Hands or Paws or Anything They Got Masturbation in the animal kingdom. In a research paper titled “ The Adaptive Function of Masturbation in a Promiscuous African Ground Squirrel,” biologist Jane M. Waterman analyzes the self-pleasuring behavior of a population of squirrels in east-central Namibia. She concludes that masturbation may help to keep the genitals clean and stave off sexually transmitt