When mother animals adopt other animals

Yes, animals adopt. Not always, but often enough to create a wealth of stories on Google from which to create this article. 

A story reported in a Pittsburgh newspaper tells of a mother cat in Pennsylvania that was still nursing her litter of kittens when she decided she could feed one more.

In this case, the additional tug at here teats was not another kitten, but a young puppy.

Apparently, a neighbor's dog had just birthed a litter of puppies at about the same time the kittens were born.

One pup was a runt and the mother dog was not feeding it.  The owner of the mother dog tried hand feeding the puppy from an eyedropper. No luck.  So she approached her neighbor  (whose cat had just birthed kittens), to see if the mother cat might nurse the puppy.

The mother cat took to the pup immediately. She nursed the dog, right along with her own newborn kittens, and even bathed him with her tongue, just like she did her kittens.

The local vet said that maternal instincts often take over and a mother animal will frequently nurse a surrogate infant, adding that he had heard of cows and horses that also nursed young that had been rejected by their mothers.

An interesting story from the 1990s:  a mother bottlenose dolphin was spotted swimming in the South Pacific with a young spinner dolphin, an entirely different species of dolphin.

Two mother bottlenose dolphins were spotted – one had a young bottlenose dolphin by her side, the other a young spinner dolphin.

This was reported as the first time a dolphin had adopted a dolphin from another species; likely, the mother had lost her own pup and either kidnapped the spinner dolphin or she had serendipitously found the spinner pup.

In 2001, at a wild game park in Kenya, a young lioness, Larsens, spotted an Oryx antelope calf near its mother; the lioness frightened away the antelope mother, then picked up the calf in her mouth.

The lioness kept the Oryx calf by her side for naps, nuzzling it, but allowed it to return to its antelope Oryx mother for nursing.

Larsens, the lioness, nuzzled the Oryx calf this way for more than two weeks, until a lion from another pride killed the calf while the calf was playing away from the lioness, who was then napping.

Apparently, when the lioness awoke to find the dead Oryx, she was enraged and roared at the predatory lion, circling the predator 10 times, before she disappeared from view.

On Valentine's Day, 2002, the lioness adopted another Oryx calf, this time protecting the calf fiercely from predator lions, which would kill and eat the calf.

According to the expert quoted in the original article, the lioness' behavior was very unusual for a large cat, because she adopted a total of five Oryx calves, all the while nuzzling them but also allowing them to return to their natural mothers for nursing.

It was unusual for a lioness to adopt infant animals from a species that her own species eats as food. Larsens' behavior showed that animals have feelings and a true knowledge of what they are doing, according to experts.

In 2003, two mother polar bears in the Arctic accidentally switched their own cubs soon after birth, according to a story reported in Science News For Kids.

The article does not speculate on how the two polar bears made this mistake, but it does state that the two mothers did not even realize they had done this. Nor did they care.

DNA testing between mothers and cubs revealed the mistaken identities.

In farms that breed animals, large numbers of cows, pigs, or sheep giving birth at around the same time may inadvertently create accidental baby swaps, too, according to the article.

In these cases, the mother animal isn't sure which infants are hers, and which are not. The importance of DNA testing to ensure pedigreed lines is important, to verify lines of milk production, for example.

Here is a link to a blog with two interesting photos: dog nursing two kittens along with her own puppy; a young puppy copping a ride on the back of a cat.

And so, yes, animals are so much like we are; after all, we are but animals. Animals love their young and more often than we might imagine, they will take in infant animals from other mothers and other species. 

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A repost.