Animal sex – is it just a bit of fun?
Sometimes I’ve heard things like Dolphins are the only other animals that have sex for pleasure. Many people and scientists believe this without questioning it in the slightest. But here is the question that you should ask yourself – if animals aren’t having sex for pleasure, why are they having sex? If you think the answer is the rational understanding of procreation then you are giving a lot of respect to the cause and effect understanding of squirrels, turtles and all the dogs that regularly hump people’s legs. You are suggesting that the animal is thinking “I will now mix my male gametes (sperm) with your female gamete (egg) so after an appropriate gestation time we will have offspring that will have half my DNA, so at least a part of me will live for ever. You see it’s all about darwinism my dear and the survival of my genes. Those humans are disgusting animals that copulate for pleasure.”. I don’t think Ned my dog who used to throw up, eat his vomit and then throw up again was thinking about darwinism when he was mounting my smaller, also male, dog Charley (gosh I loved those two sexually confused, vomiting canines).
You see, I would argue that most animals purely do things because of pleasure and suffering (yet these definitions might slowly breakdown in more simple animals which we might regard as not having emotions like zoo plankton). I think pleasure and suffering are the ends of an emotional continuum which is one of the major mechanisms by which genes (and evolution) control behaviour. These emotions are hard wired into the animals and tell them that walking into a fire is a bad idea, it causes suffering, you shouldn’t do it; and that food, sex and sleep are pleasurable, do it! Given that the neurotransmitters involved in pleasure, reward and pain are largely conserved in animals right down to cockroaches (1), I’m sure it is fair to say that even cockroaches feel something that could be called pleasure when they have sex. The alternative theory is that animals are just automatons with no emotions and or they do have emotions with the odd exclusion of sex? Given that rats appear to have the same cerebral dance of neurotransmitters during sex as humans I think many (if not most) animals are having a jolly ol’ time while knocking boots (2) (except for some of the more aggressive courtship behaviours in which perhaps only one of the genders is enjoying it). Humans on the other hand live in a complicated world where people often have sex for reasons other than pleasure. So perhaps humans are not one of the few creatures to have sex for pleasure, but instead are one of the few creatures to have sex for reasons other than pleasure. So let’s put this myth to bed.
- Anju Pandey, M. Habibulla, Serotonin in the central nervous system of the cockroach, Periplaneta americana, Journal of Insect Physiology, 1980. 26;1, 1-6
- Hull EM, Muschamp JW, Sato S.Dopamine and serotonin: influences on male sexual behavior.Physiol Behav. 2004 15;83, 291-307.
