Kitties begging for Milk at a Dairy Farm.
Why do humans drink the milk of other animals, why did we not just keep drinking our own milk? Does any other animal drink different animals milk too?
A black and white photo captures the lively scene in a barn. A farmer, seated on a stool, milks a cow while three curious cats observe with great interest. One cat even stands on its hind legs, attempting to catch a stream of milk as it shoots into a bucket just out of frame.
Humans are basically the only species which milks others, because we’re the only ones to domesticate other mammals. Not long after we invented agriculture around 10–12 thousand years ago, we started to domesticate animals, fencing them in so that we’d have a steady supply of them for meat and hides. Slowly, we started to make use of them for other reasons. Large animals like cattle could be used to carry loads or pull plows. And somewhere along the line we figured out that we could keep milking them after their young had stopped nursing and use that milk ourselves, because, hey, additional source of nutrition. I suspect that it started with using goats cattle as an additional source of milk for children when, for whatever reason, their mothers were unable to provide it for them. I imagine that dairy products like yogurt and cheese, which have less lactose, were developed next (important, because at the time everybody was lactose intolerant past infancy), and somewhere along the line somebody in western Asia acquired the mutation which continues lactase production into adulthood, which meant that they could consume this nutritious substance through their whole lifetime. That’s an advantage, so that mutation survived and was passed to.
So, then, we started consuming milk from cows, goats, and sheep because it became available to us with the development of domesticated animals.
It is not at all unusual for one species of mammal to drink the milk of another species. I don’t think there are many dogs, cats, pigs, mammals in general, that turn up their noses at bovine milk.
Generally, most young mammals recognize the milk of most any other mammal as nourishment. Tastes sometimes change in adulthood. Personally, I can’t stand any of the stuff unless it comes from a mama almond or soybean that is vanilla.
My wife once rescued a kitten when we had a rat terrier with some new puppies. The kitten fell right in with the puppies at dinner time, which didn’t surprise me at all. The surprise came when the dog weaned the puppies and allowed the kitten to continue nursing. I wondered if she did not recognize the independence of the kitten, or if she just liked the way the kitten kneaded her tummy? The kitten was slightly older than the puppies. It thrived on the dog milk, but its bark was a little weak. lol
Btw, most human women do not produce a lot of surplus milk. Human milk is extremely difficult to find at the grocery. This may have something to do with why we do not keep drinking our own milk, and a lot of women have less income.
