RosaMagika said:
Do animals rape eachother?
In humans, the definition of rape is a wide one, stretching from statutory rape to cases where the rapist(s) physically disable the victim by a previous fight in which the victim, upon defending themselves, gets so seriously injured that they cannot defend themselves anymore, and then the rapist(s) take(s) advantage of them.
I am wondering if this is the case in animals too: Does it happen that a male, in a fight, physically injures the female so much that she cannot defend herself anymore, and then rapes her?
Brilliant question, Rosa. Theoretically, human legal edict is based on the ideal that a given individual does not have the right to strip another individual of his or her natural rights, those being the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (God bless America :m: ). Your question asks not whether or not such suppositions are valid, but whether animals share our instinctual understanding of moral right. My freshman year at university, a wrote a paper which attempted to prove that moral rights and wrongs in human society were a natural product of evolution in any social being. That is, as social creature, humans rely on other humans to survive, just as a pride of lions relies on the other members of the pride to survive. Once an individual within the collective acts against the common good of the group, the group is threatened, and the individual is ostracized, either directly or indirectly as a result of his crime. Either way, his or her life is inevitably forfeit. Bearing that in mind, and definidng rape as, broadly, the engaging in of nonconsensual sexual acts, we can determine that:
Animals are capable of rape. Humans, at the least, do so, and humans are an animal.
Rape is unacceptable. It challenges the social precepts established by evolution which allow social creatures to survive, acting as a group.
In a pride of lions, rape may be defined as an outsider male engaging in intercourse with the females of a pride under another males control. Doing so may not meet the standards of rape within human society, but poses no less a threat to the prides survival than the act of rape as we (humans) understand it. And thus, to the pride, to a lion, this is an unacceptable course, and one which must be resolved by trial (trial by combat for the poor primitive lions
) and punishment for the guilty party.
So, do animals rape? Yes, but as in humans it is not the natural state of affairs and is not part of Mother Natures grand plan, hence our (and there) innate abhorrence of those who commit it. But, depending on the social norms of a given species, and the relation of these norms to sexual behaviors, what is rape for a given animal may not be rape for another.
