Quite like the poet Ern Malley, the authors would have inadvertently written a pretty nice (if a little over the top) paper on human behaviour around dogs' unwanted sexual and violent behaviour, if only they had used actual observational data. It seems quite common-sense to me that you can learn something about people's attitudes towards gay sex from how they react to their dogs having gay sex. I quote:
"In particular, regarding the interaction of human beings and animals both inside of and apart from physical space, humans project their moral beliefs and assumptions onto animals and yet also consider animals ‘outside’ the moral sphere. [...] In animals, we see this inconsistency when applying human moral values to dogs by calling them ‘loyal’ or ‘disobedient’ or when referring to cats as ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘arrogant’ and yet accepting behaviors like fighting and torturing small animals as value-free and ‘natural.’"
Yes! That's a good point and a good motivation for doing this research. The first research question:
"(1) How do human discourses of rape culture get mapped onto dogs’ sexual encounters at dog parks; particularly, how do companions manage, contribute, and respond to ‘dog rape culture’?"
If you are interested in human behaviour then I can see how this is an actually interesting RQ. I think rather too much of the gloating around this paper comes from people who simply don't think any (qualitative) science w.r.t. human behaviour is legitimate.
Their using fake data preempts anyone from biting this bullet which is why it diminishes the force of the hoax a lot, imho.
