Animal Blow Jobs

I don’t know quite how the subject came up but I was sitting in a bar with a colleague yesterday and it occurred to me to wonder why it is that animals don’t engage in oral sex. The bar was (and presumably still is) in Shanghai, so I suppose I could blame it on jet lag – after all, I’d been here less than twenty-four hours.

My basic issue was that animals already engage in some pretty disgusting behavior, so it’s obviously not down to squeamishness on their part. Dogs, for instance, will happily bury their noses in each others’ arses, eat dung and shag your leg, so why do you never see one dog lying on its back while another sucks it off? Of course dogs aren’t human and perhaps they’re just too selfish to bother, or not smart enough to consider the benefits of reciprocity. I suppose the closest animal relatives we have are the apes, so if we were to see any oral sex in the animal kingdom maybe we should expect to see it there. Consider the chimpanzee – it will go to great lengths to entertain you at the zoo with a display of masturbation and faeces throwing, so let’s not put any reluctance down to modesty. Nevertheless I don’t recall ever seeing them in a sixty-nine and, heaven knows, if I had a choice between swinging on the tire again or getting head, then the Pirelli’s not getting a look in.

It actually amazes me that there’s not more masturbation in the zoo (I mean among the animals, not the visitors – trust me, if you get the urge to do that, it’s time for some expensive therapy). I don’t blame the hoofed mammals; lack of opposable thumbs must be a bummer when it comes to self-abuse. But the primates must be bored shitless in there, and the absence of beer, TV, sports, conversation or even work leaves a lot of down time to fill. What else do you do? I mean, how excited can you get about grooming your cousin again?

I did once see a spectacled bear sucking itself off at St.Louis zoo. It sat on a rock in the front part of its enclosure, put its head in its groin and moved it up and down while numerous parents stood, rooted to the spot, hoping their kids didn’t ask. The bear paused and lifted its head, its thin pink dick standing out of its fur in the sunshine, and then resumed sucking. Parents looked sideways at each other, not daring to laugh, not sure whether they were the only ones who’d noticed; then a loud noise from the polar bear enclosure startled the self-fellator and he loped away.

Last night we sat in the bar on the thirty-third floor of the Garden Hotel in Shanghai and drank 15 year-old Glenmorangie (none of my favorites was on the menu). It was cheaper to buy a bottle, and the bar will keep any left-overs for you, for up to four months; as it was we didn’t require this service. When I returned to my room and phoned home, I shared with Mrs. Bison my animal oral sex observation. It took her about two seconds, and then she pointed out that maybe the reason animals don’t have oral sex with each other is because they can do it to themselves. Oh yes – never thought of that. It’s simple really. Maybe the real question is why humans can’t do this. Personally I believe it’s natural selection: any early humans who could manage that trick probably never left the cave, and their genes died out. It’s a powerful thing, evolution and although it’s a shame that humans lost this interesting skill, I’m very glad we didn’t end up with faeces-throwing either.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison