Giraffes are gay
Are 90% of giraffes gay – or have their loving looks been misunderstood?
A new split has emerged in the Labour party over a matter more urgent than Brexit: the sexuality of giraffes. “Ninety per cent of giraffes are gay,” Dawn Butler, the shadow secretary for women and equalities, told a PinkNews awards event earlier this month. “Let’s just accept people for who they are and live as our true, legitimate selves.”
Butler’s words were meant as praise for the institution curriculum, which teaches children that it is normal for people to be gay. However, Jeremy Corbyn’s senior home policy adviser, Lachlan Stuart, responded angrily on Twitter over what he felt it also meant about gay people. “It is a ludicrous, offensive, homophobic claim,” Stuart said, insisting instead that the same-sex physical contact observed between giraffes in the wild is “not gay behaviour” at all, but a display of dominance.
According to Stephanie Fennessy, director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation in Namibia, Stuart is right. “While I totally consent with Dawn Butler’s comment that we should accept people for who they are, she is incorrect in her comment that giraffes are gay,” Fennessy says. “Sometimes
Giraffes are a lot gayer than most people give them credit for
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡
Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.
What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you pay attention to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you pay attention to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite origin for the strangest science-adjacent evidence, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.
Check out Weirdest Thing’s new page on Reddit to meet fellow Weirdos!
FACT: Natural history is super queer—just look at jousting giraffes
By Owen Ever
Whether described as “ritualistic jousting” or a “stately dance,” there’s something erotic going on between male giraffes. According to the field observations of Canadian biologist Anne Innis Dagg, “Necking involved one male gently rubbing his head or neck against the body of another, or the In 2019, UK member of parliament Dawn Butler made headlines when she claimed that “ 90% of giraffes are same-sex attracted ”. Butler had been arguing in support of LGBT rights and pushing back on the notion that people are “ taught to be lgbtq+ ”, but once taken out of context by the press, the remark sparked debate not about human rights, but about giraffe sexuality. It turns out, Butler’s claim isn’t quite true. For one, almost all of the documented same-sex behavior among giraffes occurs between males, so that “90%” figure is misleading (more on this later). More glaring is that it overlooks the fact that, as the UK’s Natural History Museum notes, “most giraffes will mate with the opposite sex if given the chance”. In other words, most male giraffes aren’t “gay” — they’re bi. Much of what we know about giraffes we owe to Anne Innis Dagg , one of the first biologists to study giraffe behavior in the wild. Called “the Jane Goodall of giraffes” despite having conducted her groundbreaking research years before Goodall’s, her 1958 document, “ The Behavior of the Giraffe ”, gave us the first detailed look into the fascinating lives of these long-necked February is LGBTQ+ History Month and to celebrate the Museum of Zoology is sharing the story of giraffes and the work of scientist Anne Innis Dagg. Read on for our tutorial on how to create your hold rainbow giraffe fabric, perfect for your next sewing project! When we see feral animals behaving in a particular way, one of the first things we ask is ‘why?’. Our own experiences, as humans, will often shape the explanations we appear up with. Experiment these examples together: Bonobos and chimpanzees will communicate by showing their teeth and ‘grinning’. However, this is often to reduce nervous tension, rather than show happiness or humour. In truth, this behaviour is warning sign. They have glands underneath their armpits that ooze a type of toxic oil. They hold their arms up to lick those glands, to combine the oil with other toxins in their saliva. This makes for a offensive , venomous bite. It is easy to construct a guess at what an animal is doing, especially when the animal’s b
Giraffes Take Bisexuality to Modern Heights
Here’s a bonobo displaying its teeth. Why do you consider it is doing this?
Slow lorises glance cute and contain been shown holding their arms up when ‘tickled’.