Posted by Vandal:
I remember that show. As I recall, they were bats who pair-bonded. One female was separated temporarily from her mate, and another male jumped on her. The female squawked and put up a fuss–it certainly looked like rape.
When I was a teen I was with my dad one day. We were at one of his friends shops in town. The guy had this lab that laid around in the shop all day. One of their friends came in with his pet Bobcat on a leash. This stupid dog gets up comes over and tries to mount the damned Bobcat. Need I say that fur and a good portion of the dogs nose began to fly.
A pet bobcat?
Is that legal? Where was this?
The issue that hasn’t been addressed yet, is that rape in the human world isn’t just about sex, but about power, and humiliation.
The examples given so far, have addressed males wanting to ‘relieve’ themselves, but not about necessarily humiliating and degrading the female. Human rapists seek privacy and usually darkness to cover the act they know to be ‘wrong’ and illegal. Animals don’t seek that, their acts aren’t based on a ‘wrong’ vs. ‘right’ behavior.
Many rapists are married, so it isn’t just about the sexual act, they have access to that. It is about exerting power to induce fear and helplessness in the female, that is exciting to them. And if it isn’t achieved sufficiently, they will use sodomy, which I doubt is echoed in the animal kingdom.
Though I’ve witnessed odd, aberrant behavior, my mom’s FEMALE dog was forever ‘humping’ the leg of any unwary visitor to our house (pretty embarrassing if it happened to be a prospective boyfriend, they tend to look upon this as an unhappy dating experience!)
Dear God man! Dont you know i’m trying to work here?!?! So I’m taking this call and trying to walk someone through fixing their shit and reading the board at the same time. Then I read your post. Your whole description is priceless, I almost lost it on the phone and had to make an excuse and put this guy on hold while I laughed.
Are you trying to get me fired??!?! 
I agree! ROFL on the monkey story – I had to read that one to my husband to explain why I was laughing so hard.
Only if one can show that animals have a “will.” Which requires a sense of self. And probably a sense of morality.
How about the flatworm homosexual rape example? I think the male that was the victim is degraded and humiliated.
Actually Arnold, I’d call this one more competition for a mate, rather than an attempt to humiliate & degrade. Humiliation and degradation may be the result, both for the male flatworm and the female baboon, but I don’t think it was the intent on the aggressor. How degraded can a flatworm feel anyway? Mind you, I’m feeling slightly queasy.
It took two years, but Scientific American came through for us. In the June 2002 issue, Maggioncalda & Sapolsky describe rape as a common reproductive strategy among orangutans. Briefly, there are three types of fertile orangutans - adult males, arrested adolescent males and females. Adult males are about twice the weight of members of the other two groups and there is a social tendency for young males to remain arrested adolescents for as long as there is an adult male around (if they start to grow, they get beat up a lot).
“The great majority of adult female orangutans are sexually receptive only to mature males.” The arrested adolescent males will rape adult females.
There are a number of references in the article; the on-line ones are www.orangutan.org, www.orangutan.com and www.orangutannetwork.net
My great-uncle Zenas Bartlett had a pet monkey, Jake, whose bad behavior was documented in the book The Marlin Compound by Frank Oltorf.
...[Jake had] an unnatural attachment to cats. He
would grab those who strayed at the barn and would
race with the yowling victim to the top of a tree, where
the unfortunate cat faced the awful alternative of being
dropped or seduced. Sleek toms were as vulnerable as
demure tabbies, it making little difference to Jake as it
was all wrong anyway.
You need to look up the Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees). The use sex much like humans do. Not just for reproduction.
Check out this link http://songweaver.com/info/bonobos.html [sub]I’ve forgotten how do to the fancy coding so this will have to do[/sub]
I want to echo what Anti Pro said. Rape is not about sexual pleasure, it’s about domination. So whether or not other animals have sex for pleasure or reproduction is not relevant to the rape issue. It seems that some (I’m thinking of primates) do use sex as a show of domination.
I just ran across this:
Wild Stallions rape. When a stallion is ejected from his dominant poistion, the newly dominant stallion will have forceable sex with as many mares as possible, for the purpose of causing miscarriages in any pregnant mares.
It’s about reproductive strategy: If the mares miscarry, they’ll become available sooner to bear the new stallion’s young, and the stallion will be guarding fewer of his former rival’s offspring.
Needless to say, the mares resist this as much as possible, and it’s not unheard-of for a new (or even established) stallion to recieve very serious wounds in the process.
Deer also rape, and in fact, ungulates in general can be very brutal.
Male lions kill the young of a male that has lost a battle for top position, for the purpose of bringing the females into heat as quickly as possible (and remove the young of his defeated rival). This may not be technically rape, but serves the same purpose, reproductive strategy-wise.
I think it’s funny that people hear about rape in animal communities like dolphins, which are given credit for many human traits like intelligence; language; and curiosity, yet say they have “a hard time believing this”. Why?
I do think there is only one quality truly unique among humans, our ability to self-hate. All evil is not exclusive of the homo sapiens specis. There are cannibal animals up and down the food chain, baby killing animals, greed too, and yes rape in it’s various forms exists in the animal kingdom.
Rape for dominance seems to be the most common form, dogs for example will hump anything including yourt leg to assert dominance. Many other animals do this as well.
It’s hard to ascribe actual motive to more deliberate sexual rape, but dolphins do indeed engage in this. Male dolphins form strong bonds with other young male dolphins while growing up and will often assauly younger female dolphins (usually ones that are not mated to a specific adult male) and apparently, according to at least one documentary on the Discovery channel and a Cornell web page that I can unfortunately no longer pull up, they engage in homosexual rape of much younger male dolphins as well. Although they do this without the benefit of papal sanction.
Seems that the more intelligent an animal is or the more leisure time it has the more nasty business it can get up to.