Foto: Brenin, o lobo.
«Why did we walk an evolutionary path neglected by the wolf? (...) sex and violence. This is what made us the men and women we are today. Even a lucky wolf – an alpha male or female – gets to have sex only once or twice a year. Many wolves never have sex – nor do they give any obvious signs of missing or ressenting their enforced abstinence. Ape that I am, I can't quite manage to look at sexual matters objectively: but imagine an ethologist from Mars engaged in a comparative study of the sexual lives of wolves and humans. Might not the ethologist conclude that the wolf's attitude towards sex is, in many ways, a fundamentally wholesome and restrained one: they enjoy it when they have it, but don't miss it when they don't? If we replace the wolf with a human and sex with alcohol, we might say that the human had managed to cultivate a healthy attitude, steering effectively between the vices of excessive indulgence and repressive abstinence. But we can't bring ourselves to think about sex in this way. Of course we should miss it when we don't have it, we are compelled to think: this is natural, this is healthy. We think this way because we are apes. In comparison with the wolf, the ape is addicted to sex.»
[The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness, Mark Rowlands, p. 74/75]
