Forget the sweetness that Happy feet, the penguin that got lost in New Zealand, conveyed. Sexual depraves, murderers, necrophiles and rapists. This would be the true nature of penguins, or at least some of them, such as the Adelie Pygoscelids observed by George Murray Levick, British surgeon and explorer who between 1911 and 1912 participated in Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition in Antarctica.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Forget the sweetness it conveyed Happy feet, the penguin that was lost in New Zealand. Sexual depraves, murderers, necrophiles and rapists. This would be the true nature of penguins, or at least some of them, like i Pigoscelide in Adelia observed by George Murray Levick, British surgeon and explorer who between the 1911 and the 1912 participated in the expedition Terra Nova di Robert Falcon Scott in Antartide.
In those years Levick collected a lot material about penguins, later enclosed in a popular book, "Antarctic penguins, a study of their social habits“, Upon returning to the UK. But the "astonishing depravity" of the Adélie penguins was too much scandalous for the time and Natural History Museum of London decided to censor the detailed account of the sexual behaviors described in a four-page pamphlet of 1915. Recently rediscovered al Tring Natural History Museum, in England, from Douglas Russelle, the doctor's notes had been secret for 100 years, but are now there for all to see, published in the recent issue of the magazine Polar Record and reported by all the newspapers of the world.
“Some of the things noted, they had deeply shocked the explorer“Russell told al LiveScience. For example, Levick noted autoerotic tendencies, necrophilia, sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, unfinished sex at procreation, and homosexual behavior. Considering this too explicit for the society of the time, the doctor he wrote some passages even in Greek to mask the information, because mainly he feared the repercussions that the descriptions could trigger on the homosexual behavior of the penguins, which was still illegal in Great Britain.
For example, on November 10, 1911, Levick wrote in Greek: “This afternoon I saw something even more extraordinary. A penguin engaged in sodomy of the body of a dead bird. Same species. The act occurred for a minute, the position assumed by the penguin differed from ordinary copulation and the whole act was lived up to the final depression of the cloaca". In another entry, this time written in English, on December 6 of the same year, he wrote: “I saw another surprising act of depravity today. A female penguin, who had been somehow badly injured in the back, was crawling painfully on her belly. I was wondering if I should have put her down or not when a male penguin noticed her and walked towards her. After a brief inspection she has it deliberately raped, the females being absolutely unable to oppose “.
But, if the medical explorer may have seen the interactions between the penguins through a lens definitely anthropomorphic, today, fortunately, experts no longer think in this way and explain what to judge animal behavior based on some sort of 'human morality' is simply unscientific. Penguins are animals that respond to instincts. Necrophilia, for example, cannot be defined as such, since male penguins are chemically inclined to respond in a certain way to a female apparently compatible with mating. Using the term "rape" to describe animal sex is simply absurd.
Roberta Ragni
Source and photo: LiveScience
