Only humans commit murder; only men commit rape. Until recently, pretty much any biologist would have agreed. Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz argued convincingly in the 1960s that behavioral feedback mechanisms like submissive postures prevent animals from deliberately killing members of their own species. Similarly, sexual perversions are seen as a peculiarly human condition. Sadomasochism is hard to imagine in birds or other beasts. Rape and gang rape are things we see in our newspapers not in the animal kingdom.
Yet over the last four decades, close inspection of creatures from ground squirrels to great apes, from white sharks to black eagles, from timid mice to the king of the beasts, shows that they all commit murder. It turns out that there are times when, biologically, it pays them to kill their own kind. Murder really can be an adaptive strategy. Murder really can be programmed into an animal’s DNA. Who would have thought?
So if animals can be programmed to commit murder, does it take too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that they could also be programmed to coerce other animals into having sex: to rape? Rape is such a heinous crime that nowhere in our society do we allow for the possibility that it may represent a personality trait rather than a personality defect, a biologically determined characteristic like the color of our eyes. We might not forgive rape, but perhaps evolution could? Perhaps conditions could exist whereby behaviors that give an animal an advantage in producing offspring, as part of natural selection’s own competition, might lead to rape?
One thing we know for sure is that for the Victorian-bred Levick, such thoughts would never have crossed his mind until he went to Antarctica and was more or less forced to observe its penguins.