Mar 4, 2016

WHY GOATS USED TO BREASTFEED HUMAN BABIES

The Internet’s favorite animal images are photos or videos of one species nursing a baby of another.
A cow nurses lambs. A dog nurses tiger cubs. You can almost hear the aawws.

Google a different sort of interspecies suckling, however — animal-human nursing — and you’ll likely find tabloid headlines and no small amount of fetishized, not-safe-for-work material that borders on porn.
You can almost hear the ewws.
But it was not always this way, and it’s still not in some places. In fact, human-animal breastfeeding has a fairly rich history. Look no further than Rome (or, if you’re low on frequent flyer miles, Georgia), whose symbol is a statue of the Roman gods Romulus and Remus, who according to legend were abandoned and then breastfed by a she-wolf — an image said to symbolize the city’s strength and survival.

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