Teenagers are rutting no more now than they ever have.
Or was Duncan driven temporarily into shock by the sight of the two of them rutting on the sofa of a communal living room, without even bothering to close the door?
Rich mythologies may have existed concerning these avatars, but only 10 forms have been recorded: the Wind (the god Vāyu), bull, stallion, rutting camel, wild boar, 15-year-old male (15 was considered to be the ideal age), falcon, ram, goat, and hero.
Rutting males defend territories of 25 70 hectares (62 173 acres) with loud grunts, attacking vegetation with their horns and depositing middens of urine and dung in a ritualized display.
This mainly involves rutting in a cloud of pink love-hearts, which provides welcome relief from the rather gloomy hiding and scrapping as you try to keep your strength up.
Motivated by such prestige, and feeling hopelessly romantic, my girlfriend C and I go for a walk in the magnificent Richmond Park, where, despite it being rutting season, the gathered deer evince all the eroticism of the Exmoor Emperor (assuming he's met his sorry end).
They paw rutting pits with their forelegs, urinate into them, and splash the urine-soaked muck onto their hairy bells.
Rutting bucks form small breeding territories on female ranges and may unite these territories into conspicuous territory clusters called leks.
Evidence of puncture wounds in some specimens suggests rutting encounters, but the fact that both sexes apparently had horns seems to indicate defense or species recognition as their primary uses.
Presumably ceratopsians used their horns in an aggressive manner, but whether they used them as defense against possible predators, in rutting combat with other male ceratopsians, or in both is not so clear.
Fitzgerald himself knew that the real weakness of his best novel was that we could not imagine Gatsby and Daisy reunited — that, in plain English, he could not evoke them rutting because he could not credibly imagine it.
