Its easy to cherrypick examples, but at least in the mammal world being in heat for a limited time makes a lot of evolutionary sense. Humans are notorious for being horny all the time and really are an exception. Animals, in general, aren&#x27;t at all like us. The GP is correct, sex in the animal world is typically conservative.<p>There&#x27;s this historic recontexualizing of animals as being &quot;just like us.&quot; I think that&#x27;s just wrong and it leads to bad outcomes. Its only recently that we&#x27;ve been able to acknowledge the intelligence of octopus or crows because we were so focused on animals &#x27;like us&#x27; which were primarily mammals. Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable to say an octopus is smarter than a dog in polite company. You would have sounded like a crazy person.<p>I suspect these views aren&#x27;t academic but actually political. The &quot;animals are just like us&quot; seems to be 60&#x27;s counterculture vegitariansism and the &quot;animals fuck all the time and are gay&quot; seems to stem from the gay rights movement to validate their position as &quot;natural,&quot; whatever that means. In fact, I read a book about this in the 90s and the thesis was just that. It was a fairly popular book.<p>Your penis design doesn&#x27;t really help your argument. A hard to remove penis means a higher chance of pregnancy. Humans don&#x27;t have this probably because we have sex so often, but for animals with a short heat period its very important to fertilize those eggs on the first try. Also, animals are not as lingual or culturally complex like humans so the barb is how the male controls the female. In human society we do this too via cultural baggage, male domination, marriage norms, dating norms, one-sided social pressure, and sometimes the outright threat of violence or rape. So the idea that penis barbs are these awful things is questionable compared to the alternatives.<p>Lastly, one of the big issues with repairing the damage of human encroachment into wildlife areas is that we can&#x27;t just get animal populations back up easily. They&#x27;re not used to smaller mating populations, less territory, less younger and more viable mates, etc and their sexual habits reflect that. Pandas are an extreme example, but this issue happens with most animals. They can&#x27;t just magically become as promiscuous as humans. It would be nice if they could, but its just not in the cards and that&#x27;s going to lead to issues like extinction down the line for many of today&#x27;s endangered species and already has happened for so many more.