when penguins have more sense than people

Mr David has alerted me to important developments in Queer Penguin News. (No, not QueerPenguin news but Queer Penguin news.)

Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany has managed to find itself with an over-abundance of male Humboldt Penguins. Apparently this happens quite easily, as the penguins' gender is very difficult to ascertain until they begin breeding behaviour. The wonderful quirk of nature here though, is that the penguins themselves couldn't give a hoot (or a squawk, or whatever it is that penguins do) whether they have members of the opposite gender to couple with. In the absence of females, the males adopt the "any port in a storm" policy. They simply form gay couples and find nice round pebbles to nurse - keeping them warm as if they were eggs.

This would be all very well (not to mention extremely endearing) but unfortunately the species is in danger of dying out. So Bremerhaven - in an effort to get some breeder action happening in its penguin enclosure - made a deal with Kolmarden Zoo in Sweden, which has an excessive proportion of female penguins. So the saucy Scandanavian penguin ladies were shipped in, but to no avail.

From The Age:
...the birds arrived in time, but were too shy.
"The Swedes are rather stand-offish," said zoo chief executive Heike Kueck.
Once again, four local females were quickly snapped up and the rest of the 22 penguins formed broody male couples and are keeping pebbles warm.

So let that be a lesson to all my labia-equipped readers. Don't be stand-offish like the Swedes! Playing hard to get doesn't make guys want you. They'll just turn gay, and shack up together with a nice pebble.

The truly absurd thing about this story is the fact that gay activists have flooded the zoo with hate mail, proclaiming that by introducing females and trying to get the males to breed, the animals' keepers are "interfering in the penguins' freedom of sexual orientation". This is the kind of absurd over-politically-correct hyper-sensitivity that makes munkey throw his hands in the air. I'm all for a bit of rainbow-flag waving, but ridiculous action like this just damages perception of the whole cause, making all queers look like irrational whining poofters in the eyes of those we should be trying to win over.

To paraphrase what Snazzles said to me the other day in typically eloquent style: It's so frustrating when people whose views you essentially agree with, make total dicks of themselves. You want the other side to make dicks of themselves, not your own.