THE QUESTION OF whether animals can be gay has long fascinated scientists and laypeople alike. This has partly arisen from a desire to find parallels for human sexual behaviours and orientations in the natural world to prove its ‘naturalness’ – or the opposite. In the past, the existence of non-exclusively ‘heterosexual’ behaviours in other animals has been used to justify its existence in humans. Through a modern lens, however, such justification is clearly unnecessary. A behaviour doesn’t have to exist in other animals for it to be okay in humans.
Headlines such as ‘10 animal species that show how being gay is natural’ may be well meaning but ultimately they do a disservice. This type of thinking is called the naturalistic fallacy, which is a trap people can fall into by assuming that if something is found in nature, it must be good or right. The truth is that nature should not be used as a moral guide – particularly given the amount of natural behaviours, including sexual ones, that would be considered abhorrent, even if displayed by humans.
