Do other mammals ever have problems breastfeeding?

[Shitemum]

Genuine question.

Occasionally, but usually with dire consequences. If a lamb won't feed from its mother at all and therefore received no colostrum it will usually die, even if bottle fed .

Is that the same thing as having difficulty feeding?

I've wondered that too. I suppose that they must have - you quite often see animals in zoos that are being raised by the keepers, don't you? It wouldn't surprise me if some of those are down to breastfeeding issues. Or even (going off at a tangent here) PND.

At Monkey World lots of chimp babies in paticular had to be bottle fed, but that was in captivity....I came away thinking 'are we all suffering the conseuqnces of living in the 'human zoo'? etc.'....deep eh

Is it the baby animal not feeding, or the mum refusing to feed it?

BTW Blegianbun, some animals will feed other babies in their group - elephants sometimes do this, I think, and some primates too.

Snap belgianbun.

This reminds me - I went to a farm recently and saw a sow with 12 piglets. She was most determinedly lying on her stomach to prevent them latching. They all looked very plump and lively, so they were obviously getting plenty when she did let them feed. Having had 2 greedy guts babies, I could sympathise.

Hmm, I mean apart from in cases where the mother has rejected the baby as soon as it was born.

Is it common that a healthy baby mammal won't feed?

Again, on another tangent - I was chatting about wet nursing to my Dad the other day, and I was supposing that before formula was invented, that babies would be fed by another family member if there were serious problems with breastfeeding. Would that be right?

oops moving too fast for me!

Animals feeding another animal's offspring - I've just remembered my mum told me that when she was little they had some semi-wild cats who lived under the garden shed who had kittens at the same time and they would take it in turns to feed all the kittens while the other one went out!

I used to do research on a certain gene (related to the one Herceptin acts on), and if that gene wasn't switched on in the breast, no colostrum was produced and not much milk, so half the mouse pups died.

Until we sussed what was going on and could foster the pups shortly after birth - they were fine after that.

I think the number of animals in zoos that are rejected by their mothers is more to do with being in a zoo than anything else. They are living a completely unnatural life and that affects the way they express themselves and their behaviour.

I think that I live an unnatural life too, to be honest. I have moved around a lot since marriage, am miles away from family, and have no other Mums with young children in our street. That must be a million miles away from the way that we evolved as a species.

Well quite, I'm sure living in a post-industrial society means it's harder for most people to b/f. We don't tend to see many other women around us b/f, certainly not at close range, so we don't know how to do it.

other mammals do get mastitis as well so that would be problematic; runts in litters have difficulty latching and will die unless hand-reared; so yes, I suppose it's not just humans.

thumbwitch - oh god, I've just remembered we inadvertantly caused mastisis in our cat when we had the opportunity of homes for all her (8+ week old) kittens 2 days apart and took it...

in Zoo progs, if an animal has a c/s, the natural flow of hormones is interrupted making the mother less likely to bond with baby hence why some zoo animals won't allow their babies to suckle.

8-week old+, I mean, not that there were 8 of them and they were a week old!

runts may not necessarily be because they can't feed properly. different offspring, different birth weights, that is all that runt usually mean. most runts will survive the litter, they just get stuck in and find their way.

Mrs. TittleMouse: Yes, if there was a reason the mother could not breastfeed, the baby would sometimes be fed by a wet nurse, or perhaps a family member. There was also the option of feeding baby the milk from other animals, as well as homemade formulas.

I'm sure I remember reading the same as foxytocin - that animals who give birth by c-section will often refuse to suckle their young.

I wonder how much of the infant mortality rate could have been due to failures in breast feeding without any other back up available?

And also, whether wet nursing was more common because there were more women with milk but no baby

i believe animals in zoos can have problems breastfeeding because they have not had the experience of seeing other animals breastfeed, or possibly because they are separated from their peers and don't have support at the time of the infant arriving?

either way they once 'taught' some mammals (something like orangutans IIRC) to feed by getting breastfeeding human mothers to sit outside the cage and demonstrate feeding their babies!

i think the same problems may be a contributing factor in human bf difficulties
we don't tend to grow up seeing lots of women bfing as we would have done in the past
and are often isolated (by choice sometimes) from other more experienced mothers after we have given birth

Ironically I was in a zoo yesterday with DS1 (11), DS2 (8) and DS3 (12 days old). I started bf DS3 in his sling, and DS2 said, "Should you be doing that here?"

I had to laugh. As I pointed out to him, we were in a zoo FGS and surrounded by animals bf, having sex, defecating in public and all sorts of things. As just another mammal, I argued, there was no reason why I shouldn't join in and bf his brother right there and then. Plus it wasn't as though there was anywhere else I could do it, and his brother couldn't exactly wait.

DS2 looked bemused for a minute, and then ran off to the play area with his big brother (who is recovering from the militant bf lecture he got from me when he suggested I close the curtains in the Dining Room whilst bf in there last weekend)!

I am quite shocked how little bf these two have actually seen since they were toddlers, and it's no wonder we have lost the folk knowledge of how to do it.