Hi All,
    The recent post on the cat nursing squirrels was interesting. There
is a book out there, The Blessing Of The Animals about Ginny, a mixed
breed dog that rescues cats (I am not sure if that included nusing if
needed). What it shows is the intense mothering instincts of the animal
involved. I see that in our house, our new kittens (two brothers) are
fearless and somewhat dumb (for cats) and yet the dog (75lb vs 2-4lb)
and our adult cat will only growl at them, not attack them, even when
they do wrong. It is instinct that these little pests are the survival
(future) of the 'pack' in our house.
    We think in human, cultural and societial terms and try to apply
these to animals.  I have some knowledge of animals and many of their
behaviors, we have to look to the specific animal and see which instinct
is kicking in. Some animals are pack animals, some herd, some family,
some family groupings, some male dominate (rare really) and  many female
dominated. Some are fight and some are flight. These groupings and
instincts are what drive the behaviors. The fact that our animals in our
house have established a 'pack' hierarchy is not a testimony to our
knowledge of animals, but to their ability and instinct for survival in
an unusual situation and to react as comes naturally to them. We have
become very aware of this and have used it to our best advantage, to
prevent a large dog from attacking the children and 'eating' the cats in
the house. It is working well.
    Humans have 'forced' themselves so far from natural societal
behaviors that understanding why breastfeeding serves so many important
and vital functions for the proper development of the 'human' (soul) of
the infant is lost on many. Which is why the use of formula is so
acceptable. This does not lower us as humans to equivalent to animals,
but raises our level of compassion, soul and desire to keep the species
the best  that it can be. Formula, to me, has allowed humans to get
farther and farther away from human parenting and also allowed the
degradation of the human potential. Formula use among those people who
would be great, compassionate and loving parents, in situations with a
sound educational background and a healthy environment probably won't
jeopardize the infant by a very high percentage but it still diminishes
the infant's potential to devolop to it's maximum. But parents who are
marginal at best, parents who have no parenting skills or problems of
their own, financial difficulties, low educational skills or other
negative factors, put their infant at a much greater risk of a poorer
outcome, passing that onto another generation, unless someone intervenes
(causing the instituting of a program to solve a problem(s) that may
have been preventable). Also simply by virture that all feeding
interactions, involve a fake bottle with fake nipple, it gives the
infant reduced himan contact (surely few bottle feeding mothers use skin
to skin contact while feeding or at other times) and not to state that
bottle-feeding mothers are distant and less loving - the potential to
remove the human contact factor from feeeding is there and with the
advent of many of the 'new' gadgets, I see less and less bottle-feeding
mothers who hold their infants in any situation at all. All of these
factors combine to make the human condition less human than it should
be. And with each generation it has the potential to get worse.
 If you want to read other books on topics that will make you stop and
think about our behaviors as humans and how they affect our children and
animals  - Selma Frailberg's Every Baby's Birthright: In Defense of
Mothering (and others in her series- older and hard to find) are
wonderful on child-rearing behaviors that damage children. A good book
on animals is the new one by Monty Roberts - The Man Who Listens To
Horses.  I know that I am preaching to the choir and thank you all for
allowing me this moment to digress into an area I haven't had a chance
to wander into in a long time.

Leslie Ward
Vine Grove, KY
"The ones that matter the most are the children. They are the true human
beings." Lakota proverb