Romance, rhinoceros style

Romance was in the air in Escondido as a dozen couples snuggled underneath heat lamps in the chilly evening air. There was Kaluha and Baileys for the coffee, red roses and chocolates for the ladies and rhino porn for everyone.

Like so many productions in this genre, there really wasn’t much of a story, but no one seemed to mind. The raw footage, edited for time, not for graphic content, simply showed two endangered Indian rhinos determined to do as nature intended. The hallmarks of the all-day rhino mating dance were captured -- the running, the chasing, the urinating and the tremendous agility considering their 2-ton frames.

Finally, when the beasts began doing their part to make the species less endangered, the human audience, whose median age hovered around 45, calmly watched. There was no hooting, not even from the twentysomething couple.

“They can do this for over an hour,” said Jane Kennedy, a senior mammal keeper at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, offering live narration. “What a guy, what a man, huh?”

The video shown Sunday served as the culmination of the park’s popular Night Moves program for which couples, sometimes individuals, pay about $100 per person to learn about the erotic life of animals. The three-hour tours, offered the week before Valentine’s Day and on occasional weekends throughout the summer, typically sell out.

“For a lot of people, it’s perfect for Valentine’s Day. They’ve done the dinner or the exclusive resort; they’ve been there and done that,” said Paul Garcia, a park spokesman. “But this will definitely blow a lot of people’s minds.”

Such an adults-only tour should surprise no one familiar with the park’s 30-year-old mission -- to breed critically endangered species. In this pursuit, it’s been wildly successful: 120 cheetahs, 90 baby rhinos and scores of California condors have come into the world thanks to the park’s matchmaking.

In fact, the program has been so fruitful that the 1,800-acre park has recently had to implant or inject contraceptive devices in some of its 400 species. “We’re running out of room,” said Adriana Maher, a tour guide for Sunday’s Night Moves group. “So some of the animals are just engaging in recreational sex. But we don’t tell them.”

Sometimes, tour groups have been lucky enough to witness beastly behavior, but this tour was not so fortunate.

There was a near miss involving a male Thomson’s gazelle trying to put the moves on a larger female Roosevelt’s gazelle, but this wasn’t his day. As if that weren’t bad enough, someone from the tour shouted: “You’re out of your league!”

The outing wasn’t all just animal sex, animal sex, animal sex. Tour groups got to hand-feed giraffes and rhinos. Besides that, it was pretty much all about animal sex. There were fun facts like: Giraffes copulate only for 30 seconds; only 70% of birds may be monogamous, instead of 92%, as previously believed; and one of the zoo’s cheetahs had developed an odd fetish, becoming aroused when any blond human woman entered his territory.

For many couples, the tour was a thoughtful if unusual Valentine’s Day gift. Mostly, it was the male who bought the tickets in hopes of subtly stoking the flames of female passion. San Diego construction worker Eric Johnson, 31, who surprised his wife with the tour, needn’t have worried, if he ever did.

“The fact he even gave me the present is so romantic,” said his wife, Stacie, 37. “But then again, every day is Valentine’s Day for us.” Other couples, who had attended many of the park’s less risque programs, took note of the new content.

“We’ve been on a Christmas tour here,” said Gerry Lock, 62, of Escondido who brought his wife, Janet, 53. “This was definitely different.”