The renowned London Zoo
in Regent's Park has released some suitably erotic photos in time for
Valentine’s day. Starring in the images are Raika and Lumpur, the zoo’s
Sumatran tigers, a subspecies so endangered that only a few hundred
still exist in the wild - a situation which, to judge from these
pictures, isn’t the tigers’ fault.
In fact the zoo is trying hard to get the pair to breed
successfully. In new film footage, they certainly seemed in the mood,
going crazy over bits of fabric scattered with Valentine hearts.
“Raika, the female, rubbed her face and body all over the hearts, which
seemed to make her irresistible to Lumpur,” says zoo spokesperson
Rebecca Smith.
No wonder. They were laced with Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, which in the 1980s became famous (or infamous)
for over-the-top erotic advertising. It probably wasn’t the ad
campaigns that inspired Lumpur this morning - more likely, it was an
animal he would regard as lunch.
In their quest to make caged animals’ lives less boring, zoos spritz
perfumes around the enclosures of species whose sensory world is
dominated by smell - and every cat owner knows how odd scents perk up a
puss. (I had an otherwise fastidious Siamese who drooled off-puttingly
on the collars and cuffs of anyone who wore certain top-of-the-range
perfumes.)
The Bronx Zoo in New York discovered a few years ago that big cats adore Obsession for Men. Researchers now even use it in the jungle to bait camera traps,
which take pictures in response to motion, and are getting lots more
shots of inquisitive, otherwise secretive cats like jaguars and
ocelots. It must work pretty well if the wildlife crowd will spend
research budgets on it: a 200 ml bottle of that stuff will set you back
fifty bucks.
It turns out that these romantic human scents pack chemicals of
great interest to species that regularly sniff their friends’ anal
glands. In many species, these glands secrete grease containing
chemicals used for scent marking, and a wide range of animals, from
muskrats to musk ox to musk deer - note the recurring theme - pack a
chemical with a ketone ring structure that smells like what humans
call, well, musk.
Civets, a relative of the mongoose (which also eat, then poop, the world’s most expensive coffee), produce especially powerful stuff containing a musk-related molecule called civetone, with a rank odour comparable to faeces, or very unpleasant cheese.
And our ancient olfactory brain circuits recognise it. Diluted, the
stuff apparently smells great. It is perhaps the world’s oldest perfume
- the Queen of Sheba is said to have given some to King Solomon, just
before they disappeared into the king’s bedroom. It sells for around
$500 a kilo.
Civetone can be made artificially from plant oils. But around a
tonne of the natural stuff is harvested yearly, mainly by Ethiopian
farmers, who hold captive civets in squalid wooden cages, and scrape
out their anal glands with a horn spoon every week or two. It isn’t a
great life for the civets. The World Society for the Protection of
Animals investigated in 1998, and recommended that perfume makers
switch to artificial civetone.
More recent studies
by wildlife conservationists advise instead making the trade more
humane and sustainable, by moving to captive-bred, well-treated civets.
This seems reasonable: impoverished farmers aren’t likely to stop, as
current production doesn’t begin to cover demand.
Which is odd, as 31 leading perfume companies,
including Calvin Klein, told the WSPA in 1998 that they don’t use the
real stuff. Only Chanel, Lancôme and Cartier admitted it. Last year
Calvin Klein described its civet as “synthetic”.
Real or fake, as far as Raika and Lumpur are concerned, the stuff
works fine. It’s not clear what this means for the future of Africa’s
civets, which are not endangered - yet. The zoo says it will let us
know if Calvin Klein’s Valentine’s gift to the world is a litter of
baby Sumatran tigers.
http://www.newscientist.com/
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