A new British documentary, set to screen on Channel 4 later this week, claims that 1 in 12 sheep are gay.
In the documentary, titled My Gay Dog and Other Animals, US professor Charles Roselli says that around 8 per cent of sheep are homosexual.
Roselli hopes that his research will “allow better selection of rams for breeding and as a consequence may be economically important to the sheep industry,” reports The Guardian,
However, not everyone is buying it.
According to The Independent, Phil Stocker, chief executive of the National Sheep Association, branded the claims as “nonsense”.
“You don’t get rams that are gay," he said. "You find rams with high sex drive that will ride anything but they won’t have full sex with other rams. It’s a nonsense."
Stocker added: “In my experience you get females riding each other and you’ll get males riding each other but they’ll never perform a full sexual act and it’s never in preference to a female. It’s born out of high testosterone levels. They can smell ewes that are fertile and they’ll ride anything available to them."
Still, other shave backed the findings of Roselli's research.
“You see ram-on-ram behaviour going on," Dewi Jones, a commercial breeder, told The Independent. "Commercially it’s a big issue for us as a ram breeder because we need our rams to cover lots of ewes."
