Sexual imprinting is the process by which a young animal learns the characteristics of a desirable mate. For example, male zebra finches appear to prefer mates with the appearance of the female bird that rears them, rather than that of the birth parent when they are different.
Sexual attraction to humans can develop in non-human animals or birds as a result of sexual imprinting when reared from young by humans. One example is London Zoo female giant panda Chi Chi; when taken to Moscow Zoo for mating with the male giant panda An An, she refused his attempts to mate with her, but made a full sexual self-presentation to a Russian zookeeper.
It commonly occurs in falconry birds reared from hatching by humans; such birds are called "imprints" in falconry. When an imprint must be bred from, the breeder lets the male bird copulate with his head while he is wearing a special hat with pockets on to catch the male bird's semen. Then he courts a suitable imprint female bird (including offering food, if it is part of that species's normal courtship); at "copulation" he puts the flat of one hand on her back, and with the other hand uses a pipette, or a hypodermic syringe without a needle, to squirt the semen into her cloaca.
Sexual imprinting on inanimate objects is a popular theory concerning the development of sexual fetishism. For example, according to this theory, imprinting on shoes or boots (as with Konrad Lorenz's geese) would be the cause of shoe fetishism.
Read more about this topic: Imprinting (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the word imprinting:
“Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for
future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met
there who detain’d me for love of me,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)