What animals do for fun (fuck, for one)

Animals Just Want to Have Fun – by John Gartner

They get intoxicated, delight in chasing each other, and have sex just for kicks. The subjects of Jonathan Balcombe's Pleasurable Kingdom are not spring breakers, but animals large and small.

Balcombe, the animal behavior research scientist for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine , describes little-explored similarities between humans and animals from an unusual perspective: how various species have fun.

He calls this line of study "hedonic ethology," and Pleasurable Kingdom offers myriad examples of animals expressing humanlike emotions, such as happiness, observed by luminaries of biological science such as Charles Darwin, Joanna Burger and Jane Goodall.

The upshot: Animals are more like us than conventional wisdom generally allows, so much so in fact that they deserve many of the same ethical considerations that govern human relations. "If animals feel, then we have a responsibility towards them," says Balcombe.

Balcombe relies on his own and other scientists' research to show that, just like people, many animals experience joy, happiness, longing, boredom and love. This assertion is perhaps not surprising to dog or cat owners. But the author extends the argument daringly, and somewhat less convincingly, to a long list of critters that rarely receive such consideration, such as crustaceans and even insects.

The author cites research -- more than most of us would ever care to know -- detailing how fish, fowl and invertebrates are touch-sensitive and will avoid painful situations. Badgers, monkeys and felines all crave physical contact with others, he reports.

Reindeer eat hallucinogenic mushrooms more for the high than the nutrition, he argues, and normally carnivorous jaguars sometimes trip on tree bark.

While Balcombe admits there can never be definitive proof that animals feel pleasure, their facial gestures, he says, can be similar to humans'. Animal brains, he writes, undergo comparable chemical changes.

The argument really gets interesting with his discussion of animal sex, where he persuasively argues that humans can't lay exclusive claim to more highly evolved responses to the primal urge.

Evolutionary biologists have often struggled to explain human nonreproductive sex, though some such as Jared Diamond have found numerous payoffs, for example, strengthening emotional bonds between parents charged with raising their young over an extended period of dependence.

Balcombe claims that not only humans but many species have sex for fun, and plenty masturbate and have homosexual interactions. He reports that more than 300 species of vertebrates engage in homosexual activities (including giraffes, gulls and bonobo), while others practice autoeroticism (bats, walruses, rodents). He also accuses scientists of gender bias in their studies of animal sexual pleasure, claming that only a small fraction of the studies of mammal sex focus on the clitoris as opposed to the penis.

Balcombe says many scientists depict animals as joyless, continually at-risk creatures so that killing them will be seen as doing them a favor. But in the final chapter, he argues that since animals most likely feel pleasure and pain, they deserve more humane treatment during our interactions.

Balcombe makes an engaging, if not entirely convincing, case for the lowliest denizens of the animal kingdom. Whether or not you agree with him, his arguments may change your opinion of the next lobster that arrives steaming on your plate.

Was it, like us, entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?