Penguins

Since right-wingers stupidly decided to make the penguin their official animal of morality in the culture war, it’s of great enjoyment to learn more about the actual sexual behavior of penguins. Seriously, this recently found 1915 report is awesome:

At the time, Levick was so shocked by what he saw he recorded the events in Greek to disguise the information, at one point writing, “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins.”

For instance, on Nov. 10, 1911, Levick wrote in Greek (translated here): “This afternoon I saw a most extraordinary site [sic]. A Penguin was actually engaged in sodomy upon the body of a dead white throated bird of its own species. The act occurred a full minute, the position taken up by the cock differing in no respect from that of ordinary copulation, and the whole act was gone through down to the final depression of the cloaca.”

In another entry, this one written in English on Dec. 6 of that year, he wrote: “I saw another act of astonishing depravity today. A hen which had been in some way badly injured in the hindquarters was crawling painfully along on her belly. I was just wondering whether I ought to kill her or not, when a cock noticed her in passing, and went up to her. After a short inspection he deliberately raped her, she being quite unable to resist him.”

Levick described penguins that waddled about the colony’s outskirts terrorizing any straying chicks as “little knots of hooligans” in his pamphlet. “The crimes which they commit are such as to find no place in this book, but it is interesting indeed to note that, when nature intends them to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness.”

Wow.

Now if we could only get Morgan Freeman to narrate a documentary about this, maybe we could reclaim the penguin for us morally depraved folk.