In a communal pasture in Debre Libanos, in the highlands of Ethiopia, a donkey named Patroclus looks for a bull named Achilles in the middle of the meadow. He comes to her and touches her side with his spit. Incidentally, third party disagreements arise. There is a fight, someone is biting. But in the end, together again, the bull rides and licks the donkey.
But that scene, along with many others recorded on video, was not an isolated incident. What Italian researchers have just found is a relationship that challenges what we know about animal behavior: two men from different families who repeatedly probed each other with cows and donkeys a few meters apart.
What you will get if you go to read monkey. The team, led by Elisabetta Palagi, an ethologist at the University of Pisa, has been working in that region of Ethiopia for years to study how the region’s zeldas, the native monkeys, resolve their conflicts. One day, without expecting it, they saw the first mount and of course, it caught their attention.
From that moment, they followed the couple closely: we have a fine record of visions, cares, mountings and fights.
The shepherds in the area laughed curiously at the researchers. As Palagi explained, “What was an unexpected observation for us was obviously a familiar sight for them.”
And why did it attract the attention of researchers? In less than two weeks, Archyl Patroclus mounted 51 times, including 34 penetrations. Patroclus never resisted, and indeed, he often presented his hindquarters to the bull.
However, that was only part of the story. Because the curious thing isn’t the mount, the curious thing is that they had accessory contact (sacks, bites or rubs) on many occasions afterwards. This is not at all common and authors read it as a way to prolong social interaction beyond sex. In fact, it fit perfectly with what they knew: that (despite being surrounded by animals of their respective species) they spent more time together than apart.
No coercion, no confusion, no lack of women. Such detailed observations have made it possible to rule out one by one all the usual explanations for sex in different species of animals. It is not harassment (as occurs among sea lions and king penguins on Marion Island), or lack of females (as occurs with macaques and sika deer in Yakushima). Here, in these relationships, researchers find signs of reciprocity and friendship.
This is, in any case, the first documented case. But, as we said earlier, many were not surprised. In 2024, a team from the University of Toronto asked 65 mammalogists and, according to the university’s notes, 77% had seen sexual behavior between individuals of the same sex in their species, but only 18% had expressed it. When asked why, everyone came up with more or less the same thing: they had the feeling that it was something strange and imaginary.
Maybe not so much.
Picture | Palagi et al.
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