Johann Hari: The intriguing tale of the gay sheep
Jan 4th, 2025 by Jessica Gold Haralson
From The Independent:
Whatever happens in 2007, we already have the most surreal headline of the year: “Sheep have right to be gay, says Martina Navratilova”. But behind this headline and buried beneath the battery of baa-aad jokes it seems to beckon, there is a strange and serious story that will ripple out through the 21st century in ways we cannot predict.
For the past five years, a team of researchers at Orgeon State University has been investigating the sexuality of sheep. Early on, they proved what every sheep farmer knows: some 8 per cent of rams are gay. When it comes to sex, these woolly homosexuals shun ewes and engage exclusively in ram-on-ram action. They will swiftly pounce on any ram stuck in a fence - the sheep equivalent of the prison showers. The gay lovin’ on Brokeback Mountain, it turns out, wasn’t confined to Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.
And it gets more intriguing. When the team studied the brains of these gay sheep, they invariably discovered they have a substantially smaller hypothalamus than their straight male siblings. This is the first hard scientific evidence of biological differences between gay and straight mammals - and they found these brain differences are already in place in the third trimester of pregnancy. Sheep, at least, are born gay or straight.
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Hari gets the story more right than others — but be careful not to believe that the scientists have actually changed the sexual preference of sheep, or that they can tell in the womb whether a sheep will be gay. Those are parts of the lies that PETA has invented to sell this story — lies that have been getting pushed lately by the Sunday Times.
Fortunately, Hari sees through most of that. But think twice whenever you see “gay sheep” — more often than not, it’s PETA exploiting the gay rights community to push their anti-science agenda.