Nursing dogs

A month ago, Reuters reported on this amazing story:

DAR ES SALAAM, Feb 9 (Reuters) – A Tanzanian mother went into hysterics when she found her six month-old baby suckling dog’s milk, a local daily reported on Thursday. The mother left her son on a mat while she went to hang clothes in the yard of her Dar Es Salaam home, Uhuru newspaper said. When she came back to find him suckling on the dog, she screamed and rushed to her brother’s house to seek advice. But the brother managed to convince her dog’s milk was harmless. “Since that day the baby is doing well and hasn’t had diarrhoea or any signs of illness,” he was quoted as saying. Another relative, who witnessed the incident on Monday, was also unperturbed. “The baby was satisfied, since his belly was full and his lips had traces of milk,” he told Uhuru.

I think that story is extremely sweet, as is this excerpt from Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, which I just read this evening:

Dogs are the ultimate example of the accidental breeding programs humans create for the animals they live and work with. Many experts believe that one of the reasons wolves turned into dogs was that nursing human mothers probably adopted orphaned wolf cubs and nursed them at their breasts along with their human babies.

Makes sense to me.