A new split has emerged in the Labour party over a matter more urgent than Brexit: the sexuality of giraffes. “Ninety per cent of giraffes are gay,” Dawn Butler, the shadow secretary for women and equalities, told a PinkNews awards event earlier this month. “Let’s just accept people for who they are and live as our true, authentic selves.”

Butler’s words were meant as praise for the school curriculum, which teaches children that it is normal for people to be gay. However, Jeremy Corbyn’s senior domestic policy adviser, Lachlan Stuart, responded angrily on Twitter over what he felt it also meant about gay people. “It is a ludicrous, offensive, homophobic claim,” Stuart said, insisting instead that the same-sex physical contact observed between giraffes in the wild is “not gay behaviour” at all, but a display of dominance.

According to Stephanie Fennessy, director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation in Namibia, Stuart is right. “While I totally agree with Dawn Butler’s comment that we should accept people for who they are, she is incorrect in her comment that giraffes are gay,” Fennessy says. “Sometimes they fake-hump each other, which is also dominance behaviour. Dogs do that as well. And when you see them necking, it’s fighting. It’s vicious. They can kill each other.”

Dr Natalie Cooper, a researcher in life sciences at the Natural History Museum, sees things slightly differently. According to her understanding of giraffe research, same-sex necking, licking, nuzzling and mounting is not always an aggressive act. Indeed, it may not be aggressive at all, and sometimes includes genital stimulation. It is common among males, but has been seen among females too. “At the moment, I don’t think we have enough research to know why the males do it,” Cooper says. “There are usually females around, so it’s not just because there are no females.”

Even so, it is probably a mistake to call any giraffes “gay”. “Giraffes don’t have a sexual orientation,” Cooper says. “That’s a human thing.” In any case, whatever their same-sex predilections, all giraffes have heterosexual sex as well, or at least they try to. Nor do they form couples of any kind. Adult females live together in herds, and only mate with the transient males who manage to be dominant enough, or surreptitious enough, to visit them at the right time. Afterwards, the male leaves, and takes no role in rearing any offspring. If most giraffes have any “true, authentic selves”, in short, they would be bisexual, aromantic. And, as fathers, they set a very bad example.