November 18, 2004

• Fact a) Breastfeeding temporarily reduces a woman's fertility. Fact b) Some tribeswomen in Papua New Guinea habitually breastfeed pigs. Right. I'm out of breastfeeding facts. Night.
• Fact c) This is some freaky, weird-ass shit.
• Fact d) ??? Fact e) Profit!
• No registration and pictures. SFW pictures, I hasten to add.
• She must be a really big Tori Amos fan.
• Why wouldn't she just pump the milk, and then give it to the dog?
• Ewww... pumps are creepy.
• Tori! ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
• I'm pretty sure that, historically, letting a puppy breastfeed was a not-so-uncommon way for lactating women with painfully enormous breasts to get some relief. This is in the pre-breast-pump, pre-refrigerator world, I'm thinking.
• Mental illness, a complete lack of understanding about dogs, some kind of creepy thrill from breastfeeding a dog or all of the above. This will have no positive effect whatsoever on how the dog feels about her daughter, and I can see that it's possible it could even have negative effects (i.e. rivalry). She's crazy if she thinks it's desirable to have a dog see a human as a sibling.
• Hmm, I feel like I've heard of this before except it was a Scandinavian woman with different reasons for doing it. Ah... Young mother nursed orphaned pups A 23-year-old Norwegian woman who's been nursing her infant son suddenly found herself faced with 10 more hungry mouths when her dog died after giving birth to a large litter of puppies. She literally took them all to her breast.
• As disturbing (and ill-conceived, as biscotti already pointed out) as this story is, I think it's liable to be a self-limiting situation. The news story doesn't say how old the pup is, but a puppy's milk teeth - WHICH ARE VERY SHARP - generally start to emerge at 2-3 weeks of age. (Ouch!)
• PY, your link is broken, but I was too consumed with curiosity to wait for a re-post. Norwegian Woman Nurses Orphaned Pups I note that she only nursed them for a weekend, until she could find foster parents for the puppies. See, that's just nice. The Australian woman - she's nuts.
• How's the weather in Canada, mechagrue?
• Oh, thanks mechagrue. Sorry about that.
• I'm sure that even after this that pup's gonna grow into a stage where it goes around saying its mother was a bitch.
• Sick, SICK, SICK! Excuse me while I go gag.
• Well, I don't see any problem with these ladies doing this if they choose to -- I'm sure the pups won't mind. I'd want to make sure the Staffie pup wasn't suddering from malnutritiion, thoguh, because I have no idea what a diet of human milk might be dieficient in compared to canine milk. The first woman called her offspring Honey Pauline Philomina Flo, I wonder what she's named the pup.
• Milk teeth are sharp. Youch.
• This is hot, though not as hot as when Marky Mark kissed the space monkey chick.
• I know I should find this bizarre, but I just don't - guess growing up on a farm you get used to animal world and people world overlapping. Once, in Mexico, I found this little parrot passed out cold at the bottom of resident cage of budgies in a hotel I was running. I was busy mopping the floor and answering the phone, and the 86 other things I had to get done so I just chucked him down my shirt into Cleavage Intensive Care until he started kicking again. Basically, you got no time with a sick bird - when in doubt warm them up and keep a real close eye on them. When he seemed to be at least opening his eyes I put him in a shoe box on the desk, and would stick a finger in there as I'd run by. When he tried to rip my finger off, I knew he was improved and put him back into the cage to be his usual petulant self. The moral of this story? Chicks do weird stuff with their tits? Birds like tits? Everybody likes tits? I read Grapes of Wrath?
• Birds like nice tits.
• Not unknown for bird fanciers or bird lovers to hatch eggs in their bosoms before elecrtric incubators came along, moneyjane.. Have to salute anyone willing to plunge a conure inside her blouse. Or a lory.
• To this day, I have no idea what, exactly he was, other than most definitely not a budgie, though he was the same size. He was dark green, and without any particular markings. Given you could buy birds off dudes in the street, he was an International Bird of Mystery. Actually, given how aggressive he was, it's quite probable he was actually a she-parrot.
• I lie! This girlie bird is exactly what I shoved down my shirt! Cluing in that it was probably female was immeasurably helpful as they'll show mostly photos of males since they are usually more colourful - I would never have recognised the male version of this Mexican Parrotlet.
• In related news, it appears New Zealand has been taking these dog-boys, dressing them in cricket whites, and sending them to Australia to represent their nation.
• Actually, I've been thinking about this, and it probably will in fact work. If the dog believes the child to be a sibling, as long as that sibling is higher up in the pecking order than it is, it very probably will serve as a protective spirit. At the very least, it won't tear it to pieces. The trick is to make sure the dog recognises the child as being higher up in the pack social order. This should follow naturally from it being on the ground while the mother carries the baby a lot. Interesting experiment. And one that mirrors the co-evolution of dog & man circa 30,000-18,000 years ago.
• The first woman called her offspring Honey Pauline Philomina Flo, I wonder what she's named the pup. Honey Boy. I wonder if they will both end up responding to Honey.
• Truly, NZ is the land of milk and honey.
• But Nostrildamus, a baby is in no position to constantly reinforce its own dominance, which puppies do all the time. Mostly through play. Ever watched puppies playing? It's pretty rough stuff. I work at a doggy daycare, and we have many puppies on the client list, so I'm in a good position to see this process up close and personal. I can't imagine what would happen if a puppy decided that a human baby was its sibling, and tried to play with it accordingly. (Actually, I can, and it involves a lot of stitches for the baby, and probably a one-way trip to the vet's back room for the puppy.)
• No, I'm not about to infer you don't understand dog/human interaction, but the baby doesn't have to enforce its dominance, only the pack leader has to indicate who is more superior. When you kick your dog off the setee, or scold it for stealing food, you are enforcing the hierarchy, & the dog sees that other members of the family don't get scolded & get perks it does not - it is able to realise that these others are higher in rank than itself without direct confrontation. The important fact to remember is that the dog sees the other humans as dogs, or sees itself as human, one or the other, or something. In any case, it doesn't differentiate. Under normal circumstances, it's enough for the dominant human to display preferential treatment to the child/husband/whathaveyou for the dog to get the message. In the case of highly aggressive breeds, such as bull terriers etc, slightly more is needed, & I think this is the thinking behind the actions we are discussing.
• Cleavage Intensive Care I'm *definitely* amending my living will. Like, today.
• oh moneyjane, now you have my unwavering respect! anyone who goes out of their way to be nice to birds is a friend in my book. my quaker parrot used to crawl in my shirt (usually through the sleeve) looking for a nice warm spot.
• 'tunnelling' they call it. Great way to get your young birds used to huge tits human handling.
• If any of you have any shred of decency in you, it's time to take out the trash.
• Well, I have no shred of decency. I think tracicle may have a shred or two, but she may have a problem with that concept, since she is from NZ.
• Oh boy, this is the thread where I get to tell my snake story. When my kiddlings were small, we would go driving in the back country for amusement/relieve cabin fever. Late one Fall, we were headed down a steep road behind Anderson Ranch Dam out to pick elderberrys, when Mr. BlueHorse slammed on the brakes, piled out of the car, and proceeded to pick up a snake in the road. Turns out it was a fairly stiff Rosy Boa, and what it was doing out in the cold we hadn't a clue. Mr. BlueHorse was afraid it wouldn't be able to find a suitable place to hibernate as it was so cold and torpid, and kiddlings were begging, "Canwekeephim, hunh? Canwekeephim?" We decided to take him home and put him in a snake house for the winter. Snake perked up a bit as I was holding him in my hands and seemed to appreciate the warmth. When we got to the picking spot, he seemed to be very content to just hang out around my neck, so I tucked him in under my sweatshirt and proceeded to jump from rock to rock picking berries. Apparently this jostled Snake a bit more than was comfortable, and next thing I knew, there was a wet sensation down my front. I flipped up my shirt, and found Mr. Snake's last dinner--three baby mice. I could tell he felt greatly relieved. We packed him on home, and the kids named him Jake the Snake. Next Spring, we turned him loose--except for having to pick dead mice out of my bra, Jake was one of my favorite temporary houseguests.
• BlueHorse, you should have named that snake "Chuck".
• He regurgitated his dinner .. what a charming story. My god. Well, thank you for saving the life of the snake, anyway.
• Actually, that was probably a fear reaction from the snake, regurgitating his meal so that he could more easily evade danger, now that I think about it. So your milks must be pretty scary.
• C'mon - who here hasn't hurled down a lady friend's chest? I mean, really.
• Um, just about all of us drink milk from another species daily..... This woman is just returning the favor
• Does my wife count?
• What if it bit her on the tits? Cue the joke with punchline: "Doctor can you take away the pain & leave the swelling?"
• Sure, Nostrildamus, absolutely. That's usually how it works in blended human/dog households, because the dogs (hopefully) learn early on that all humans automatically outrank them by default. In any group of dogs, however, there is a stepped hierarchy from top to bottom, and everyone is constantly jostling to maintain and improve their position. The alpha dogs do assert their dominance over everyone, but each individual dog is also constantly asserting its dominance over whoever's beneath it, and so on down the line. The alpha dogs don't dictate the rankings - usually, the underlings are left alone to sort things out for themselves. Unfortunately, this woman is attempting to teach her dog that it and the baby are littermates. In her mind, that way the dog will be more likely to protect the baby if danger threatens. Two problems: 1. If she convinces the dog that it and the baby are littermates, there's going to be big trouble the first time she puts the baby down on the floor. 2. The whole nursing thing is absurd and completely unnecessary. Raise your hands, everyone who's had a dog that would protect you to the death, even though you didn't actually nurse it yourself. She's not helping the baby/dog relationship by going through with her plan - she's only setting the stage for a major disaster. If she were a dog behavior specialist, she might be able to get away with this - but why even try? There's nothing to gain, and plenty to loose. I hope someone talks some sense into her before it's too late.
• Followup story from today's paper takes this out of the 'novelty' category and into the simply very sad: A woman who had been breastfeeding her puppy so it would grow up to protect her baby daughter is understood to be in a psychiatric unit. Kura Tumanako, of Hastings, said this week that she was breastfeeding her Staffordshire bull terrier twice a day because her own baby had stopped taking her milk. Ms Tumanako, who is in her 30s, is reported to have said she did not want her breast milk to go to waste and wanted her puppy to grow up protecting her baby. The Dominion Post understands she was being treated in the Hawke's Bay Hospital mental health unit yesterday. A spokesperson for the Hawke's Bay District Health Board could not confirm Ms Tumanako was a patient in the unit because of privacy issues. An associate of Ms Tumanako described her as a "lost soul". It was not known who was caring for her three-month-old baby or the dog.
• Wow, I really thought this story would be unresolved. I never actually expected a follow-up. Thanks, vitalorgnz! I'm glad she's getting some help. I have a feeling that breast-feeding a Staffordshire pup was probably the least of her, err, "personal quirks." Hopefully the baby and the dog and the mother will all find their way out of this mess, and everything will turn out alright in the end.
• Three regurgitated baby mice? I think having tits must make us stoic. Thank you for saving Jake! Heh...think of the male version..."Dear God! This Komodo Dragon looks very poorly! Quick John, tuck him behind your scrotum, and we'll jog for help!"
• Hmm. A komodo dragon? Who could possibly have a scrotum that could envelop one of those...
• MonkeyFilter: I think having tits must make us stoic. MonkeyFilter: Quick John, tuck him behind your scrotum, and we'll jog for help!
• Who could possibly have a scrotum that could envelop one of those... *shakes leg, cracks knuckles, looks vageuly uncomfortable*
• It's true. I've seen it. Uh, I mean, ewww, dead mice on your boobs? That's really fucked up.
• scrotum big enough for a komodo dragon? sounds like a job for a tanuki! not monkeys, but surely there's a place in our heart for them.
• Absolutely. Her ideas about the pup protecting her child sounded more magical than logical; but it shows that, though her coping skills may be a bit off at the moment, she truly thought she was doing the best for them all as a blended dog/people family unit. I do hope she receives the therapy/medication she needs to pull this idea apart and put it back together in a more workable way rather than having the three summarily separated. That doesn't seem kind to anyone especially given the child and pup are, at this point, still too young to get into any kind of serious dominance tangle. By the way; feral children raised by with littermates, by canids, seem to sort things out...but then again, we see only the success stories. Well, so to speak.
• Mishukov left the family home when he was four to get away from his mother and her abusive alcoholic boyfriend. He took to begging and won the dogs' trust by offering them scraps of food. In return they protected him, from the cold and from ill-wishers, and made him their pack leader. The police tried to rescue him three times but each time he was protected by the dogs. More about this child.
• the baby doesn't have to enforce its dominance, only the pack leader has to indicate who is more superior In almost all canid packs (including domestic dogs), the alphas only care that the other pack members know who is alpha, the other levels of the pecking order are left to sort themselves out. Alphas do not maintain pack hierarchy below themselves.
• "the child and pup are, at this point, still too young to get into any kind of serious dominance tangle" Wanna bet? Puppies compete with littermates from the get-go. In a couple of months, that pup will have needle-sharp teeth and Bubs won't know what hit him when his soft little throat gets ripped open. This was an accident waiting to happen and I'm glad it has been prevented. Having said that, it's clear from context that while this may have been the proximate cause of intervention, Mum is, as we say around here, mad as a meataxe. I hope she gets some time out, decent care and the opportunity to get a grip.
• I'm not talking about canids I'm talking about humans. Anyway, she's crazy, which indicates that I may be as well for even entertaining the concept.