A Spanish scientist says he has discovered a female chimpanzee who is addicted to watching porn.

Gina, a resident of Seville Zoo, chose to solely watch adult entertainment channels when a Freeview television and remote control was placed in her enclosure.

Primatologist Pablo Herreros, writing in Spanish newspaper El Mundo at the weekend, told how he made the discovery some years ago on a tour of the nation’s chimpanzee enclosures.

During his research trip, dubbed the ‘chimpatour’, he conducted surveys on the behavior of the animals.

‘What I could never imagine were the surprises prepared for me by a female of this species called Gina who lived in Seville Zoo,’ he said.

Her enclosure, he said, consisted of an outdoor area where she could play and a heated interior zone where she could protect herself from the winter cold and extreme summer heat.

Due to the intense interior lives that these animals have, you have to enrich their environment to stimulate them physically and psychologically,’ he wrote.

‘These usually consist of artificial mounds, toys and other inventions that require them to be active and sharpen their wits. It is the equivalent of occupational therapy for humans.’

Chimpanzees and their close evolutionary relatives bonobos are the closest cousins to humans in the animal kingdom.

Bonobos in particular are known for their aggressive sexual behavior, but no-one could predict how Gina the chimp would respond to a television with access to adult channels.

In the early trials, her keepers visited Gina to check that everything was in order and she did not break the new toy.

‘The surprise came when they found that within a few days, Gina was not only using the remote control perfectly well, but that she also chose the porn channel for entertainment, as many of us would have done.’

Professor Herreros said that easy access to those kind on images on television was ‘a very recent phenomenon in human sexual history’.

He added: ‘Although a small study estimated that porn films are only watched for about 12 minutes on average, the truth is that human and non-human primates possess an intense sexual life.

‘This is probably the result of an infinite capacity to dream and recreate the situation in the mind, as evidenced by the games, innovations and manipulations that we are capable of in other areas of our lives.’

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