start seeing more and more same sex pairing. So those two factors do not figure in, in the lab because you can't have too large of a population in the lab for anything other than fruit flies or rats. Oh, no. Even rats, mice.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Rats. You can get too big of a population. Or you can not get too big of a population. It has to be that large of a population.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Oh, wow. So this really is only something you can observe in nature.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: Exactly. Which is why also you only see it, why you see so many researchers talking about it being a newer phenomenon. It's not a newer phenomenon. As we've seen, they were talking about it. But notice what? Notice what? They were talking about it appearing in pigeons, partridges, hyenas in Egypt.
[00:38:14] Speaker A: Birds.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Birds. Birds.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: Birds. And a few mammals.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: Birds and a few mammals that are insanely large population for the area in which they lived.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: True. I never realized how many hyenas were in Egypt, but I can see that considering how prevalent the jackal is.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Yep. So, yeah, it's. But again, just like same sex, the prevalence of same sex coupling throughout nature, so is the prevalence of non monogamous situations in nature. Monogamy, especially as we understand it as humans, is incredibly abnormal.
Extremely abnormal. Even those lovely little things that, even those lovely little species that we talk about being such wonderful examples. Oh, it's so romantic that they make for life. No, they don't. Wolves, swans.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: Swans. No, no, they don't.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: Yeah, there's evidence of swans divorcing, for lack of a better way of putting it. Don't ask me what. And one of the things interesting in the article I read about that, the article I read that was talking about that one pointed out that one of the reasons that one, at least one mated pair that they talked about was adultery, or adultery as we understand it. In other words, one of the swans was cheating outside the relationship, and they got the two swans separated.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: I have a terrible pitch idea for Disney.
[00:39:41] Speaker B: Oh, see, that would never fly.
But, yeah, mute swans. The example in this article, mute swans, is the article talks about him being the high school sweethearts of the animal kingdom.
[00:39:54] Speaker A: Which article is this?
[00:39:55] Speaker B: This is the one from ZME science. It's animal animals that mate for life. The truth and fiction.
[00:40:01] Speaker A: Oh, we'll probably end up in show notes, posting all of our research.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: Yes. Because there's a lot, there's a lot more that I'm pulling general information from, but I'm not actually citing, because I. I dug. I dug and I read, and it was all really interesting, but sharing some key tidbits from some of these swans.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: So back to the swans.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: The swans really struck a note. So, because, as they point out, it's a universal monogamy is non negotiable for these swans. They are monogamous, apparently, as a species.
[00:40:31] Speaker A: Apparently.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: They're also apparently universal symbol of love and togetherness. And these birds, they're best known examples of monogamy in the wild. And they'll frequently spend an entire lifetime with their partner, which is cool for them, but sometimes even they can't make it last. This is the one where even swans are susceptible to heartbreak in times of death.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Yeah. You see. You see a lot of. You see a lot of mourning.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:59] Speaker A: In animals, when I'm not looking, someone or something they're close to dies.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: I'm not looking forward to when my main passes.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: He's gonna be gonna be heartbroken.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: But. And it's a. It's another trivia bit amongst humans. This is another piece of trivia. I don't even remember where I learned it. I've known it forever, that when a female dies of a long term marriage, the male frequently follows soon after they will. When the male dies, not so much. You're not wrong, which I found absolutely fascinating.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: I mean, but, yeah, this was the synthesis.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: This was the indication of adultery leading to divorce, where in these mute squads, apparently they screw, apparently fuck around and find out.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: All I keep thinking is, so how do they do this divorce? Do they. Do they go up against a swan judge, or do they do like me? Or do they do. Or they do like the medieval irish woman did, and basically just put their stuff outside the house and say, you.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: Out now, outside the house, you out now, I think. But apparently even better is just like the fact that that random. Back to it. I was sharing about. Apparently males have a worse time as swans than humans. We have. Apparently, socially, we have more in common with swans than we do with primates because males have a rougher go.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Oh, you are going to have to explain that one.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: Females recoup quicker.
[00:42:25] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, I can see that we do bounce back quicker.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: Sometimes the speed of moving on is different from gender to gender. Males have a rough time of it. Females recoup quicker, and the female swans, after the divorce, go for younger males.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: Well, you know, sometimes trading up for a younger model is a good thing. Sometimes trading up for an older model can be better. Hence my second marriage.
[00:42:50] Speaker B: I've always been married to someone slightly younger, so we're good.
[00:42:53] Speaker A: I went from. I went from five years younger to four and a half years older. The four and a half years older lasted a whole lot longer.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Yeah, he's six months younger, so we're all good. Although.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: Although I will say what you do commonly see in humans when there is a breakup, while oftentimes men will work through it by rapidly dating lots of other women, women deal with it on a more emotional level. But, yeah, when it comes to getting into a relatively more stable next relationship, it is pretty more common for women to do that. For women identifying, to do that faster than male identifying to some degree. Well, I would say that's probably more common in the cisgendered realm. You start wandering into the trans and non binary and gender fluid, and the rules start changing.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: I suspect in the cisgender realm, it might have something to do with toxic masculinity and the cultural expectations of male versus female and all that, which we will again be a later discussion.
[00:43:51] Speaker A: Again, another podcast episode. Y'all are getting an awful lot of.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: Teasers in this one, because we're talking about sexuality and queerness in the animal kingdom, and we're part of the animal kingdom.
[00:44:03] Speaker A: We are part of the animal kingdom. And we. I don't know if it's because of the amount of sentience we seem to have or because it's the biased opinion amongst us, but we change a lot of rules and we make things a lot more complex.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: I suspect, too, it's because as a species, as an animal species, we're considered herd animals, but as a reality of a sentient individual, a sentient grouping of individuals, we have a significant number among us who reject the herd mentality.
[00:44:44] Speaker A: That is true.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: And therefore, we have to have find a better balance between intellectual, emotional, and all of the other factors. And we are prone to looking back and analyzing what worked, what didn't work, why it worked, how we can make it work better, things like that.
[00:45:02] Speaker A: There's that sentience coming into play. Yeah.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: There's that sentience coming into play.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: It's kind of interesting when you start comparing what traits we have in common with which animals and the fact that, wow, these statistical outliers of the animal kingdom, mute swans are about the only example of individual that I ran across anywhere of individual perfect monogamous pair bonding.
[00:45:26] Speaker A: Everything else is kind of up in the air.
[00:45:28] Speaker B: Well, even penguins, they're a social monogamy, which makes sense, considering for 50% of the year, the femA, all of the females are gone off hunting, and dad is left alone. All the dads are left alone taking care of those eggs until they hatch and even taking care of the babies once they are born until moms come back with food.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, I can see that. At that point, the concept of monogamy kind of sometimes lies in the face of the it takes a village concept. It doesn't just take a village to raise a child.
[00:46:03] Speaker B: It takes a population.
[00:46:05] Speaker A: It takes a village to survive.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Yep. Because this is. They pool resources and responsibilities to raise a brood of eggs and to survive.
[00:46:13] Speaker A: Exactly. Feral cats and dogs absolutely. Get together, form colonies, and help each other raise the young.
[00:46:23] Speaker B: And the dads in the penguin world aren't necessarily even just watching their own eggs. They're watching eggs, period. Once the chicks are born, they're not watching only their own hatchlings because they probably don't even know anymore which ones are their own hatchlings, to be honest.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: Not wrong.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: I guarantee the females don't know anymore, and the males probably don't know anymore either, by this point. Okay. And so they're all taking care. It's. It's kind of like a friend of a friend of mine, our taekwondo. The head of our taekwondo school. He's like, he keeps telling the kids, I'm from an era where I had about half a dozen moms. Any of them could come out onto their porch, yell my name, and if it was my middle name in there, too, I knew I was in trouble.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: Uh huh, uh huh. And everybody knew your middle name.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: And every single mom on the block knew the middle name. To be able to know how to get my attention and to get me to stop doing whatever the hell I was doing wrong.
[00:47:16] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:47:17] Speaker B: Whereas I was raised, I had no neighbors for about a mile around me, and I was raised as an only child, so I lived very much in isolation, except for my parents.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I kind of had the extended family concept because parents being divorced, my grandparents and my great aunts and uncles were the people who were babysitting us and helping raise us. So I experienced a little more of the generational community. Yet another episode, because I have very strong opinions about the nuclear family concept.
But, yeah, I mean, we all have very different experiences on how we're raised. And in the animal kingdom, you don't always see that. You see a lot of community. You see a lot more communal raising for some specific. Some species.
[00:48:13] Speaker B: Anyway, see, the ZME article is one of the most recent ones, according to their number crunching. Now, granted, this is a summary kind of article. It is not a. There's. There's a couple that will link that are very specific reports that are very scientific. This one is not very scientific, but they point out that less than 5% of mammalian species actually engage in any form of monogamy.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: Less than 5%, huh.
So polyamory is the name of the game.
Well, according to least, non monogamy is the name of the game.
[00:48:45] Speaker B: Interestingly, they're claiming with monogamy, it comes back to genetics, whereas it wasn't really genetics when it came to same sex.
Apparently with monogamy, they're claiming it does animal and it's coming back to gestation periods more than anything. Hence genetics.
Longer gestation periods adopt social structures and strategies that lend themselves towards monogamy.
[00:49:12] Speaker A: Makes sense because you don't. You see a little more of monogamous behavior in some of your herd animals.
[00:49:20] Speaker B: You can only invest in one litter or you can only invest in a very finite number of offspring.
[00:49:26] Speaker A: Exactly. Would you. Hello, Sabrina. Yep, Sabrina's back. She's probably gonna be a mascot on the show.
[00:49:33] Speaker B: She's gonna come in and chirp and say hi.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: She insists on not taking her afternoon nap while we're recording. I can see that. Because when you can only have so many offspring in a life cycle, you're going to be more inclined, probably, to stay with, genetically stay with a mate. I would be very interested to see what the behaviors were in animals like cows or horses or herd animals that are right. More genuinely. We live together as a group concept, rather, while they. Seriously?
[00:50:08] Speaker B: Well, yeah, she has to do her claws.
She's not the center of attention. Until she does.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: We may leave this in just because it's funny for once.
[00:50:18] Speaker B: Then you'll do the soundtrack to make sure you can edit it back out.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: She knows we're talking about her kind, of course, but it would be interesting to see how much that exists in those types of animals.
[00:50:33] Speaker B: I will say, from what I've heard seen in things like free range cattle, where there literally is no control mechanism whatsoever, that you have multiple cows hit estrus at the same time, go into season, and so you'll have a group of calves delivered at the same time. Any mama will feed the calf. It doesn't matter if she has milk, she'll feed the calf.
[00:50:58] Speaker A: Whereas I remember there's an old pictish saying.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:02] Speaker A: From Scotland, that they were matrilineal, because any horse can sire a foal, but a mare will only suckle her own.
[00:51:12] Speaker B: Okay. Which is interesting. And that.
[00:51:16] Speaker A: How true that is. I don't know well, it's also. How large was the grouping exactly?
[00:51:21] Speaker B: Because, again, I'm talking. I'm talking the cattle ranchers grouping where they have hundreds of head of cattle.
[00:51:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: And I could be wrong if there are cattle ranchers, people who know more about cattle ranching, listening to this. Hey, feel free time, and feel free to comment. Please correct me.
[00:51:36] Speaker A: I'd have to go back through and watch the farm shows that were on the BBC.
[00:51:41] Speaker B: I've seen. I have seen examples on smaller farms where if there's more than one cow that has milk, usually she doesn't care if another calf comes up and suckles.
[00:51:53] Speaker A: I'd have to go back and look at the. Watch the farm shows that the BBC did that were the historical farms and see if they tended to always have flocks of sheep to see if that was the case with the sheep. Sheep, were they nursing them?
[00:52:08] Speaker B: To be honest, sheep are hard to see, especially if they haven't been sheared recently. I don't know about you, but I've seen a sheep farm. I've seen lots and lots and lots of sheep. And when their coat is in full, you can't tell where the udders are, much less that they have which ones are male or which ones are female.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: And whether or not. Because there's so much of it and whether or not they're. They're suckling more than just their own.
[00:52:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, that wasn't my sheep farm. I wouldn't know who was who. I could tell you. Okay. We had a kennel. I could tell you the name of every single one of the 20 plus dogs we heard had 20 to 30 dogs we had at any given time. Okay? I could tell you that no matter how much alike they looked, I knew who was who. Okay. The people that own the sheep farm could probably tell you the same thing about the sheep. Okay. I couldn't tell you about that, about their sheep farm because sheep are stupid and I didn't want to know.
[00:52:55] Speaker A: Now, I remember in the farm show they were absolutely marking them to figure out which lamb went with which you.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: But how much of that was because you. It was a show. And they weren't necessarily the farmers that always. That these were their sheep.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: It was actually something that they did historically. And they are recreating. They are recreating a historical farm. Interesting.
[00:53:18] Speaker B: So, yes, in terms of horses, I'm not entirely sure because we had one formerly male Arabian. We had one formerly female Morgan. That's a breed of race, a breed of show horse. And we had one really badly tempered Shetland pony. We had one each of those, and they all got along just fine, except for with the humans. The pony would bite and almost bit. She never bit me, but I was allowed to ride her. But she did bite other people from time to time, or at least try to. Despite having a lot of interaction with these species, I don't actually know as much about the foaling and growth. To know whether the pick dish comment would be accurate or not, I don't know.
[00:54:07] Speaker A: I might have to ask my sister. She helped her father in law with a lot of the foaling process when he had horses, so she might be able to answer my question a little better. Although I don't know, because you're talking about. You're talking about instances where you've only got two or three horses of things. So hard to say.
[00:54:24] Speaker B: But they did hang along. They did hang around together. They did nuzzle each other. They were. They were all friendly with each other. That wasn't unusual. But interestingly, are monogamous mammals bring us back on track? Well, now, this is, well, only 5% of mammals, right?
[00:54:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:54:43] Speaker B: A couple of documented monogamous mammals. Mice in California.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Why in California?
[00:54:49] Speaker B: I don't know. They're called California mice.
[00:54:51] Speaker A: They really like to surf.
[00:54:53] Speaker B: I have no idea. I assume it's a breed of mouse that was originally discovered in California.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: I'm guessing it is too.
[00:54:59] Speaker B: I just know it's part of the list.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: I just couldn't help. Snarky comment.
[00:55:03] Speaker B: Snarky comments are awesome.
And prairie voles, 100% monogamous, apparently. Prairie voles, they're monogamous rodents.
Prairie voles are so fucking monogamous. Sorry, language, folks. But really, they are so monogamous. One, that the male will only ever again mate with or be around the female that takes his virginity, and two, he will actively attack other females that come anywhere near. Oh my. Now, interestingly, one of the other articles I found, this is the summary article, but one of the other articles I found about this mentioned these prairie voles. Apparently they discovered that the dopamine levels in the male prairie vole get elevated and the same kind of dopamine level elevations we see in addicts, in drug addicts.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:55:58] Speaker B: So they essentially are addicted to their partner. To the extent of anything threatens that addiction, they will destroy it.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: Wow. That takes toxic relationship to an interesting.
[00:56:10] Speaker B: Level, because this is the monogamy we want to model on. Really? Not so much.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: Oh, I have the feeling divorce doesn't exist in that situation.
[00:56:19] Speaker B: No. If one mate in the pair bond dies over 80% of the time, the remaining mate chooses to forego forming another pair bond. It doesn't necessarily indicate that mate also dies shortly thereafter, but they will not pair bond again, which is interesting.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[00:56:37] Speaker B: But, yeah, they are a couple of the eggs. Yeah, there are a couple of the lone examples. Rodents, folks, are what, other than humans, are known for monogamy? Monogamy in the mammalian world. Hmm. Anyway, I'm not gonna.
[00:56:53] Speaker A: I'm not gonna draw any conclusions. I'm not gonna pass any judgments. If monogamy makes people happy, go for it.
[00:56:59] Speaker B: Yeah. If it works, it works.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: If it works for you. Fantastic.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: Oh, and termites are monogamous.
[00:57:08] Speaker A: You know, if we want to wander into the insect world, we can go back to the ace conversation. Talk about. Talk about Prague manus affair.
[00:57:17] Speaker B: Unlike ants and bees, termites don't worship a single queen. Rather, it's a king and queen. Virgin termites embark on the nuptial flight, an annual ritual, and foregoes lifelong relationships with a single mate with whom they establish a new colony.
[00:57:32] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:57:33] Speaker B: They become the king and queen of a new colony.
[00:57:35] Speaker A: Yes. All the good old swarming seasons.
[00:57:37] Speaker B: Fun fact. In hard times, male termites will shack up with each other when they can't find female termites to settle down with. In these relationships, male termites build nests together and cease looking for females altogether. But if they come across a heterocolony of termites, the males engage in conflict with the hetero male.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: Makes sense.
[00:57:57] Speaker B: And one of the males eventually kills the hetero male to mate with the widowed queen, thus forming the homosexual, thus ending the homosexual bond.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: Oh, the same sex bond.
[00:58:07] Speaker B: I'm looking at the language that is. No, that is the language you used in the article.
This wasn't fall into it. This was the language that was. I was reading.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: Was this another one? That was.
[00:58:19] Speaker B: This is Zme science still. This is animals that mate for life. Now, Zme, I suspect. I'm not entirely sure, because I don't know.
[00:58:29] Speaker A: What does Zma stand for?
[00:58:30] Speaker B: I'm wondering if they're an american magazine or not.
[00:58:33] Speaker A: Although, to be fair, the idea of queerness in the human world does not just existent within the United States. It's worldwide.
[00:58:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:44] Speaker A: So.
[00:58:44] Speaker B: Right. And that's why I suspect Zme science might not be an american.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: It could or could not be. Yeah.
[00:58:51] Speaker B: Um, it's a ZMe science brand. Um, they have been mentioned by New York Times, National Geographic, ismodo, BBC.
Again, back to that might not be american. They might.
[00:59:05] Speaker A: That's okay.
[00:59:05] Speaker B: My first suspect was they might be british. And yes, we do get cannibalism and monogamy and insects that make for life. Taiwanese cockroaches mate for life, but then they kill each other and eat each other.
[00:59:17] Speaker A: I'm sensing a theme in the insect world.
[00:59:21] Speaker B: You know, some species, praying mantis female kills and eats the male. Well, is it mainly for life? Not so much. Well, for the male it is.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: I was gonna say for him it is.
[00:59:31] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's.
You wanna get into insects? We can't get into praying mantises. Cause that's. Again, Zme went there, too.
[00:59:39] Speaker A: Takes me back to that Buffy episode, stay strong.
Well, you know, what can I say?
[00:59:47] Speaker B: Apparently, female alligators exhibit evidence of mate fidelity. Cause that's who we really want to have.
[00:59:56] Speaker A: I will travel the world to find you. No, no.
[00:59:59] Speaker B: You can stay right in that little river over there where I know where you are. Thanks.
[01:00:02] Speaker A: Right.
[01:00:04] Speaker B: Ooh.
[01:00:04] Speaker A: Get another idea to pitch Disney.
[01:00:09] Speaker B: They'd probably go for that one. Cause that's a. That's a love story.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: I have watched way too many Disney animated movies, apparently.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: Yeah. The same pair that. The interview that they did, one of the investigators from a study that was done at Rockefeller with wildlife Refuge in Louisiana, that same pair of breeding alligators that bred together in 1997, are still breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests to this day. Because that's not scary. Go to Florida sometime. Alligators, it's a thing.
[01:00:45] Speaker A: They're in Louisiana, too.
[01:00:46] Speaker B: Oh, I know they are. But you have to actually go to where they are in Louisiana and in Florida, they come out onto the roads.
[01:00:52] Speaker A: Yeah, no kidding. No kidding.
[01:00:54] Speaker B: They'll come to you.
But, yeah, I found this was really a super interesting dive into the fact that what we as humans think of as normal and socially accepted is so completely abnormal amongst the entire animal kingdom.
[01:01:14] Speaker A: Right.
[01:01:15] Speaker B: I mean, to be almost a statistical outlier.
[01:01:18] Speaker A: Exactly. And I mean, a lot of.
I feel, yet again, this could be another rabbit hole for a different episode, because we were pretty far in at this point how much our moral lens really influences those differences and has from early on.
[01:01:36] Speaker B: That's, for example, National Wildlife Federation was a great resource for some of this. And, for example, so they talk about. Moral attitudes have long clouded scientific thinking about same sex animal behavior. In 1906, a naturalist was watching an all male group of showy shorebirds called ruffs, including one inseparable pair. And this was in the Netherlands. The naturalist wrote down, quote, they're constantly, so to say, mistaking one another for the female. He later wrote, perverted sexuality is the real keynote.
[01:02:10] Speaker A: A few years later. Yeah. Perverted is 100% a judgment?
[01:02:15] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
And the same.
A few years later, a researcher in Antarctica witnessed same sex populations amongst some of the penguins and then coded his findings in greek letters and didn't publish them because he was so mortified by it. And, of course, we're talking 1906. Okay, fine. That was a long time ago. Right? 1986. Butterfly scientist. Okay. Because we usually call those entomologists in the scientific community, but.
[01:02:42] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:02:42] Speaker B: National Wildlife Federation. You do. You witnessed four male maharine blues. What type of butterfly? Very beautiful butterfly, by the way. Vying for the attentions of another male in Morocco. He publishes under his observations. The scientist publishes observations under the title a note on the apparent lowering of moral standards in the lepidoptera, and compared their courtship behavior to what he called the horrific sexual offenses that humans commit.
[01:03:13] Speaker A: And people wonder why.
[01:03:14] Speaker B: 1986.
[01:03:15] Speaker A: People wonder why so many Gen xers waited so long to come out of the closet.
Between that and the AIDS scare, granted.
[01:03:22] Speaker B: National Wildlife Federation seems to think that today research on animal homosexuality carries less stigma. That's good. That means we might.
[01:03:29] Speaker A: Okay, that's gross.
[01:03:31] Speaker B: That's real research.
[01:03:32] Speaker A: Okay, that's gross. I like that. I like that. New mindset.
[01:03:36] Speaker B: Interestingly, what they're pointing out is the tight job market and the academic situation might have emboldened young scientists.
[01:03:46] Speaker A: Okay, I. You know what? I can see that. Especially with the rise of normalizing and acceptance of queerness, especially amongst younger generations.
[01:03:59] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:04:00] Speaker A: We kind of saw the same thing with us. I mean, we are the ones who kind of got the queer ball rolling again. Probably a topic for another episode, but we got that ball rolling by starting to normalize it. And now the result is our children are 100% going to take this in directions we never did. We kind of did this with psychology. I mean, Gen Xers really started. Are the ones who did.
[01:04:24] Speaker B: Who really started realizing therapy works, right?
[01:04:27] Speaker A: Who started realizing that we could make changes within psychological research and started making those changes. Millennials have taken up the cause and moved onward with it. Thank God. Whichever one's listening, I don't care.
[01:04:39] Speaker B: I really do like what this person has to say.
They quote an ecologist from UC Berkeley. Our generation has faced so much precarity and uncertainty in terms of even being able to follow a traditional academic path that there's a little bit of more. Well, we may as well do what we want now.
It's like, yes, you go.
[01:05:03] Speaker A: It's just a microcosm of what's happening everywhere else.
[01:05:06] Speaker B: But, yeah, apparently another 2010s when this person was a PhD student, she read the academic literature on same sex animal couplings. And she said it seemed to her like every time researchers studied another species, they treated homosexuality, their word, as both a deviance and a discrete phenomenon that required a species level explanation.
[01:05:28] Speaker A: And yet all the research we're finding is that it's.
[01:05:31] Speaker B: It's natural amongst every living species out there.
[01:05:36] Speaker A: Much more natural than people realize.
[01:05:39] Speaker B: And like I said, national Wildlife Federation was sharing this. So I think that in their discussion of behavior among animals isn't new. Science is finally catching up in that article. And as we found out, it's not new. Aristotle is far from new.
[01:05:53] Speaker A: Oh, God, no.
[01:05:55] Speaker B: Aristotle is beyond far from.
[01:05:57] Speaker A: I also find it mildly amazing that he was talking about pigeons, which are basically the same thing as doves, and yet doves were always considered to be a symbol of love and a symbol.
[01:06:08] Speaker B: Of loyalty, infidelity and purity.
[01:06:11] Speaker A: Infidelity and purity, when apparently pigeons don't do the same thing.
[01:06:15] Speaker B: Interesting. The other factor in there, he might have been willing and open to observe this and report it. Less because he was a good scientist. He was a scientist and less because he was a good scientist and more because he was gay.
[01:06:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:33] Speaker B: The social. The social construct of Greece at that time, it was nor it was abnormal to love a woman if you were a man. That was abnormal. That was bestiality.
[01:06:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Because you.
[01:06:45] Speaker B: Women were property. Women were beasts. Women were not.
[01:06:48] Speaker A: Had the perpetrator appropriate for life in some areas. It was more along the lines of you, you coached and trained a younger male lover before you eventually went off and got married kind of thing. Although, yeah. In some areas.
[01:07:02] Speaker B: In some areas, it was absolutely, it was absolutely that level of. And Aristotle was well known for being absolutely in love with a certain king of Persia that he trained.
[01:07:15] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[01:07:16] Speaker B: So, you know, a certain conqueror.
[01:07:19] Speaker A: Did Aristotle never have.
[01:07:22] Speaker B: He is never wife. He is never known to have a wife or child. No.
[01:07:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:07:27] Speaker B: He's like Socrates. He's never known to have specific offspring.
[01:07:31] Speaker A: I didn't think so.
[01:07:32] Speaker B: But he was well known to be absolutely enamored of Alexander.
[01:07:36] Speaker A: Oh, that's true. Yeah.
[01:07:38] Speaker B: He was absolutely enamored of Alexander. 100%.
[01:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And Alexander absolutely was homosexual. That is well known. That is well known that Alexander was gay.
[01:07:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm pretty sure Aristotle was, too. Interestingly, too, the fact that even though it seems counterintuitive on an evolutionary concept, that same sex relationships actually promote the evolutionary evolution of a species, because that's obviously not going to be promoting offspring.
[01:08:12] Speaker A: What? Exactly.
[01:08:13] Speaker B: Which is the end all be all for some people of evolution? I don't know, but it serves an incredibly necessary evolutionary role on a larger social scale. So if we stop looking at evolution as strictly being weather, resources, geographic limitations and start actually looking at it more holistically, basically the same sex relationships perform a very, very crucial critical function.
[01:08:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. Human women have banded together to help each other out. Sharing information, sharing knowledge, sharing a shoulder to cry on.
[01:08:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: Sharing sympathy that. I mean, I could see that being a thing in the animal kingdom as well. The idea that you can only have opposite sex pairings completely and totally on a social level as well as a breeding level makes no sense to me.
[01:09:14] Speaker B: And see, that goes into the flip side of it too, is the fact that you can't have opposite sex, platonic social interactions. Don't get me started, because that's a whole nother. There's another episode, other ball of wax in that one.
[01:09:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:09:29] Speaker B: So I will honestly say that without you and the queer community friends that I have, I would not be as successfully happy in my marriage as I am because I'm married to someone who doesn't talk.
[01:09:46] Speaker A: He's pretty quiet.
[01:09:47] Speaker B: I mean, when he says something, it's worth listening to. But he doesn't say much very often.
[01:09:52] Speaker A: No, he's not really a talker.
[01:09:54] Speaker B: And as is obvious, I do like to talk, but there are times I'd like to take a break and actually listen to someone else do the talking, you know?
[01:10:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will do more research later.
[01:10:07] Speaker B: That's not it. You know, it. It's not much of a conversation if only one person is pulling the weight.
[01:10:13] Speaker A: That's true. I, having been in relationships with people who also were not heavy talkers, I do not really want to sit and yammer at someone for hours. I want that interaction.
[01:10:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:10:24] Speaker A: It's a social desire.
[01:10:25] Speaker B: It is.
[01:10:26] Speaker A: It's a natural social desire. Despite being an introvert, I actually still do crave that.
[01:10:31] Speaker B: I think all introverts do, because honestly, I'm very comfortable as a hermit. But at the same time, that doesn't mean I want to talk to myself all the time. I spent an entire childhood doing that. Thanks.
[01:10:41] Speaker A: Oh, come on. I talk to myself all the time anyway. But that's kind of part of the writing process.
[01:10:45] Speaker B: I have children. I talk to myself anyways.
[01:10:51] Speaker A: Lord knows they're not listening sometimes. Sometimes I was being nice.
[01:10:57] Speaker B: I'm being honest.
[01:10:58] Speaker A: I mean, to be fair, I talk to my cats all the time. They don't really answer back very well.
[01:11:03] Speaker B: Oh, I have long conversations, and mine do talk back. And that's the scary part.
[01:11:06] Speaker A: Sabrina talks back because she is a melty little girl. Leah was not extremely talkative.
He's a little bit like your husband.
[01:11:17] Speaker B: And how far does that satisfy a conversational bent? Right.
[01:11:23] Speaker A: Okay. Have we hit everything?
[01:11:25] Speaker B: I think we hit a lot of the major high notes and a few low notes.
I think the middle area might need some work, but, you know, and apparently.
[01:11:36] Speaker A: Probably a few inappropriate comments.
[01:11:38] Speaker B: No, if we only hit a few, we're doing. We're not doing our job right.
We need to work on that.
[01:11:46] Speaker A: So what have we learned? That same sex pairings are actually a lot more common than we'd realize in the natural world. And that trying to be 100% monogamous is apparently an anomaly is what I'm pulling out of this pretty much.
[01:12:02] Speaker B: That honestly gender, that honestly queer. Taking the gender out, that honestly queer life is the normal, and for us to demand that it not be normal.
[01:12:16] Speaker A: Is very wrong and very unhealthy.
[01:12:20] Speaker B: Insanely unhealthy.
[01:12:21] Speaker A: Not good for society, actually. Not good for society instead of good for society.
[01:12:27] Speaker B: And, oh, yeah, there are transgender. Since we're talking queer, there are transgender in nature. Touch on that earlier, and there will be more about it when we talk about transgender at a later point in time, because, honestly, transgender is natural to people.
And on that note, I'm sorry. I'm fiercely defensive of the people that I love.
[01:12:48] Speaker A: I feel that.
[01:12:49] Speaker B: Believe me, I have a lot of people in the queer community that I very much love.
[01:12:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm amazed at the number of trans people I know.
It's a significantly large number that apparently the GLAAD study has pointed, has put out, especially when it comes to trans men. Apparently, for me, they find me. I'm okay with that. Three of my chaos goblins are. So, you know, I'm just not naming any names.
[01:13:14] Speaker B: Whereas mine are the trans women I know more trans. I know as many trans women as I do trans men.
[01:13:19] Speaker A: That is apparently common, according to a GLAAD study. And I'd have to go back and watch the. The disclosure so on Netflix to remember which one it was. But they actually do say that people. Very few people know transgender people. That's probably changing. And people who do know transgender know more trans women than they do trans men, which I thought was very, very interesting and I can see very interesting.
So I believe that is all that we have hit for today.
Drop us a line and let us know what you think. And I should probably go up the outro because I don't remember it. That's what we have for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode. We would love to hear what you think. So drop us a line at spilltheteapodcast 224 mail.com no, we are not boomers and yes, we will eventually get a different email address. We would also love your support, so please visit our Patreon site or buy us a
[email protected]. slash spill the teapodcast. I believe that's all.
[01:14:22] Speaker B: Be well, folks.
[01:14:23] Speaker A: Be well. Bye.
Yeah, close.
