Robert Kirby is, well, otherwise occupied. This is a reprint of a previous column.
Fair warning. The subject of today’s column is the human breast. Actually, we will be discussing only female breasts. If this might offend you, read something else.
It may seem rather sexist to discuss women’s breasts, but I don’t care. It’s my column and talking about men’s breasts is, well, exactly like looking at men’s breasts — boring and a waste of time.
Don’t get too excited. If the words “female breast” immediately bring to mind images of Britney Spears, Jennifer Aniston and Dolly Parton, forget it. Ditto silicone implants the size of beanbag chairs. This is not that kind of column.
We’re talking straight, serious biology here, or the point of women having breasts in the first place. Apparently, it’s to feed tigers.
As you know, I diligently scan the internet every day to find important breaking science news. Yesterday, when the editor wasn’t looking, I Googled “tiger woman boobs” and was taken to a news story.
According to MSNBC, Hla Htay, a 40-year-old mother in Myanmar, breast-feeds her baby every day at the Yangon Zoological Gardens. When done feeding her own child, she then tanks two abandoned Bengal tiger cubs.
I know what you’re thinking: “Ouch.” Turns out that the baby tigers do not have teeth yet. Furthermore, they would have died if Htay hadn’t been hired to feed them. Reuters ran a picture of her doing it.
Now seems to be a good time to point out that Htay is not undergoing some bizarre initiation for a PETA membership. She’s doing this out of the goodness of her heart and her milk.
“The cubs are just like my babies,” Htay says. “It’s not scary at all.”
Zoo veterinarians were initially at a loss as to what to do when the cubs’ birth mom gave them the boot. They tried everything before coming up with Htay.
“[The cubs] had some difficulties sucking the nipple on the bottle,” said a zoo vet. “When we tried to get the cubs to suck a lady’s breast, it was all right.”
There are rather serious implications here, not the least of which is the safety of the woman and the nutritional requirements of animals that won’t be satisfied with just milk for long. Pretty soon they’re going to want the cow, too.
While these are important points, I’m still back at the one where it actually occurred to someone to go get “a lady’s breast” in the first place. If I suggested something like that where I work, I’d get fired.
Around here, we worry about women nursing their own babies in public. Is it polite? Is it legal? Is it R-rated? We are not yet ready to deal with, “Is it human?”
I like to think that I am open-minded about nursing babies in public. I prefer discrete, but if a woman needs to haul out the guns and load up a kid, I’m OK with that.
I’m going to draw the line at tigers, though. At some point in the process, they’re going to become meat eaters. That’s when they might start looking at me for their daily nutritional requirements.