The epic showdown between the two sets of parents was captured on camera.
All these gay penguins wanted was to raise a chick of their own.
A same-sex penguin couple living at the Odensee Zoo in Denmark snatched a baby chick they thought had been abandoned by its rightful parents.
"I think the female had been out to get her bath, and then it had been the male's turn to care for the kid," zookeeper Sandie Hedegard Munck explained in Danish. "He may have then left, and then the [gay] couple had thought, 'It's a pity, we'll take it.'"
Munck suspects it was the neglectful father that may have been at fault.
"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 chick," she said.
The chick’s biological parents didn’t immediately panic when they saw their chick had disappeared – instead, they calmly wandered around their enclosure in search of their baby.
But when they eventually found their chick tucked between the legs of the gay couple, a fight broke out between the penguin pairs.
The epic showdown, which featured the mother fighting to be reunited with her baby, was captured on camera, until zookeepers intervened and returned the chick to its rightful parents.
But zookeepers decided the gay couple should have the chance to become parents in their own rite, and presented them with an egg from a female penguin unfit to be a mother. The egg had been sat on for more than 60 days and remained unfertilized.
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