In an encounter which has been described as romantic, two male lions appear to have straight-up fucked right out in the open for about a full minute.
The event, captured by wildlife photographer Pete Goldstein, took place in the Masaai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, where sodomy is a felony. Ezekiel Mutua, the chief executive of the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB)–the moral regulator of broadcast content–is outraged, since naturally they couldn’t possibly have seen this sort of stuff on television. He told the Nairobi News:
These animals need counseling, because probably they have been influenced by gays who have gone to the national parks and behaved badly. I don’t know, they must have copied it somewhere or it is demonic. Because these animals do not watch movies.
How or why a human couple would get out of their vehicle to have sex en plein air in full view of two lions, as Mutua proposes, is a mystery. But, he added, it’s not up to the KFCB to “regulate animals.”
The topic of gay lions came up for debate last year when another lion couple was spotted doing it in Botswana; some researchers believed that people were inaccurately equating their behavior to human romance. As University of Minnesota professor Craig Packer explained then to the Washington Post, outcast “coalitions” of two to four male lions don’t get to have sex with females until their take over a pride. So sometimes they just have sex with each other:
“If there was a receptive female that would wander up about that point, they would stop that,” said Packer, who compared the lions’ mounting to a dog humping a human’s leg.
But are human males not like dogs humping legs, sometimes? Is love not also attainable for lions?
We’ll let the photos speak for themselves. The photographer Goldstein described the event to the Daily Mail:
Sometimes you just see something that takes your breath away. I was guiding in the Masai Mara recently and we saw two impressive alpha males in perfect light.
‘After a while they stood together, in perfect symmetry. What then happened was remarkable.
‘I have heard of this happening in Botswana but with nothing like this vigour, and indeed at various zoos and safari parks, but incarcerated animals will do strange things, who can blame them.
Whether friends with benefits or lovers or just horny lions, congratulations to the happy couple on finding companionship in a cruel world.