Reply #188: Thank you very much- I saw that - I would like to try to clarify a bit more on my clumsy post: [View All]

[Tumbulu]

Aggressive sexual type behavior is not at all normal in the farm animals that I care for either. In fact it is quite unusual.

Normal mating behavior for sheep begins with the female becoming fertile which seems to result in her looking for the rams that I try to keep in a separate flock as I have enough sheep already. So the ewes go to the fence that separates them and they call for the rams. The rams generally come over and they spend days and days "talking" to each other in low baa's. They stop eating sometimes and just "talk". Normally when a ram is let in with the ewes he just stands there and receptive ewe's hang around and they all spend a lot of time nose to nose. Days go by like this. The breeding is so secretive many shepherds buy these chalk bibs to put on the rams so that the ewe is marked by something. It is not some rough wild rodeo thing. It is quite unusual among sheep for a male to display aggressive behavior toward ewes and these males are removed from the flock as quickly as possible. These males occur, but not so very often. They create havoc. Normal male behavior among sheep strikes me as very sweet actually. And not so different from other animals.

Border Collies used to only mate within a bonded pair. That meant that one could have a great female that you wanted to breed, but if she had not lived with the male for quite sometime AND liked him very much, no way would she breed. And male border collies certainly never bred unless invited to do so. Now people get around this with artificial insemination.


Temple Grandin wrote in her book "Animals Make Us Human" about how the folks breeding the battery hens accidentally selected for "rapist roosters". Again, not the norm as roosters have a choreographed dance behavior displayed prior to mating that the hen can recognize and respond to. But there is always variation in behaviors and somehow the folks breeding the poor battery hens who can produce an egg a day also picked and amplified this nasty set of traits responsible for making life even more miserable for the poor hens.

I did not know that people did not know that it is unusual for a male animal to be aggressive in this way, but they occur and generally farmers remove them straight away.

I also agree with your very well stated points about the media and societies's capacity to encourage or discourage these behavioral traits. With humans a great deal of our behavior is shaped by culture. That our culture seems to be encouraging male aggressive behavior and calling it somehow "natural" in unconscionable.

I am very sad that my short post may have contributed to this idea.