Happy Mothers Day

One Thing They Aren't: Maternal - New York Times: "In a word — ha. As much as we may like to believe that mother animals are designed to nurture and protect their young, to fight to the death, if need be, to keep their offspring alive, in fact, nature abounds with mothers that defy the standard maternal script in a raft of macabre ways. There are mothers that zestily eat their young and mothers that drink their young's blood. Mothers that pit one young against the other in a fight to the death and mothers that raise one set of their babies on the flesh of their siblings.

Among several mammals, including lions, mice and monkeys, females will either spontaneously abort their fetuses or abandon their newborns when times prove rocky or a new male swaggers into town.

Other mothers, like pandas, practice a postnatal form of family planning, giving birth to what may be thought of as an heir and a spare, and then, when the heir fares well, walking away from the spare with nary a fare-thee-well.

'Pandas frequently give birth to twins, but they virtually never raise two babies,' said Scott Forbes, a professor of biology at the University of Winnipeg. 'This is the dark side of pandas, that they have two and throw one away.'

It is also something that zoos with ever-popular panda displays rarely discuss."

Heard this on Prager today. If the little Darwin fish on the back of cars is true, then why is this behavior "wrong"?

Also, if people and animals have the same "rights", why don't we prosecute animals for such behavior?

I'm glad my Mom was lived out the Judeo-Christian ethic of raising her children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and didn't follow her fellow earthmates in their evolutionary examples.

Thanks Mom. Happy Mothers Day.