A dog is a domesticated animal. It is submissive to humans and conditioned to tolerate us and obey us aside from anything else. In contrast people don’t abuse wild wolves much. Similarly horses also get abused, and they are much larger than dogs or apes.
That was my original point. It’s domesticated animals that people have sex with, not animals in general. I doubt if anyone has ever had sex with a wild animal of any size. Apes are by no stretch domesticated and as such I doubt that anyone has had sex with an ape.
Chimaeras aren’t crossbreeds though, they are animals that result from the fusion of two distinct embryos. An ability to create a viable chimaera is a strong indicator of hybridisation potential, but it doesn’t prove the issue either way.
Surely anyone who’s had access to the internet for any length of time has, at some point, read about how randy dolphins, sea-turtles and the occasional sea lion can get.
Land animals can be quite prudish, but I tell ya, those ocean critters are total floozies.
Well, I dunno about real life, but in fantasy, sci-fi, and science fantasy, humans are pretty much the most prolific, hybridizable species in existance.
Update. I’m just now reading Frans de Waal’s new book “Our Innner Ape” and he states that chimp/bonobo hybrids do exist, although they were accidentally produced by private individuals, not on purpose by scientists. Given de Waal’s credentals as one of the world’s leading biologists studying chimps and bonobos, I think we can assume he is correct.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t give much detail about the behavioral differences these hybrids exhibit. OTOH, the book is quite good and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject of human/ape behavior. He does, for instance, discuss in detail the striking difference in social structure between chimps and bonobos, and how that structure does depend (to a significant degree) on the physical environment, especially the availability of food. Chimp social structures become more similar to bonobo social structures as the availability of food increases. Fascinating stuff.
There is an old African taboo about engaging in sex with apes, and males of other species will attempt to engage human females. This was said to be the reason that Richard Leakey only sent women to study apes–because it was known that while the female apes are rather accepting of outsiders the males are not, but males will accept a new female into the group.
The taboo says these offspring are bad luck and generally dangerous if they are allowed to live, and the usual response was to kill anyone caught having sex with apes, or to kill any mothers that gave birth to hirsuite children (as well the children).
Hirsutism in humans has nothing much to do with apes or chimps of course. There is no good evidence that sex between humans and apes/chimps has ever produced viable offspring–but even so, scientists will not definitely state that such offspring is impossible, only that it is extremely, extremely unlikely.
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It’s the height of Googly irony that the Ad I just saw at the bottom of this thread offers to rent ‘Affection trained chimpanzees for TV, movies and live events’.
