WASHINGTON  — Republican senators introduced a bill today that has zookeepers turning their heads. The proposed law, titled the Penguin Egg & Nest Guardianship Act (PENGA), seeks to regulate a zoo’s authority over penguin eggs. The bill would make it a crime for a zoo to remove an egg from its parents or transfer eggs between penguin couples.

“Penguin parents have a right to raise their own chicks and chicks have a right to be raised by their own parents,” said the top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. “Zookeepers do not have the right to play God with penguin eggs for the sake of conducting social experiments.”

The so-called experiment McConnell referred to occurred in 2004 in New York City’s Central Park Zoo. Two male chinstrap penguins named Roy and Silo paired off, but for obvious reasons, they couldn’t produce an egg on their own. Desperate, Roy and Silo rolled an egg-shaped rock into their nest and tried to incubate it.

The senior penguin keeper at the zoo, Rob Gramzay, took pity on the penguin pair and decided to make their dreams of parenthood come true. He gave the couple an abandoned egg that needed care. They incubated the egg for the typical 34 days, and finally, Tango was born.

“Thanks to those two trailblazing chinstrap penguins, there are now dozens of same-sex penguin couples fostering eggs in zoos,” says LGBTQ rights advocate John Paul King, “and they have proven to be quite talented at getting them to hatch.”

This trend has social conservatives seething. 

“This isn’t natural, okay? This isn’t natural,” President Trump remarked while waiting to board Marine One. “If two boy penguins wanna hatch an egg together, that’s fine. I’m completely fine with that. But it isn’t natural for zookeepers to play musical chairs with Penguin eggs.”

In response to the President’s statement, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “This bill is not about preserving the sanctity of penguin parenthood. This bill is a thinly veiled attempt to outlaw same-sex parenting in the animal kingdom.”

But the President’s critics say there may be more to Trump’s support of PENGA than meets the eye. After Tango hatched, more people visited the penguin exhibit in the Central Park Zoo than the Central Park ice skating rink that bears the Trump name. A former employee for Trump Incorporated said, “Trump didn’t like those attendance numbers. He’s still steaming mad.”

The Penguin Egg & Nest Guardianship Act adds two criminal provisions to existing zoo regulations. It makes “egg snatching” a class E felony punishable with 1-5 years in prison and “conspiracy to commit egg snatching” a class A misdemeanor punishable with six months to a year in jail. If passed, zookeepers could be locked up for half a decade for taking an egg and their names permanently placed in a new egg snatcher database. 

“The penguin keepers in America’s zoos are highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about congress,” a spokesperson for the Association of Zoos & Aquariums said. “Congress should leave the zoo keeping to the zookeepers.”

Surprisingly, PENGA has received a mixed response from animal rights activist groups. The Global Penguin Society opposes the bill. “With penguin populations shrinking across the globe, we believe every egg should be incubated by any means necessary,” a spokesperson for the group said. “We are #TeamIncubate.”

Conversely, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) feel that PENGA’s new regulations don’t go far enough. “It’s unconscionable that penguins in zoos will get to keep their eggs, while chickens on factory farms have their eggs snatched and sold for a profit,” said a PETA spokesperson. “Show us a bill that creates universal egg rights for all birds, and we’ll support it.”

Preet Bharara and Anne Milgram — known for their discussions about penguin law on their podcast, CAFE Insider  — released a joint statement about PENGA on Twitter:

“Happy April Fools’ Day”