A Nude Horse is a Rude Horse

April 4, 2017 11:18 AM

After seeing a small crowd's mortified reaction to two cattle behaving amorously on a Texas road in 1959, Alan Abel (previously) created SINA, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. An article he wrote about the organization for the Saturday Evening Post was rejected, as the editor thought the group deplorable. Undeterred, he carried on his crusade against amoral animals.

A contemporary news story from the Harvard Crimson. Make sure you stick around to meet G. Clifford Prout jr., the president of the organization (who would later write "The Graduate", among other accomplishments).

posted by GhostintheMachine (23 comments total)

Zootopia's sloth DMV gets all the attention, but I really think the animal naturalist club is the funniest part of the movie.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:28 AM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

I was at the Zoo in DC a few years ago when two Galapagos tortoises started going at it, the male's grunting audible from several yards away. They immediately drew an enthusiastic crowd, including some dude bros who were cheering them on.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:30 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

This guy is funny, right? Like Coyle and Sharpe from the same era.

(reads further) OOoooooh this guy. The Idi Amin Wedding Hoax guy. Funny that there aren't a lot of internet articles published by the people he pranks.

> "One of Abel's earliest pranks took place in the late 1950s. Abel posed as a golf pro who taught Westinghouse executives how to use ballet positions to improve their game."

I would be surprised if this is not actually a thing now.
posted by lkc at 11:34 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was at the Zoo in DC a few years ago when two Galapagos tortoises started going at it

Hey, me too*, though in San Diego. (caution: Hot turtle action)

*Actually I'm not sure what kind of tortoises they are but they sure are randy as fuck
posted by bondcliff at 11:35 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think it just absolutely captured the imagination of people that there's some crazy guy out there and his team who wants to put clothes on naked animals. They never stopped and thought, well, it could be a joke. No, because nobody would do something like that as a joke - I would and I did.

Wow, how times have changed. I think most people now careen wildly between thinking everything is a hoax to wondering if Poe's law might not be in play.
posted by cj_ at 11:38 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Huh, I saw some tortoises ... making the beast with two shells? ... at the petting zoo a couple of years ago. Maybe somebody can arrange a tortoise-and-hare style fuckathon to see which species is truly randier.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:39 AM on April 4, 2017

More like the heavy petting zoo, amiright?
posted by bondcliff at 11:40 AM on April 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

Hoping to avoid any appearance of impropriety, Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed.
posted by cenoxo at 11:41 AM on April 4, 2017

I think that's called "clappin' castanets", uncleozzy.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 11:42 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: tortoise-and-hare style fuckathon
posted by sammyo at 11:46 AM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

Jimmy Kimmel stole Alan Abel's joke in his appearance on Shark Tank pitching Horse Pants.
posted by larrybob at 11:49 AM on April 4, 2017

To show how far society has fallen, you can see plenty of youtube videos of "horses mating". I wonder what the monetization rate of that is.
posted by lkc at 11:49 AM on April 4, 2017

Sam the Eagle on nudity.
posted by Melismata at 11:56 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

"The Today Show" said we want to have your president of the organization appear. So I got my friend Buck Henry, who had a great sense of humor, and he wrote "The Graduate" subsequently and "Get Smart" and, you know, "Saturday Night Live" - he was on that show for a long time with John Belushi. But Buck, who at that time was unemployed, he agreed. He said, OK, I'll go out and pose as G. Clifford Prout, the president of this nonexistent organization. And then Walter Cronkite, he interviewed Buck Henry.

Buck Henry posing as the president of an organization dedicated to the eradication of lewd animal behavior—if there's ever been a better example of pitch-perfect casting, I've certainly never seen it.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:04 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

My uncle was a volunteer docent for his local zoo and can reliably report that you can't keep the attention of groups of middle school students with a randy rhinoceros in the background.
posted by meinvt at 12:17 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is my favorite thing. I love animal genitals! In fact, I once got a comment on a student evaluation that said "This is a great class, other than Erin's weird obsession with monkey genitals." I spend a lot of time staring at monkey nipples to identify which monkey is which, and I love embarrassing students when we go to the zoo by asking them to compare gibbons' testicles (they are very small) and bonobos' testicles (they are very large) and explain why (because sperm competition: gibbons typically live in groups with one male and one female, so the males typically don't have to worry about someone else impregnating the female before he gets a chance, whereas bonobos are, well, you know about bonobo sex). I would consider giving up my love for primate genitalia if I was given little bras for my monkeys.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:44 PM on April 4, 2017 [12 favorites]

When I was in college a bunch of friends and I used to all sit around these long tables at lunch and have the kind of weird rambling esoteric conversations that smart dorky young people enjoy, frequently with a high degree of trying to out-witty each other and otherwise be generally clever. One of the things I particularly enjoyed (although I wasn't the only one) was to note, when someone said something particularly unlikely but totally reasonable in the very specific context in which they said it, that it was possible they were the first person in human history to utter that particular set of phonemes in that particular order.

I would consider giving up my love for primate genitalia if I was given little bras for my monkeys.

ChuraChura, you may be the first person in human history to type that particular set of letters in that particular order.
posted by nickmark at 3:09 PM on April 4, 2017 [9 favorites]

Hmmm... No sir, I don't like it.
posted by farlukar at 3:20 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: I spend a lot of time staring at monkey nipples
posted by delfin at 5:20 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

...highway accidents due to the fact people take their eyes off the highway to look at a naked cow and bull, and they run into a truck or a tree.

'Round here, we call it thinning the herd. Stupid is as stupid was.
posted by BlueHorse at 6:05 PM on April 4, 2017

“I figured all these guys were gonna call and brag about their prowess, and their length, and width, and all that,” he says. “I decided to call in and say I was the smallest in the world — one inch, erect. They ate it up.”

So to speak.

As Abel progressed into his 70s, his pranks grew more political and ambitious. And in Trumpian fashion, the more outrageous his stunts got, the more people people came out of the woodwork to support his opinions.

What is it with human beings...?
posted by bryon at 12:16 AM on April 5, 2017

What is it with turtles? I have seen animals doin the nasty at the zoo exactly twice and both were some form of turtle/tortise.

The first time was really funny because it was at a zoo that allowed the turtles to roam around the outside of some monkey cages (Anyone ever been to the Austin Zoo?). My husband and I were beginning to make our way over to them and saw a couple families trying to shuffle their children along rather quickly. Once they did we were able to see what was going on and enjoyed quite a laugh.
posted by LizBoBiz at 8:04 AM on April 5, 2017

My Father went to college with co-conspirator Buck Henry (he later wrote Get Smart with Mel Brooks), and therefore knew it was a prank and had a big laugh when they later tried to go after the San Francisco Zoo.
posted by eye of newt at 10:54 PM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]