Daz and Chip, gay otters

Two male New Zealand otters who spent 15 affectionate years together at the Natureland Zoo died within an hour of each other this week. The treatment of their story is exactly what The New York Times Magazine story “Can Animals Be Gay?” out tomorrow is about. Biologists are realizing that many animal pairings are same-sex but the debate over whether to consider the animals gay has become more political than scientific.

The Times writer Jon Mooallen whimsically describes it this way:  “It may seem surprising that scientists sometimes don’t know the true sexes of the animals they spend their careers studying — that they can be tripped up in some ‘Tootsie’ -like farce for so long.”

With Asian otters Daz and Chip, everyone knew they were male and bonded. The circumstances of their death just solidified their coupledom. When an animal pair dies so closely–like my dog Jolly did after he lost his girlfriend Shadow–how can you not acknowledge their complex emotional life? “The bottom line is that when one of them had a heart attack, it just set the other one off and he followed through,” a zoo spokesman told the New Zealand Herald.

The Times story mainly follows albatrosses, who have a lot of two-mommy households, but the phenomena spans the animal kingdom. A two-mommy, one-daddy family of another albatross species in New Zealand’s Taiaroa Head got lots of attention because of the gay-friendly tourist board, Mooallen says.

So back to

Keep reading Can We Call Animals Gay? How About This Otter Couple?