A Small Furry Prayer (11 page)

22

As we were accumulating dogs over the summer, Joy had mentioned that it could take five or six months for most of them to come out of their shell. “In November,” she would say, “that's when we'll really get to know them.” Well, it was November, and two things were clear: we had certainly accumulated a lot of dogs over the summer and all of those dogs had needed those months to come out of their shells. Those months had now passed and those personalities had now emerged. The easiest way to explain the difference was claustrophobia.

That autumn, our house just felt small. It felt like we'd lost a bedroom or added more dogs. I asked Joy. We hadn't lost a bedroom and, she seemed pretty sure, we hadn't added more dogs either. It was that the dogs we'd already added were suddenly starting to express themselves, and those expressions were taking up a lot of space. And after we got cut off from the outside world, this was my first lesson in island living: it's damn crowded.

The second lesson concerned the nature of that crowd. It wasn't just that we saw an expansion of personality, it was the particular personality we saw expand. He was a miniature Doberman who'd showed up in July. Joy called him Buddy, but by the time the shell shock wore off and his real self started to emerge I had taken to calling him Smashmouth Thunderfuck. Smashmouth had ended up at the Española shelter because he was a rambunctious adolescent who couldn't stop scent-marking. Dogs scent-mark out of instinct and trainers find erasing instinct among the hardest things to do. It only takes the right smell on a vertical surface to trigger leg lifting in some dogs. With Smash, even those things were optional. This guy pissed everywhere, but this was not why I called him that. He earned his moniker because he was missing half his face. Something had taken a bite out of him, and what grew back was not quite right. His jaw was offset, his mouth crooked. He had a tooth growing out of one nostril, and he only had one nostril. He also had the largest penis I've ever seen on a dog. The first time we saw it we thought tumescence emergency, the kind that requires surgery to repair. Then, as he came into his own, we saw it nonstop. Smash earned the second half of his name humping all of our male dogs.

He was a caricature of a Latin lover. His passion ran hot and fast. Smash burned through the men in our pack, then went back to the beginning and started over. And it was only the men. For a few days he'd be enamored with Hugo, then switch to Damien, then over to Leo. Whoever his
hombre de
desire, he would stare at him longingly, follow him around endlessly, groom him ceaselessly. He looked exactly like a lovelorn teenager with a crush. And like most lovelorn teenagers, he was also horny as hell.

Smash humped his paramour every chance he got. According to most researchers, male-on-male humping is always about dominance. Examples of this attitude are everywhere. Author and behavior modification expert Rena Murray, in her
Paw Persuasion Pointers
newsletter, says: “Dog humping, dog mounting, blocking and claiming are all serious and growing dog dominance issues, and most will lead to aggression if not handled.” But Smash had no interest in aggression—he was a lothario, after all—just as he had no interest in dominance. In fact, a lot of the time, he didn't even mount his boyfriend. Just standing in the vicinity and thrusting into the air was enough to keep him smiling. And he would keep smiling until he had an orgasm. Being fixed, this could take a while. Two days of thrusting, three days of thrusting, that was what it took.

And Smash wasn't the only one who batted switch. We had gay dogs. A lot of gay dogs. Smash was in love with Misha, who was in love with Salty, and when I said there was less space in the house, I both mean psychologically and having to step around their bizarre hump triangle on my way to the bathroom. When Hugo wants to make a male friend, he licks anuses and testicles. He doesn't groom the whole body; he zeroes in on the erogenous zones. Squirt—how to put this—is a bull dyke. Same goes for Dagmar. Helgar only likes gay men, which makes her our resident fag hag. Damien, meanwhile, is a drag queen, a hunchbacked Chihuahua given to high-pitched operatic rampages and being extremely picky about his clothes. When Damien finds a winter sweater to his liking, he parades around the house and we are treated to the canine equivalent of a drag show. If our rescue was a television series, over the summer it was the canine equivalent of
Little House of the Prairie
, but by the time we were cut off from the outside world, we were clearly
The Real World: San Francisco
.

The arrival of the sexual revolution made me curious. Why did so much personality express itself as sexuality? Why was so much of that sexuality homosexuality? I figured the best place to start was with how psychologists assess personality. In a speech given to the American Psychological Association in 1933, Louis Leon Thurstone made first mention of the most comprehensive inquiry into human psychology yet undertaken. What researchers had done was identify, analyze, and categorize every word in the English language that could be used to describe disposition. When finished, they discovered that all our linguistic variety could be reduced to five personality traits, now known as “the Big Five,” which—even though they were originally meant as theoretical categories—have since become so well validated that no one has yet to find a better model.

Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability are those five, but it's helpful to see them for what they really are: strategies for survival. In his
The Five-Factor Model of Personality
, psychologist Jerry Wiggins explains that all cars have four wheels, a set of brakes and a steering device and that these components could loosely be described as “car nature.” In the same way, all humans have two legs, an opposable thumb, and a relatively—compared to other primates—hairless body, and these could be similarly considered “human nature.”

When an engineer designs a car, both the “car nature” and differences in components must be considered in great detail. When choosing a car to purchase, however, the basic components of “car nature” become irrelevant because all cars possess them. Rather, the
differences
among cars become critical for selection—whether the car is large or small, powerful or weak, economical on gas or a guzzler … In the same manner, when we face social adaptive problems such as selecting a mate, it would be preposterous to use “having an opposable thumb” or “two-leggedness” as key selection criteria since, with rare exception, all potential mates have these attributes. Despite the fact that having an opposable thumb is a remarkably important part of human nature, a woman seeking a mate does not think: “Wow, I really find him attractive—he has an opposable thumb!” Constants do not count in decisions of selection. Just as in selecting a car, the differences among individuals loom large.

The differences he's referring to are all various combinations of the Big Five. The reason these differences show up as sexuality is because mate selection requires judging another's demeanor as a way of judging a potential partner's ability to provide for basic needs. Since reproduction is among those needs, sexual identity becomes a subcategory of personality. Take Smash. His Big Five breakdown looks something like this: he's open and agreeable (open and agreeable to lots of lovers) and extroverted (capable of charming those lovers), but not conscientious (he burns through his lovers) or emotionally stable (again, he burns through his lovers). Yet this balance works perfectly for Smash, because what he's really after is a strategy for survival known as
short-term mating.

From a Darwinian perspective, the way to win the game of survival is to pass along one's genes. There are a number of routes available, with monogamy and polygamy being the most familiar. Scientists, wanting to understand the psychology behind both strategies, have done significant research into the personality traits associated with each. Across the boards, humans who score high on openness and extroversion and low on conscientiousness and emotional stability tend to have more lovers than others. Track a small child who scored this way into adulthood and you'll find a grown-up with lots of affairs and few long-term relationships. Moreover, the human data matches the animal data—as Smash bears out—because polygamy remains a viable option no matter the species. And, as Joy and I discovered, both strategies remain viable no matter one's sexual orientation.

And that orientation is not the anomaly some suggest. When the religious right calls homosexuality an “abomination against nature,” they couldn't be more wrong. Homosexuality is everywhere in nature. Dogs, mallards, gulls, dolphins, bison, elephants, lions, sheep, lizards, dragonflies, and around four hundred other species display the preference. A couple of years ago a pair of male penguins living at the San Francisco Zoo fell so in love that they fostered an egg together. Giraffes have all-male orgies. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are committed lesbians. Bonobos, our closest living relatives, go every which way they can whenever they can. But if Darwin is correct and evolution is competitive by design and the way to win the game is to pass along one's genes, then why is anything gay?

For a while the answer was genetic mutation. Then Stanford University evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden decided to march in the 1997 San Francisco Gay Pride Parade and was stunned by the number of gay people. “Even the most conservative estimates puts the number of gays at one out of twenty,” she said, “but to see how that looked in the real world was another thing. It made me realize that Huntington's disease, the most common illness caused by genetic mutation, shows up in one out of every hundred thousand people. But there are just too many gay people in the world for that idea to be right. With this much frequency, there's no way the preference could be caused by an aberrant gene. Gayness has got to serve a purpose.”

Roughgarden started with the idea that homosexuality has to be an adaptive trait because it's been adapted everywhere in nature. Rather than being edited out, gayness has been carefully preserved by natural selection for millions of years. Stranger still, the more “advanced” a species seems to be, the more prevalent its preference for same-sex coupling. Homosexuality, Roughgarden now thinks, is actually
the
telltale sign of advanced animal communities, writing in her book
Evolution's Rainbow
: “The more complex and sophisticated a social system is, the more likely it is to have homosexuality intermixed with heterosexuality.”

This idea conflicts with one of the fundamental tenets of Darwinism. According to the theory of evolution, the relationship between males and females is governed by sexual selection—which is defined as anything that helps us reproduce better. Men compete for access to females, females compete by choosing the best males. The poster child for sexual selection has always been the peacock. Why would a bird develop an ornament as detrimental to survival as a tail the size of Detroit? The answer, Darwin suspected, was female choice. Somewhere along the line, peahens decided big tails were sexy. So males with big tails got to have the most sex, and their offspring got bigger tails. Give it enough time and you end up where peacocks are today: stuck with useless bridal trains sticking out of their butts. Once we discovered genes, scientists went one better. They realized that the bridal train was an expensive costume requiring top-flight DNA to produce. It was those genes the peahens were after—it was why they developed this predilection in the first place.

Lately, a few problems have arisen, not the least of which was what University of Tokyo researcher Mariko Takahashi discovered after spending seven years observing a feral population of Indian peafowl. “We found no evidence that peahens expressed any preference for peacocks with more elaborate trains,” she wrote in a 2008 article for
Animal Behavior
, before mentioning other related studies—some corroborating her results, others finding not enough variation between the size of male trains to make female choice even possible, while even more discovering no evidence that a large tail has anything to do with the quality of the male's genes—and concluded that it was time to face facts: sexual selection might not be the driver of natural selection we have long suspected.

Roughgarden believes that Darwin made a critical error in developing his criteria for success. Because paternity testing was not around in his time, sexual selection has been judged on
quality of mating
rather than
quantity of children
. “Obviously,” she writes in
The Genial Gene
,

offspring are impossible unless some mating takes place, but the quality of mating
per se
is only distantly related to the quantity of offspring reared. Nonetheless, sexual-selection theory always refers to reproductive social behavior as comprising a “mating system.” Within a mating system, evolutionary change then arises from differences in “mating success,” and particular behaviors are understood by how they contribute to controlling and maximizing the frequency of mating. Male/female social dynamics are then seen to revolve around females as a “limiting resource” for males. Hence males must compete with each other for access to mating opportunities with females, or for control of the females themselves, and females choose males to maximize the genetic quality of their offspring. Sexual selection errs by elevating a component of reproduction, namely mating, into an end in itself.

So Roughgarden threw out sexual selection and replaced it with
social selection
, which views all “reproductive social behavior”—that's flirting to fondling to fucking—as part of an “offspring-producing system.” In this system, the basis for evolution is cooperative teamwork, not individual competition, as the entire community tries to produce the most offspring. “The advantage of Roughgarden's new theory,” says Jonah Lehrer in
Seed
magazine, “is that it can explain a wider spectrum of sexual behaviors than Darwinian sexual selection. Lesbian oystercatchers and gay mountain sheep? Their homosexuality is just a prelude to social cooperation, a pleasurable way of avoiding wanton conflict.”