A gay penguin couple wanted so badly to start a family of their own that they kidnapped a straight couple’s chick.
Sandie Hedgegård Munck, a zookeeper at Denmark’s Odense zoo, explained to Denmark broadcaster DR that the gay penguins snatched the baby while the baby’s parents went for a swim.
The gay penguins felt the chick’s parents were not fit to look after the baby, so their disappearance was the perfect moment to sweep in.
“The parents disappeared, and the kid was simply kidnapped,” the zookeeper continued.
Hedgegård Munck says while the gay penguins thought the parents were careless, only the father is really at fault.
“I know that the female is very caring for the kid, and she is also very aggressive to us animal lovers if we get too close to the chick,” Hedgegård Munck explained.
“I think the female had been out to get her bath, and then it had been the male’s turn to care for the kid. He may have then left, and then the [gay] couple had thought, ‘It’s pity, we’ll take it.’”
One day later, the chick’s biological parents wanted their baby back. In a video posted on the Odense Zoo’s Facebook page, the straight parents can be seen confronting the gay penguins, who protectively nuzzled the chick in between their legs.
After their encounter turned physical, the chick was given back to his biological parents.
Nonetheless, the gay penguins were rewarded for their paternal skills and were given an egg from a female penguin that was not able to care for her child.
The gay penguins aren’t the first same-sex penguin couple to want to start a family.
In 2004, the New York Times published a story about two chinstrap penguins who fell in love at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan.
The penguins, called Roy and Silo, “exhibit what in penguin parlance is called ‘ecstatic behavior’: that is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have sex,” the New York Times wrote.
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Like the Denmark couple, Roy and Silo were desperate to have a baby, so they put a rock in their nest and sat on it.
Chief keeper Rob Gramzay noticed this and gave them a real egg that needed parents. Gramzay explained that Roy and Silo eventually welcomed baby Tango, who they cared for until she was old enough to be on her own.
Roy and Silo remained together for six years, but later split up. However, their story has been praised all over and was even turned into the book And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.
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