Sphere Collision Overlap Detection

I have been scratching my head with this problem for the last few hours. I'm randomly generating multiple objects (animals) which all have sphere colliders on various points on a small map. I'm trying to accurately detect when the animals are spawned on top of each other, so that I can retry to place them so they are not touching. The problem is that even when they are nowhere near each other, they all claim to be touching the first animal that is generated. Every time I spawn an animal, I call the checkCollision function and pass along the newly spawned creature.

     //Check if colliders touching
     bool checkCollision(GameObject obj)
     {
         SphereCollider objCollider = obj.GetComponent<SphereCollider>();
         Collider[] touching = Physics.OverlapSphere(objCollider.bounds.center, objCollider.radius);
         //print(touching.Length);
         foreach(Collider touch in touching)
         {
             //avoid detecting itself or the tile it's placed on![alt text][1]
             if(touch.gameObject != obj && !touch.gameObject.CompareTag("Tile"))
             {
                 print(obj.name + " touching " + touch.gameObject.name);
                 return (false);
             }
         }
         return (true);
     }

You can see from the attached picture, that they are nowhere near each other when detecting the collision. In a different script, I used the DrawGizmos function to draw a sphere based on the collider bounds center and radius, just as I'm doing to check for the collision. The Gizmos sphere is what I'd expect it to be.. But I do not understand how they are detecting collision between each other. Even more puzzling, animals that actually are colliding do not print that they've detected the collision. If it matters, the sphere colliders on each of the animals are marked with "isTrigger" false and on the rigidbody "isKinematic" false.

Here is the code that spawns them. The animals are positioned, and then checked for collision.

 GameObject animalClone = Instantiate(animalPrefab, animalHolder.transform);
                     animalClone.name = Random.Range(1, 3000000).ToString();
                     float x_rand = Random.Range(-xDim, xDim);
                     float z_rand = Random.Range(-zDim, zDim);
                     animalClone.transform.position = gameObject.GetComponent<Renderer>().bounds.center + new Vector3(x_rand, 0, z_rand);
                   
                     placedAnimal = checkCollision(animalClone);

[1]: /storage/temp/152505-capture.png