One of ours once woke me up by pouncing on my ear. Went from a dead sleep to sitting upright, screaming, with claws embedded in my cheek and my scalp, and needle-teeth clamped in my ear.
I went from living alone to having a dog this past summer and the first night that she came in in the middle of the night and stuck her nose right on my foot that was hanging off the bed outside the covers was like every child’s nightmare come to life.
I legit will not let my toes be bare at the edge of the bed. My mind says ” scary demon will get you from under bed’. It was ny step brother’s cat when I was 5. I remember that.
I think they just expect it. I tend to foster kittens right around when they’re weaned or with their mothers. I have a little deaf-blind old man cat who lives for kittens and bathes and mothers them. They never give up looking for milk in Momma Stephens fluff
It’s not just the smell. 13 years ago I got a puppy. I brought it up in bed and he latched on to my nipple!! At that time I’d never had or nursed a baby in my life, so no smell of milk. Weirdest thing that ever happened to me. Poor boy missed his mama, but I scared him by my reaction.
Yeah I was wondering, is it safe for an animal to drink milk from a different species? I mean I know we are all similar and chemicals are chemicals no matter where they come from, but just wondering.
Iirc most animals lose the ability to process lactose once they’re out of infancy. But since drinking animal milk is a good source of nutrients for people, children who didn’t lose that ability had a higher chance of survival, and because of that, a higher chance of passing it on.
They have a strong sense of smell – which is why you shouldn’t wear any perfume if you want to hold a small baby. It’s also super irritating for the mother to get her baby back smelling like another person. Suuuuper annoying. Smokers are the worst. Bring a change of clothes when visiting newborns, people!
Now I have a couple of thoughts on that, the first is pretty obvious: Humans domesticated the cow, to the best of my knowledge no other species on earth has domesticated livestock for dairy production. We don’t see orangutans drinking glasses of milk for the same reason don’t see African swallows installing headers in their Honda Civic.
If you’ve owned a house cat you know those gremlins will guzzle down milk like it’s going out of style. If you’ve ever had a dog you know that they’ll be happy to drink a bowl full of milk. I’ve seen racoons and opossums drink milk. And not to be outdone, nature itself, sometimes, will hook up a kitten or a puppy or a kid with a mother from a different species (like we’re seeing in the video above) and they won’t miss a single beat plugging themselves in to a pig or lamb or sheep to nurse. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the number of animals who will drink milk vastly outstrip those who won’t.
(Important note about that, though: While milk makes a wonderful treat for house pets, it absolutely shouldn’t make up the main bulk of their calories. You know this, I know this, but it still bears repeating. Milk is delicious stuff, but house cats can’t live on milk alone.)
The larger point that the pundit was trying to make was that humans aren’t naturally lactose tolerant, that’s an evolutionary trait. Here in the west most of us can consume dairy without a second thought, but there are many places around the world where lactose will send a person running to the bathroom. Unfortunately he chose to make that case in perhaps the weakest, mostly easily dismissed way possible, which is somewhat of a shame, that his point was obscured by his arguments.
He was really sharp on everything else, though, when it came to politics he absolutely knew his shit, no doubt about that! He just had a weird thing for milk drinkers, I guess.
You don’t even need to cut out dairy to stop supporting the dairy industry. Though you should know most dairy farmers aren’t giant operations, they’re relatively small farms with ~100 head that sell their milk to a larger company. Nonetheless, if you like dairy products but don’t want to support factory farming there is, almost for a 100% certainty, a local farmer in your area selling his milk himself. Maybe it’s sold from a shop on his farm, maybe he has a local farmer’s market that does it. Either way it’ll just take the effort once to find them. After that, you’ll always know where to get the freshest, most local, most ethically produced dairy.
