Pray Away The Gay (Penguins)

As you've surely read on every other gay news site, the Toronto Zoo is going to temporarily separate its famed pair of gay penguins in order to facilitate an urgent breeding program for the endangered species. Taiwan's news animators weigh in below with an amusing reference to Ladybird Bachmann.

Animals Are Gay, Part II

Two elderly male otters died within an hour of each other at a New Zealand zoo yesterday. Handlers say that the second one probably died of heartbreak after watching his mate pass away.

Zookeeper John Miller said the Asian otters, who were 19 and 16 years-old, had been best friends for 15 years. It's thought that having each other for company kept them alive beyond the normal otter life-span of 14 years. According to handler Gail Sutton, the pair lived to nearly 100 in human years. 'They were a great pair of otters, they were interested in what was happening,' she said. The pair had been unwell for a couple of weeks but after completing treatment they were returned to their enclosure, only to be discovered dead the next morning. 'We were devastated and we couldn't work out quite what had happened with them,' Ms Sutton said. 'It brought a tear to my eye and it's making me well up now.' 'The only consolation from this is that they both went together because if one had gone without the other, the remaining one would have been really lost.'

Sniff.

Animals Are Gay

This weekend's feature article in New York Times Magazine deals with homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Here's an excerpt:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

In recent years though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in animals — approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn’t even realize she’d been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own. “This colony is literally the largest proportion of — I don’t know what the correct term is: ‘homosexual animals’? — in the world,” Young told me. “Which I’m sure some people think is a great thing, and others might think is not.”

Wingnut logic: Homosexual acts are not natural! Then why do so many animals do it? What are you, an ANIMAL? Well, yes.

Linda, You Homewrecker!

And Now, A Joke From Free Republic

Via Free Republic, in response to a Scientific American story wondering if same-sex behavior in the animal kingdom has an effect on evolution:

A father watched his young daughter playing in the garden. He smiled as he reflected on how sweet and pure his little girl was. Tears formed in his eyes as he thought about her seeing the wonders of nature through such innocent eyes. Suddenly, she just stopped and stared at the ground. He went over to her to see what work of God had captured her attention. He noticed she was looking at two spiders mating. ‘Daddy, what are those two spiders doing?’ she asked. ‘They’re mating,’ her father replied.‘What do you call the spider on top?’ she asked. ‘That’s a Daddy Longlegs,’ her father answered. ‘So, the other one is a Mommy Longlegs?’ the little girl asked. As his heart soared with the joy of such a cute and innocent question he replied, ‘No dear. Both of them are Daddy Longlegs. ‘The little girl, looking a little puzzled, thought for a moment, then lifted her foot and stomped them flat. ‘Well, we’re not having any of that shit in our garden’ she said.

You've got to be carefully taught.