A couple of “gay” penguins from the Harbin Zoo, northwest China, decided to manifest their paternal instinct and steal eggs hatched by heterosexual couples.
The two penguins, both three years old, generated discord among the group after they placed rocks on the feet of other members of the species, to facilitate their escape and hide the eggs. The keepers, in an attempt to avoid fights between the couples, isolated the “gay” penguins and explained that, despite their sexuality, the fact that they stole the eggs meant that they both naturally have paternal instincts.
“It’s not discrimination. We had to separate them because otherwise the whole group would become tense”, a biologist told the newspaper “Austrian Times”.
There are countless cases of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, but lately gay penguins have caught the public's attention. Last year, a German zoo was criticized for trying to mate gay penguins with females from Sweden, but the project was abandoned because the males refused to be “converted”.
In 2002, Roy and Silo, two penguins from the New York Zoo who had lived together for 8 years, were “taken out of the closet” when keepers discovered that they were both males.
