I like reading this story and hoping that somewhere, perhaps in a better world than ours, Rick Warren’s head has exploded.
A pair of gay penguins thrown out of their zoo colony for repeat- edly stealing eggs have been given some of their own to look after following a protest by animal rights groups.
Last month the birds were segregated after they were caught placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs.
But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, complained it wasn’t fair to stop the couple from becoming surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance.
In response, zookeepers gave the pair two eggs laid by an inexperienced first-time mother.
‘We decided to give them two eggs from another couple whose hatching ability had been poor and they’ve turned out to be the best parents in the whole zoo,’ said one of the keepers.
‘It’s very encouraging and if this works out well we will try to arrange for them to become real parents themselves with artificial insemination.’
Not the first time this has come up.
go little gay penguins, go!
I love these guys! They’re my #1 rebuttal to the “gay is only a human thing” argument.
Gay penguins trading stones for eggs? That may be a new watermark for adorableness.
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Aw, sleepy baby penguins – damn that’s cute. Also if Warren’s head is to explode can we watch? Please?
I love this story, but I am unclear about the animal rights angle. If these animals have rights, then don’t the original parents have a right not to have their eggs stolen? Or does it violate animal rights for us to be policing the actions of animals, even when they are violating each others rights? Are humans obligated to observe a Prime Directive with regard to other species? And even if the answer is generally yes, does that answer make any sense in a zoo?
I don’t know. Cute as the gay parent penguins are, I feel that Rick Warren will simply feel that this proves that adult gay people are going to steal babies.
Gay penguins, eh? I see a same-sex couple parenting a child. Where was the description of their sex lives?
Ron, “gay penguins” have sex with each other pretty much the same way “straight penguins” do: they rub cloacas. It’s just not a reproductive act when both penguins are male.
I think that what people generally find interesting about the gay penguins, though, isn’t so much their sexual behavior (lots of animals will have sex with other animals of the same sex, that’s quite common) as it is their pair-bonding and nesting behavior. It’s not that the penguins will fuck other penguins of the same sex that makes them “gay”; it is that they go through the entire penguin mating ritual: the pair-bonding (in the wild, Chinstrap penguins mate for life), the nesting, and the showing a strong interest in raising young together. It’s not just a matter of sex.
I have to agree with Dednavda, though, about the “animal rights” angle. First the zoo intervenes to prevent the (perfectly natural and usual) egg-stealing behavior, then it just decides to replicate it artificially instead! Most strange.