Milk contains pus?!

Gods be good, who comes up with this crap?!

The Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), which is essentially the "medical" branch of PeTA. Despite it's name, fewer than 10% of its members are physicians. They do, however, make wild claims about meat and dairy product, including the "pus" thing and the claims that it causes acne and so on. You want good reason why Neal Barnard is such a bad source for any medical information? His being a PeTA shill pretty much explains it all.

Eggs are chicken periods. But damn they're tasty.

I thought I was the only one who said this! Totally grosses out my friends...

And yes, milk contains pus, and carmine dye contains beetles, and gelatin is made from ground up cow bones, and in some parts of the world, people eat dogs and cats. But honestly, if you're going to eat animals, does it really make a difference?

Actually, if you say this, you're incorrect. A human being has menses to slough away the contents of the uterus, including unfertilized eggs. While the chicken does indeed start out with thousands of unfertilized eggs, much like a human being, the egg travels through the oviduct for approximately 25 hours, during which time it's given its protective shell. If it makes it all the way through the oviduct without being fertilized, it will never be fertilized and will never become a chick--so the whole "unfertilized chicken fetus" thing is incorrect, too. It's an egg. That's it. Anyway, regardless of whether the egg is fertile or not, its fate is the same: it is deposited in a nest or on the ground or in some receptacle from which the farmer collects it. It's not being sloughed away, since it was never implanted in the first place.

Slightly OT, but it's equally incorrect to call a dog's heat cycle its "period." A human woman is not fertile during her menses. A female dog is at the peak of her fertility when she comes into estrus twice a year.

Humans are the only species on earth that drinks the milk of another mammal. We are also the only species that continues to drink milk after being weaned off of mother's milk. Just sayin'.

THIS IS PURE ANARCHY...
What's next? Dogs living with cats?!?!

All I'll say is this, none of the above in your pictures does it happen naturally. It is all with human interaction/encouragement.

Do I agree with the original statement? Kinda.
Could there be a few exceptions in nature? Sure.
Is likely or a large percentage? Nope.

That is not the point. The point is that milk (regardless of the animal it comes from) is a food source, and ALL mammals, regardless of where the milk comes from, will choose it as a food source if it is available, INCLUDING adult mammals.

That is the point.

*edited to add - There has also been instances where non-mammals have chosen it as a food source when it was available. I mean seriously people, dogs will eat their own ****. If that isn't an example of the animal kingdom's utter lack of pickiness when it comes to food, I don't know what is.

We are unique in our capacity to knowingly care about something beyond ourselves.

As far as we know. Possibly not, though. Dolphins have been known to save human beings from shark attacks. For all we know, they do it consciously and for species preservation reasons. How do they know there are billions of us buggers on land?

Or maybe human proportions and (from their view) clumsiness in the water trigger their "aww wookit the widdew baby" nurturing instincts.

LOL, quite possibly but that very tendency for apparent altruistic behavior seems to strongly associate with species who also show highly structured social systems, potential self awareness and some scientists have even gone so far as to say language and culture.

And for obvious reasons. And it nice to see the word "apparent" in there. An important distinction. But self awareness, language or culture are not necessary as dogs, for example, also produce apparent altruistic behavior without them.

Certainly not necessary, but altruistic behaviors do seem to have some significant adaptive advantages in social structures that have gone beyond tit-for-tat interactions, and given the fossilized evidence of dire wolves in the la brea area that died of old age despite having clearly lived with debilitating arthritis and other fossils of wolves who had crippling femur breaks that had healed and apparently the animal survived for years afterwords, dogs in general certainly qualify as well beyond the tit-for-tat stage.

The problem of course with trying to establish self-awareness, language or culture with animals like orcas and dolphins is there's such a massive umwelt issue going on. We're talking about an animal that lives in a three dimensional environment who's primary sensory system is a sonar system quite possibly better than anything we've been able to develop since we first started working with sonar in the early 1900's. We're probably not even picking up on half of what they're actually communicating to each other and understanding even less.....:ohwell:

If dolphins had a language it would be pretty easy to prove. We don't need to communicate with them, just show they communicate with each other. So take dolphins that live together, separate one, show it a puzzle/problem and give it the solution, then put it back with the others. Then cycle out the next one. If they talk to each other in a grammatical language, they'd share the solution with the next ones and it would be obvious that the first one to encounter a problem takes longer or fails to come up with a solution yet the others immediately come to the solution.

I don't think the puzzle thing exactly has been done but dolphins do teach skills to their offspring:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7475-dolphins-teach-their-children-to-use-sponges.html#.U6hP__ldWCk

That they communicate in some form is actually pretty well established, the question is how and to what extent. We tend to focus on vocal and body language communication because that's how WE communicate. My point was that it's altogether probable their "language" is more complex than we can currently establish because they can use an entire sensory system (sonar) that we're just beginning to catch up on. It's similarly problematic to how bee flower selection used to confuse the hell out of researchers until we realized that bees can see in ultraviolet. It was outside of our own sensory range so no body picked up on it for quite a while.

Also, fun fact, certain species of octopus have been shown to learn simply by observing other octopus solving a problem. Places them well above many mammals on intelligence scales, but if we have a hard enough time working with other mammals imagine trying to interpret behavior on an intelligent invertebrate!

Oh, I saw something a few months ago about scientists observing a group of young male dolphins passing a puffer fish around, squeezing it in their jaws for few moments to ingest small amounts of the toxin, and then spending long periods of time apparently staring at their own reflections under the water surface.....

Yep, and the fact that dogs cannot learn by watching other dogs says they aren't nearly as intelligent as people tend to give them credit for. Our capacity for empathy unfortunately also makes us prone to perceive intelligence/foreplanning/abstract thinking where it isn't happening.

There's also a big difference between repeating an action that is rewarded, learning a task/action by watching someone perform it, and using grammatical language to convey abstract concepts. I can watch someone do something and learn how to do it without speaking with them. But without language they cannot explain to me that last week they saw Bob kissing Suzie and they told Joe, who is now angry. It (among other things) makes possible a much more sophisticated type of social organization/interaction.

Anyway, the point I was making before was that there are two ways to know something: by discovering/observing it yourself, or by having it communicated to you by someone else. You don't need to know what dolphins are saying, or how they communicate, to determine whether communication does or doesn't happen. There is no need for "do dolphins have a language" to be some great mystery.

And where's the calcium and protein in almond or coconut milk? What is the point in even drinking it? :frown:

Disclaimer: My response it not directed to the poster of the above quote, I just sued the quote for reference

Cow's milk is not the only source of calcium and protein. If we eat well, we get all the calcium and protein from fruits, vegetable, meats, legumes & eggs, even a vegan cane get plenty of calcium and protein from non-animal products. No one in our home 'drinks' any type of milk, but if we need milk for cereal or baking then we use almond or coconut milk. Humans were not designed to drink another animal's milk - that's why you can't give babies cow's milk and if you do decide to give it to your kids after the 'safe' age of 1 yr old, it's recommended to cut back to skim or 2% after the age of 2. Even so, do you feel okay filling your body (or your kids) with all kinds of antibiotics and hormones that you can easily prevent them from ingesting? If you think there is a single dairy cow out there that isn't on antibiotics or progesterone, you're wrong. Do you think we send milk to third world countries with starving children - um, no...we send nut products because it's safer and quality control is much better. If you are dead set on drinking animal's milk, why not get yourself a goat or a cow of your own?

Oh noes my one year old drinks 24oz+ of this pus contained beverage. Whatever do I do? :noway: :sad:

Don't think about your food too much. :sick:

Humans are the only species on the planet that comes to an internet message board to complain about which food will sustain us better...

Humans are the only species on earth that drinks the milk of another mammal. We are also the only species that continues to drink milk after being weaned off of mother's milk. Just sayin'.

My dog & cat both disagree with you.

*coherently...

well, ****, still not covered.

And where's the calcium and protein in almond or coconut milk? What is the point in even drinking it? :frown:

Disclaimer: My response it not directed to the poster of the above quote, I just sued the quote for reference

Cow's milk is not the only source of calcium and protein. If we eat well, we get all the calcium and protein from fruits, vegetable, meats, legumes & eggs, even a vegan cane get plenty of calcium and protein from non-animal products. No one in our home 'drinks' any type of milk, but if we need milk for cereal or baking then we use almond or coconut milk. Humans were not designed to drink another animal's milk - that's why you can't give babies cow's milk and if you do decide to give it to your kids after the 'safe' age of 1 yr old, it's recommended to cut back to skim or 2% after the age of 2. Even so, do you feel okay filling your body (or your kids) with all kinds of antibiotics and hormones that you can easily prevent them from ingesting? If you think there is a single dairy cow out there that isn't on antibiotics or progesterone, you're wrong. Do you think we send milk to third world countries with starving children - um, no...we send nut products because it's safer and quality control is much better. If you are dead set on drinking animal's milk, why not get yourself a goat or a cow of your own?

I was on antibiotics and birth control minipills when I was nursing.

If a body has been buried under a tree, cadaver dogs will frequently indicate the tree rather than the ground...because that's where they can smell the decomposition compounds.

So you're saying even the trees on this planet are carnivorous?

Omnivorous scavengers.

Leafy little vultures! I'll try not to die under one.

Better do it in the desert, otherwise it'll niggle a little root right under you.

I'm thinking of spending my rapidly approaching golden years on Mars. I'll be awfully old to start over on a new planet, but still, I might just hang on until we can get there.