“Did Breast-Feeding Play A Role In the Evolution of Pets? Like the Dolphin Who Adopted a Baby Whale, Humans Have Often Breast-Fed Pets”, 2019-08-06 (; similar):
…One of my Facebook friends did not agree. She responded that the big difference between human pet-keeping and this unusual dolphin/whale relationship was that human females never breast-feed members of other species. But she was wrong. The surprising fact is that in many parts of the world, there is a long history of women nursing animals. To modern sensibilities, the idea of a woman suckling an animal is, to say the least, weird, and even perverted.
And yet, both of the two most important books on the evolution of pets, James Serpell’s In the Company of Animals and Psychology Today blogger John Bradshaw’s The Animals Among Us, discuss the role of wet-nursing animals by women in the origins of pet-keeping. Indeed, Bradshaw writes, “Far from an aberration confined to one tribe, breast-feeding of pets used to occur all over the world…” The most extensive academic treatise on the geography and functions of women breastfeeding animals is a fascinating but little known 1982 article by Fredrick Simoons and James Baldwin titled “Breast-Feeding of Animals: Its Socio-Cultural Context and Geographic Occurrence.” The authors were particularly interested in regional differences in the suckling of animals…Why Do Women Breast-feed Animals? Simoons and Baldwin reported that wet-nursing of young animals occurred in different societies for four reasons:
- Affectionate Breast-feeding: In affectionate breast-feeding, women elected to nurse baby animals out of “compassion, warmth, love.” These creatures were essentially pets treated like human babies. This form of nursing was most common among the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon and the Malay Peninsula.
- Economic Breast-feeding: In economic breast-feeding, young animals were nursed primarily for utilitarian purposes, for example, the rearing of a hunting dog. On Polynesian islands where dogs were on the menu, puppies were breastfed in order to improve the flavor of their flesh when they were consumed as adults.
- Ceremonial Breast-feeding: This rare form of animal nursing was practiced by the Ainu in Japan who raised bear cubs for sacrificial slaughter.
- Human Welfare Breast-feeding: In these cases, animals were nursed for the benefit of the humans. The most common examples were in cultures in which lactating women breast-fed animals to relieve breast pain. And as Carys Williams and her colleagues pointed out, breast-feeding puppies in Polynesia may even have been used as a form of contraception by extending lactation.
…Animal Breastfeeding and the Origins of Pet-keeping: Simoons and Baldwin argue that breast-feeding was an important step on the path to pet-keeping and the domestication of animals. John Bradshaw is not so sure. He writes, “Just because women in other cultures interacted with animals in ways that seen unfathomably intense to us does not mean they automatically considered them “pet” in the sense that we do.” His point is well-taken. However, I still don’t see much difference between the adoption of a baby melon-headed whale by a nurturing mother dolphin, and the modern penchant for adopting puppies and kittens, showering them with love, and calling them “our babies.”