Why do humans get sexually aroused when seeing other members of our species naked/copulating (porn of course)? Do animals do that as well?
In: Biology
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Depends on what you consider porn. Vision is one of the most dominant senses if not the most dominant sense to humans. In other animals this isn’t so. So porn could be a smell or a sound to other species. And these sounds and smells, especially pheromones , are def used in breeding programs across the board. That being said if these techniques are applied outside said animals natural breeding cycle you are wasting your time and confusing the animal. So not as effective all the time as in humans but can be effective at the right time for sure
Humans are also a species where you can’t tell whether or not someone is ovulating by looking at them, which has made our sex drives grow to be a lot more complex.
For animals, the evolutionary strategy to reproduce effectively is “have sex when the female is in heat” or “have sex during mating season”
For humans, the evolutionary strategy to reproduce effectively is “have sex often so that one of the times you have sex it makes a baby.” So somehow people need to be convinced to have sex regularly, or we would barely reproduce.
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Its due to the mirror neuron in our brains. We tend to see ourselves doing the things that we see others doing. This is why people get excited when watching sports despite not playing.
If I’m wrong, then that really explains my grade in psychology right now.
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The trouble is that humans are kind of rare in the broader animal kingdom in that we are theoretically fertile year-round. As such, our sex drives are mostly constant, and something like porn can have a semi-reliable effect on us.
That’s not the case in a lot of the animal kingdom. Most are only fertile for a tiny window of the year. And not just the females — many male animals’ whole reproductive systems completely shut down and regrow from scratch once a year in time with mating season.
During these times, animal porn would conceivably have no effect anyway. So as a random human bystander that doesn’t work in that field, you’re just not going to witness it by random observational chance.
But yes, many zoo breeding programs (pandas being the most famous) do use animal porn during mating season to help things along. Just realize even then, most animals’ actual sexual intercourse is only seconds long at best, so for many there’s just not much to even *show.*
(Edit: I completely forgot that I have a cousin who works in endangered animal husbandry for the zoo when I wrote this answer! I showed this to her and she agreed, but suggested I add that when most animals are in their narrow fertility window, the urge to have sex is so overpowering compared to ours that some will forget to eat, drink, or even seriously injure or kill themselves trying to tap that. So even if critter porn was “helping,” it would be awfully hard to tell.
It’s really only theoretically useful both during the fertility window, *and* if something else has gone wrong preventing them from wanting to on their own, as is usually the case with pandas in captivity. She also reminded me, for probably the 400th time, how much she “hates the goddamn pandas,” and “please don’t write that I said that.” Love you, cuz.)
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