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May 22 2007 at 12:55AM

London - A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organisation said on Monday.

Carlos and Fernando had been desperate to start a family, even chasing other flamingos from their nests to take over their eggs at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) in Slimbridge near Bristol.

But their egg-sitting prowess made them the top choice for taking an unhatched egg under their wings when one of the Greater Flamingo nests was abandoned.

The couple, together for six years, can feed chicks by producing milk in their throats.

"Fernando and Carlos are a same sex couple who have been known to steal other flamingos' eggs by chasing them off their nest because they wanted to rear them themselves," said WWT spokesperson Jane Waghorn.

"They were rather good at sitting on eggs and hatching them so last week, when a nest was abandoned, it seemed like a good idea to make them surrogate parents."

Gay flamingos are not uncommon, she added.

"If there aren't enough females or they don't hit it off with them, they will pair off with other males," she said. - Sapa-AFP

National Geographic article titled Homosexual Activity Among Animals Stirs Debate

Animals exhibit "gay" behavior
By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times staff reporter

Some of Rich Osborne's killer-whale pictures aren't suitable for children. But among adults, the director of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor sometimes brings out the censored shots: Young males engaging in what might be described as a ribald form of fencing.

"We try not to impose values on these things," said Osborne, who has studied orcas for three decades. "But it looks pretty homosexual."

From whales to buffalo to Caspian terns, a profusion of animals exhibit behavior that in humans would be called gay.

In his book "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity," Seattle biologist Bruce Bagemihl estimates 450 species display some form of homosexuality, which can include same-sex courtship, displays of affection, sexual activity, long-term pairings and parenting.

• Up to 15 percent of Western gull pairs are females. The birds woo each other with gifts of food and form bonds that last for years. They build joint nests and tend clutches of unfertilized eggs. Occasionally, one or both females will mate with males, but they always raise their young together.

• In some penguin species, males form lifelong same-sex partnerships — especially in captivity. A pair named Roy and Silo in New York's Central Park Zoo incubated rocks until keepers gave them an egg of their own.

• Male giraffes spend most of their time in bachelor groups, where they entwine necks and rub against each other for up to an hour at a time. These "necking" sessions often culminate in mounting, and can outnumber heterosexual encounters 9 to 1.

It's rare for animals to be exclusively homosexual, Bagemihl said, but bisexuality is common. While male orcas seem to relish their same-sex romps, they mate with females, too. Virtually all bonobos, or pygmy apes, are bisexual.

None of this is surprising to field biologists, but many omit or gloss over homosexual behavior in their scientific reports. Others have tried to explain it away as a form of aggression or confusion.

In species like bonobos, same-sex behavior seems to help cement relationships and defuse conflict, said University of California biologist Marlene Zuk, author of "Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex From Animals."

Though it's tricky to impute motives to animals, the fact that homosexuality is so widespread shows it is not unnatural or biologically aberrant, she said. "But I'm leery of trying to use animals for models of our own behavior."

If the animal stories hold any lesson for human societies, Bagemihl said, it could lie in the dazzling variety of sexual behavior nature offers.

Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com

You can do your own research if you'd like.
As for gates, I never said pearly gates. You'll see when you get there.

Messenger: Yaa Asantewa

Sent: 8/28/2007 12:37:37 PM

Copy... and paste!

Ms. Nzingha... I'm not gonna have a heavens war with you. You keep heaven. Just know that you're nuts if you think that a Nazirine vow is compatible with your gayness. It isn't.

Anyway, Innocent. InI have dominion over all HIM creatures... you know that bit right? The animal world reflects the problems of the world of men, and harbours the negative effects. Due to people like you taking it upon yourself to decide it's all good, well that's why it's now part of your world.

Nobody is born gay, so get over that nonsense.

Messenger: Ras KebreAB

Sent: 8/28/2007 12:44:51 PM

" We must look, first, to Almighty God, Who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason. We must put our faith in Him, that He will not desert us or permit us to destroy humanity which He created in His image. "

Rastafari

Messenger: Empress Nzingha

Sent: 8/28/2007 12:59:12 PM

"You keep heaven."
Thank you! Peace and Blessings for that, it is a beautiful day indeed.

By the way I'm not gay. In fact, I've always though two men together is nasty, but I also think frog urine is nasty. It just so happens that I have tons of frogs in my yard and lots of bisexual and homosexual friends. I didn't know they were same sex oriented when I met them, and when I found out, it changed nothing in our friendship. I once picked up a frog because I thought it was beautiful. The frog was so frightened of me, being so much larger, that it urinated in my hands. I didn't kill the frog, I let him go and washed my hands. I know personally that neither frogs or homosexuals are evil.

Messenger: Yaa Asantewa

Sent: 8/28/2007 1:01:13 PM

what a surprise. The frog pissed on you.

Messenger: Empress Nzingha

Sent: 8/28/2007 1:06:37 PM

Yes, the frog urinated on me. Once a bee stung me. Many birds have deficated on my car. A bird once died in my back yard, and so did a baby dear (years apart).
Once a butterfly landed in my hand. Once a cat walked with me to the store. Once an abandoned squirrel baby adopted me, and wouldn't let me put it down. Once a sick cat took yoga classes at my center until she died.
Yes, a frog once urinated in my hand. It was a blessing. I learned not to pick up frogs.

Messenger: Ras KebreAB

Sent: 8/28/2007 1:15:11 PM

Let me see if i can copy and paste too....for thos who want to take their example from the animals

Some animals become cannibals when faced by certain environmental conditions. Mice and rats, for example, may turn cannibal when their colony population rises rapidly, and their naturally high reproductive rate results in a high mortality of young. Dead offspring may be eaten by the hungry and stressed survivors. This behavior is most often observed in animals kept under unnaturally cramped conditions in captivity but there is also evidence of cannibalism occurring in the wild under similar conditions. Among some bird species, parents or nestlings may eat the young when populations become dense, or food scarce. Young birds of prey often kill and sometimes eat weaker nestlings. Crows, too, may eat eggs and chicks of rivals to improve their own chance of successful breeding.

Cub killing among lions: Of the higher mammals, the lion shows the most definite cannibalistic tendencies. There have been many reports of male lions killing and then sometimes eating young cubs. In almost all cases, however, the male lion is prompted to kill the cub, not from hunger or population pressure, but by a need to safeguard his own offspring. In most cases, the young are killed but not eaten. This is better described as infanticide, the killing of young, rather than cannibalism.

defend that too

Messenger: Empress Nzingha

Sent: 8/28/2007 1:28:07 PM

Cannibalism: A modern taboo
By Clare Murphy
BBC News Online

Armin Meiwes, the German jailed for eight-and-a-half years for eating an acquaintance, advised others not to follow his example.

But he is unlikely to be the last to sample human flesh.

After years of wrangling over its very existence, anthropologists increasingly concur that cannibalism is a tradition which has spanned both cultures and centuries, although the extent to which it has been practised remains an academic battleground.

General repugnance has met the case of Mr Meiwes, who has confessed to killing and eating a man he met after advertising for someone who wanted to be killed and eaten.

While modern societies have proven largely sympathetic to "survival cannibalism" - eating others on the grounds of nutritional necessity - many remain uncomfortable with the notion of the ritualistic consumption of human flesh - however consensual the act may be.

Demonising effect

The term cannibalism derives from the name of the West Indian Carib tribe, first documented by the explorer Christopher Columbus. The Carib tribe was alleged to eat others - it remains unclear whether they did indeed do so.

Early accounts of cannibalism by European colonisers have been widely viewed with suspicion on the grounds that allegations may well have been made in an effort to illustrate the necessity of civilising foreign peoples.

For cannibalism has frequently been used as a means to demonise others: Medieval Christian culture frequently depicted the Jew who had a taste for the blood of Christian babies.

But while anthropologists approach stories of cannibalism with caution, there do nonetheless appear to be substantiated examples of both ritualistic and survival cannibalism throughout history.

Murder and survival

The Aztecs are believed to have practised cannibalism on a large scale as part of the ritual religious sacrifice of war captives and other victims in a practice known as exocannibalism - the eating of strangers or enemies.

Earlier this year the United Nations accused rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo of cannibalising their enemies, and of forcing families of the victims to eat the organs of their relatives.

Aboriginal Australians are meanwhile believed to have taken part in what is seen as a more benevolent form of cannibalism - endocannibalism - the consumption of friends and relatives, who are usually dead.

In this case, the body of a dead person was ritually eaten by his relatives as a means of allowing his spirit to live on.

History also provides ample examples of cannibalism during famine and other periods of severe shortages.

Survival cannibalism was made famous by the film Alive, based on the 1972 air crash in the Andes, when surviving members of the Uruguayan rugby team ate the dead to stay alive.

And somewhere between ritual and survival lies the case of the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, who engaged in cannibalistic practices from the end of the 19th century until the 1950s.

While the men of the Fore tribe supplemented their bean-and-sweet-potato diets with small game, women and children made up for their lack of protein by eating the brains of tribal members who had recently died.

Some scientists hold the practice responsible for incidences of a fatal brain disease, the symptoms of which are similar to the human form of mad cow disease, although other experts have disputed the link.

Breaking a taboo

In many countries, the consumption of human flesh is not itself a crime.

Perpetrators tend to be convicted on the basis of accompanying acts: Mr Meiwes, for example, was not charged with cannibalism, but with murder for "sexual satisfaction".

A number of high-profile cannibal cases have involved the eating of flesh in a sexual context.

Albert Fish, who has been called America's Bogeyman, raped, murdered and ate a number of children during the 1920s. He claimed to have experienced immense sexual pleasure as a result.

Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered at least 53 people between 1978 and 1990, also indulged in cannibalism. His crimes were linked to sexual problems.

But what distinguishes Mr Meiwes' self-confessed sexual cannibalism from killers such as Fish and Chikatilo, or acts committed by peoples such as the Aztecs or the Congolese rebels, is the ostensibly consensual nature of his act.

Mr Meiwes met the man he was ultimately to eat, 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, in early 2001, after advertising on websites for "young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter".

Mr Meiwes told investigators he took Mr Brandes back to his home, where Mr Brandes agreed to have his penis cut off, which Mr Meiwes then flambeed and served up to eat together.

Mr Meiwes says he then killed Mr Brandes with his consent.

But the allegedly consensual nature of the act has done nothing to pacify German disgust.

Whether Mr Meiwes' victim was willing or not, eating another for anything less than necessity remains a taboo in the modern world.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/3254074.stm

Published: 2003/12/02 10:19:07 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Messenger: Ras KebreAB

Sent: 8/28/2007 1:31:13 PM

like i said defend that too

Messenger: still looking

Sent: 8/28/2007 2:14:38 PM

" We must look, first, to Almighty God, Who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason."

did you really post this?

wars all over the planet ----people oppressing each other ----people still being held in bondage ------- people raping,killing and stealing each day every minute ..............

and you posted this?

are you for real? you think your god has endowed all of these murders and rapists and thieves with intelligence and the ability to reason?

you think god endowed the phelps guy (who has a web site titled "god hates fags")with intelligence as he stood across the street from the funeral of a gay man, and held signs that read "mathew shepard is in hell now"

is that the god you are speaking of or the type of intelligence you are speaking of?

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