Posted on 06/03/2009 4:26:03 PM PDT by lewisglad
Two "gay" male penguins have hatched a chick and are now rearing it as its adoptive parents, says a German zoo.
The zoo, in Bremerhaven, northern Germany, says the adult males - Z and Vielpunkt - were given an egg which was rejected by its biological parents.
It says the couple are now happily rearing the chick, said to have reached four weeks old.
The zoo made headlines in 2005 over plans to "test" the sexual orientation of penguins with homosexual traits.
Three pairs of male penguins had been seen attempting to mate with each other and trying to hatch offspring from stones.
The zoo flew in four females in a bid to get the endangered birds to reproduce - but quickly abandoned the scheme after causing outrage among gay rights activists, who accused it of interfering in the animals' behaviour.
The six "gay" penguins remain at the zoo, among them Z and Vielpunkt who are now rearing the chick together after being given the rejected egg.
"Z and Vielpunkt, both males, gladly accepted their 'Easter gift' and got straight down to raising it," said a zoo statement.
There have been previous reports of exclusive male-to-male pairings among penguins, some of which have also included the rearing of chicks.
Homosexual behaviour in is well documented in many different animals, but it is not understood in detail, says Professor Stuart West, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford.
Other animals may simply exhibit a "drive to mate", while others may, like humans, enjoy non-procreative sexual activity.
"Homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals," Bremerhaven zoo said on Wednesday.
"Sex and coupling up in our world do not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Emperor penguin males incubate the egg alone. The females all haul ass and leave the males alone. I think the fine prancing fellows know this, which is why they gave the adult males an egg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgGL6SbMfKc
Call me crazy but wo/men are not animals, nor are we supposed to behave like them.
I guess Darwin's THEORY never sunk in.
Time to legalize human-penguin marriage. Penguinophiles deserve equality.
This is just so retarded.
Oops, thought this was a Stanley Cup thread about Penguins' Crosby.........
You said that much better than I, good post.
Are these the same penguins that were forced to commune only with same-sex penguins until they exhibited the approved behavior? IOW, they were victims of a perverted socialization experiment from the get-go? Any perceived “gayness” then, would be environmental - a result of psychological abuse by the researchers. Says a lot.
Cmon, June is National Gay Month....Obama said so:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2263744/posts
This is the money line. Males cannot mate with each other. Put enough stress on an animal, like perhaps life in a zoo, and animals will still rely on instincts, albeit misdirected.
I suspect if an otter lived with a sex-deprived penguin in a zoo, the otter might have to have its head on a swivel to protect its "honor".
Uh, no they didn't. They are still gay, right? (you can't make this stuff up).
My first ducks were a pair of females, they had duck sex or the lesbian equivalent every morning. We got them a male and all was well.
Animals of various species do all sorts of wierd behaviors, including mating behaviors. They are not humans, so such things are irrelevant for what humans do or should do.
I was wondering the same thing.
Talk is cheap from some people. Others it requires a lot of thought to see around the satire!
The Discovery Channel’s sometimes useful. :^)
In a zoo, it takes zookeepers moving an already fertilized egg into proximity of purposefully identified “gay” penguins and hoping survival instincts kick in an the egg is “reared”.
In nature, no homosexual couple has successfully procreated in 4 billion years. It takes stress in the environment, disease, overpopulation, etc., to cause certain weakened species to exhibit homosexual activity. Further, it takes an entire system of man-made controls (zoos or court systems) to afford homosexuals the right to rear anything other than each other.
So we’re taking our social cues from critters? How freeing.
Now we can shake hands and introduce ourselves the way dogs do.
We can eat poop like the chimps in the zoo.
We can eat the placenta, raw, the way many mammals do.
We can bite when threatened or provoked.
We can sleep 22 hours a day, like my dogs.
We can drop one on any person any time, like the bonobo apes.
We seem to be headed there as a culture.
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