Zookeepers in Denmark were left shocked by an unlikely kidnapping scenario earlier this week, with a gay penguin couple deciding to steal a chick from its neglectful parents.
Sandie Hedegård Munck, who works at Odense Zoo where the incident took place, told Danish publication that it didn't take long for her to "see that there was something wrong.”
She continued: “The only parent couple was gone and the kid had simply been kidnapped. There were a couple of homosexual males who had snatched the kid and stood with it."
Explaining what she believed to have happened, Munck said: “I think the female has been out to get her bath, so then it was the male’s turn to care for the kid.
“He may have left, leading the [gay] couple to think: ‘That’s a pity, we’re snapping.'”
Munck said that while the mother desperately searched for her missing baby, the father was fairly nonchalant throughout the ordeal.
“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 kid,” she said.
“So I could not have imagined she would leave it.”
Munck added: “The male is a bit more relaxed and might find it hard to search too much."
Even without the father's help, the snatched chick was soon returned to its birth parents.
While the gay penguins may not have gotten away with their kidnapping plot, the budding parents were eventually given an abandoned egg by zookeepers to raise and care for.
