# Interspecies Gender Recognition (& Attraction) **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 27, 2018, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686 "2018-02-27T18:43:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2018, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/1 "2018-02-27T18:43:32Z")
Question is whether an animal can recognize members of another species as either male or female, as they would recognize this in the case of members of their own species, and if so, how? ISTM that it makes sense to assume that animals from species which are morphologically similar and closely related would have this recognition. Which is why you have these cross-breeds between lions and tigers, dogs and wolves, horses and donkeys, and so on. But my question is about species which are not at all similar, e.g. [macaque monkeys and sika deer](http://www.newsweek.com/snow-monkeys-dont-care-if-their-sexual-partners-are-other-monkeys-or-deer-750144), and so on. ISTM from stories that I’ve read that animals attempting erotic interspecies connection tend to focus on members of the opposite gender more than members of their own gender (though not exclusively so). FTM, ISTM that reports of animals attempting to mate with humans (e.g. [orangutans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan#Orangutans_and_humans), possibly dogs) tend to mostly involve male animals and female humans. This too - if correct - implies some recognition of human females as “female” despite being clothed and generally dissimilar to female animals. But perhaps this is all incorrect. So the questions are 1) if this correct altogether, and 2) if it is, what might be the basis for this recognition. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2018, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/2 "2018-02-27T20:01:40Z")
Purely anecdotal stuff here to get you started, but I’m pretty certain my African Grey Parrot Rocco can differentiate human males and females. He spends 8 to 10 hours a day with me. He is totally cool with me put will not allow me to “pet” him. Meanwhile, if a female human he has never met talks to him for a few minutes, he’ll bow down and allow her to pet his head. He also will regurgitate food to a human female. He has never done this with me or any other male. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2018, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/3 "2018-02-27T20:04:56Z")
Also, there is literature suggesting that male iguanas can differentiate human males from females and will aggressively [attack menstruating human females.](http://www.anapsid.org/iguana/season.html) ---
**Author:** ![purplehorseshoe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/purplehorseshoe/32/2996_2.png) [@purplehorseshoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplehorseshoe)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2018, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/4 "2018-02-27T20:08:29Z")
Pheromones? Many animals recognize if/when a female is in heat through scent, and _usually_ the males will otherwise leave her alone. (In larger or pointy species, a non-receptive female can signal her displeasure with those males in ways that, ah, ensure he thinks twice before future attempts. A pissed off lioness can do some damage.) Anyway, it’s possible those odor markers would “translate” across species enough for a whiff to signal “whooo!! female!” even if they look different from each other. Not all animals are as visually-oriented as humans. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/5 "2018-02-28T00:20:47Z")
I knew some people who raised emus, and it was amazing how an emu could distinguish a male from a female human, and become dangerously aggressive on that basis, especially during breeding season. ---
**Author:** ![Lasciel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e79b87/32.png) [@Lasciel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lasciel)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/6 "2018-02-28T00:44:26Z")
All of my feral cat rescues have had clear and sometimes neatly exclusive gender preferences for the humans around them. In their cases I attribute it to whichever humans their feral experience pegged as dangerous or not. My current cat politely tolerates me and other women, but will lounge for an entire day across the lap of any male willing to leave her there. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/7 "2018-02-28T01:00:25Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > Which is why you have these cross-breeds between lions and tigers, dogs and wolves, horses and donkeys, and so on. Possibly a bigger factor in “why you have them” is that human curiosity (or avarice) created them. Because I don’t know of any such hybrids occurring in nature. Lion-tiger crosses were first recorded in 1798, from human breeding. Dogs & wolves is not a hybrid at all; they are the same species. Wild ones we call wolves; ones we have domesticated (and bred into various breeds) are called dogs. But genetically, all part of Canis lupus. And mules (the donkey-horse cross) are produced by human breeders. Darwin mentioned them in his book, saying “art has here outdone nature”. While such inter-species cross-breeding could possibly happen in nature, and probably does occasionally, it seems to happen regularly only with human intervention. ---
**Author:** ![Lamoral](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lamoral/32/16078_2.png) [@Lamoral](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamoral)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/8 "2018-02-28T01:07:53Z")
Can different species of wild cats breed, other than lions and tigers? Like, leopards, jaguars, panthers, cougars, cheetahs, lynxes, etc, is there any overlap between any of them genetically enough to where they could mate? ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/9 "2018-02-28T15:19:25Z")
> [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > Possibly a bigger factor in “why you have them” is that human curiosity (or avarice) created them. Because I don’t know of any such hybrids occurring in nature. > > Lion-tiger crosses were first recorded in 1798, from human breeding. > > […] > > And mules (the donkey-horse cross) are produced by human breeders. Darwin mentioned them in his book, saying “art has here outdone nature”. > > While such inter-species cross-breeding could possibly happen in nature, and probably does occasionally, it seems to happen regularly only with human intervention. That’s not relevant to the point being discussed here. Given a choice between mating with its own species and a species it’s not surprising if creatures will naturally stick to their own species. But the question here is about gender recognition, and the fact that in captivity these animals do readily mate with members of these other species indicates gender recognition - my point is that this is not surprising when they’re morphologically similar and closely related. > [@](#): > > Dogs & wolves is not a hybrid at all; they are the same species. Wild ones we call wolves; ones we have domesticated (and bred into various breeds) are called dogs. But genetically, all part of Canis lupus. I could be wrong, but my impression is that this is only semi-correct, and that to the extent that they’re not at least separate subspecies it’s only because for classification purposes a difference that arose from domestification is not used. ---
**Author:** ![purplehorseshoe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/purplehorseshoe/32/2996_2.png) [@purplehorseshoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplehorseshoe)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/10 "2018-02-28T15:24:49Z")
Sure, plenty of them CAN interbreed, in the sense that the male can insert penis into vagina - in a few specific crosses, a viable offspring can even be born: > **[Panthera hybrid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_hybrid)** > > A Panthera hybrid is a crossbreed between individuals of any of the five species of the genus Panthera: the tiger, lion, jaguar, leopard, and snow leopard. Most hybrids would not be perpetuated in the wild as the territories of the parental species do not overlap and the males are usually infertile. Mitochondrial genome research revealed that wild hybrids were also present in ancient times. The mitochondrial genomes of the snow leopard and the lion were more similar to each other than to other P... Those offspring, though, are sterile - same as with donkey/horse hybrids e.g. mules. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/11 "2018-02-28T16:07:18Z")
> [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > Dogs & wolves is not a hybrid at all; they are the same species. Wild ones we call wolves; ones we have domesticated (and bred into various breeds) are called dogs. But genetically, all part of Canis lupus. And mules (the donkey-horse cross) are produced by human breeders. Darwin mentioned them in his book, saying “art has here outdone nature”. > > While such inter-species cross-breeding could possibly happen in nature, and probably does occasionally, it seems to happen regularly only with human intervention. > [@purplehorseshoe](#): > > Sure, plenty of them CAN interbreed, in the sense that the male can insert penis into vagina - in a few specific crosses, a viable offspring can even be born: > > [Panthera hybrid - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_hybrid) > > Those offspring, though, are sterile - same as with donkey/horse hybrids e.g. mules. It is a misconception that interspecies crosses necessarily result in sterile offspring. In the specific cases of lions/tigers and horses/donkeys this is the case. But it is not true at all within the genus _Canis_, including dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals, which produce completely fertile hybrids. Likewise species of ducks in the genus _Anas_ produce fertile offspring. Species are defined on the basis not of whether they can produce fertile hybrids, but on whether they regularly do so _under natural conditions_, and whether two species maintain their separate identity in nature. Under natural conditions, wolves and coyotes do not hybridize very often. However, as coyotes spread into the eastern US following the local extinction of wolves and human modification of the habitat, they [hybridized widely with wolves and dogs.](https://theconversation.com/yes-eastern-coyotes-are-hybrids-but-the-coywolf-is-not-a-thing-50368) > [@](#): > > Coyotes in the Northeast are mostly (60%-84%) coyote, with lesser amounts of wolf (8%-25%) and dog (8%-11%). Start moving south or east and this mixture slowly changes. Virginia animals average more dog than wolf (85%:2%:13% coyote:wolf:dog) while coyotes from the Deep South had just a dash of wolf and dog genes mixed in (91%:4%:5% coyote:wolf:dog). ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/12 "2018-02-28T20:13:45Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > It is a misconception that interspecies crosses necessarily result in sterile offspring. In the specific cases of lions/tigers and horses/donkeys this is the case. It’s actually not even always the case that those pairings are fully sterile. There are at least 3 known cases of female lion/tiger hybrids successfully producing cubs with male lions (so called ‘Liligers’). Likewise, the odd female mule/hinny has been recorded as producing offspring. It is very rare though, and afaik no male hybrids from those pairings have ever been recorded as fertile. Regarding the OP, I’ve heard a lot of anecdotes about parrots acting differently to different gender humans, and I’ve lived in a house with a dog that (presumably due to abuse by the previous owner) was scared of men but not women. It calmed down with known men after a while, but any strange male would trigger violent barking and attempts to run away, whereas strange women were treated with cautious friendliness. We had 5 iguanas at the zoo I used to work in, 2 of which were male, and never noticed them responding differently to different gendered staff, menstruating or not. That’s a new one on me. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/13 "2018-02-28T20:29:55Z")
I should perhaps note that recognizing differences between men and women is not the same thing as recognizing gender. Men and women tend to differ in appearance, and it’s not impossible that an animal would be cognizant of those differences, and consider men and women different types of creatures. But that doesn’t mean that they appreciate that these are different genders, which correlate to parallel genders of their own species. So if an animal was mistreated by a man and gets suspicious of all men but not women, then all that means is that the animal is differentiating between Type 1 and Type 2, one being more dangerous than the other. It’s when the animal acts towards the different human genders in line with how they act towards the parallel genders of their own species that we can say that they are recognizing gender in humans. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/14 "2018-02-28T21:02:01Z")
From **Colibri** ’s cite: > [@](#): > > Coyotes in the Northeast are mostly (60%-84%) coyote, with lesser amounts of wolf (8%-25%) and dog (8%-11%). OK, so a 60% coyote has 25% wolf and 11% dog. What’s the other 4%? ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/15 "2018-02-28T21:05:55Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > From **Colibri** ’s cite: > > OK, so a 60% coyote has 25% wolf and 11% dog. What’s the other 4%? Something they order from the Acme company. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2018, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/16 "2018-02-28T21:24:03Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > From **Colibri** ’s cite: > > OK, so a 60% coyote has 25% wolf and 11% dog. What’s the other 4%? Offhand I don’t know without looking at the original paper, but my guess it would be genes that don’t distinguish between the three species. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2018, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interspecies-gender-recognition-attraction/809686/17 "2018-03-01T11:56:33Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > OK, so a 60% coyote has 25% wolf and 11% dog. What’s the other 4%? [Scott Turner.](https://nypost.com/2017/09/22/sex-offender-busted-for-bestiality-under-new-ohio-law/)