Do baboons have oral sex? What kinds of oral sex?
The reason I ask, so you don’t think I am a freak (too late), is I was at the zoo and I swear a baboon was giving another baboon a blow-job. A Google search didn’t help.
I’m sure there was something in my email about this the other day…
Seriously though, I know that this sort of thing has been observed in chimps(different from baboons, I know) in the wild. The behaviour of zoo animals is often quite unnatural anyway though.
Apes do groom each other - maybe what you witnessed was some type of grooming behavior. Although animals in captivity will sometimes exhibit some weird behaviors including homosexual activity, I don’t think blow jobs is one of them.
Grooming can be done using the teeth as well as the fingers - perhaps that’s what was going “down”.
Grim
Actually as funny as it seems, I did see a special on a group of monkeys that perform oral sex on each other. Mostly it was females performing on females, and I don’t recall any males being serviced. (have you seen monkey teeth?)
But it wasn’t baboons, it was a group of chimpanzees…
It’s true.
Really.
It IS!
Ok this mentions Gorilla’s not Baboon’s, but that Cecil knows everything.
**Baboon Oral Sex **
Hold on…
Erm…
Band name?
I think we can be pretty sure they do. Almost all primates engage in that sort of behavior. Cecil mentions some of their sexual proclivities in his column on gay animals here:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_198.html
Notice that “oral sex” is specifically mentioned – not with respect to baboons specifically, but I doubt they’re much different sexually from the gorillas and monkeys that are specifically mentioned as oral sexualizers.
But it would have been so great if you had been able to snap a few rolls of baboon porn so the experts could verify exactly what those two were up to…
(I shouldn’t have fallen asleep while writing this – preview shows me that most of it has already been mentioned. But hey, whatever.)