Powerful bonds can form where and when you least expect them. For instance, in the Ethiopian highlands between a black and white spotted bull and a tawny male donkey. Recently, field scientists documented a kind of love affair between the two herd animals, who grazed together on a rocky plateau outside the village of Debre Libanos in a region known as Oromia, the breadbasket of the Horn of Africa.
Over a period of weeks, the hoofed pair copulated dozens of times, nipped, licked, and nuzzled each other, and generally hung close during grazing time in open pasture and under the succulent shade of Sycamore trees. Read more: “Why Are So Many Animals Homosexual?” When the team of scientists brought the story back home to Italy, their students decided to name the bull and the ass after characters in Homer’s epic poetry: The four-year-old bull, a species of humped cattle with drooping ears, was named Achilles, after a Greek warrior from The Iliad. His buddy, a nine-year-old domestic donkey, was named Patroclo, after Achilles’ dearest companion and fellow soldier in the war against Troy.
While Homer doesn’t explicitly describe the pair as lovers in The Iliad, same-sex relationships were integral to the ancient Greek world and later authors interpreted their intimate relationship as a romantic or sexual one. Likewise, the story of our donkey and our bull. The donkey-bull bond came to the scientists’ attention accidentally, while they were studying a primate known as the bleeding-heart monkey, which has distinctive hairless red patches on its chest and is native to the Ethiopian highlands.
After the scientists observed the first tryst between the Achilles and Patroclo, they set out to document the interspecies romance in a methodical way. Over a period of less than two weeks in March of 2026, the scientists made eight separate observations, and recorded the details of 51 mountings, the majority of which involved copulation, as well as other friendly behavior between the two animals. They published their results today in Current Biology.
When local herders noticed the keen interest the scientists were taking in the bull-donkey affair, they offered a bit of back story. Achilles and Patrocolo never spent the night together, as Achille was housed with another adult bull, a cow, and a calf, while Patroclo was housed with two other male donkeys. The two animals belong to different herds, and only interacted during daily shared pasture time, which, depending on the particular day, might include 3-6 bulls, 3-7 cows, 3 male donkeys, and 2-7 female donkeys.
Standard explanations for same-sex cross-species relationships between animals—which have been observed but are rare—tend to be somewhat uncharitable. Scientists have proposed that they may be the result of sexual coercion, mistaken identity or limited access to opposite sex or same species partners. But none of these explanations hold for Achilles and Patroclo, Palagi told me.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
