“A woman in New Zealand says she is breastfeeding her pet puppy because she wants it to protect her baby daughter as they both grow up. Kura Tumanako told the NZPA news agency Wednesday that she had started breastfeeding the Staffordshire bull terrier pup after her baby stopped taking her milk. ‘I didn’t want to waste it so I gave it to Honey Boy,’ she said. According to NZPA, Tumanako said she had fed the dog twice a day for the past week but would probably wean it off in about six weeks’ time. Her baby, now 2 months old, is on bottled milk. ‘I wanted to raise it (the pup) with my baby,’ she said. ‘I wanted to bring it up with a baby. It will protect her as they grow up,’ said Tumanako, who lives in Hastings in New Zealand’s North Island. ‘He drinks more than the baby. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s a little bit ticklish.’” —Yahoo (US)

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

First reaction when you read a story such as this: What the…? How does anybody even conceive of something like this? It’s become a commonplace that people “treat their pets like children,” but this is evidently a matter of taking that commonplace to its fullest extreme.

Second reaction when you read a story such as this: How in the world does a story like this become news? In other words, how do the papers get wind of it? Does the lady call up the newspaper and say, “Hey, I got a story for you. I give suck to my dog.” Does word get around the neighbors, who pass it on and on until it reaches a newsdesk somewhere? It’s strange because you’d imagine that most people who engage in a behavior such as this — and let’s face it, there are probably others — must go to great lengths to keep it to themselves.

If you google around in an effort to answer this question, you end up finding a few interesting tidbits. For example, here’s a picture of the woman and her puppy. One paper even published a picture of her actually breastfeeding her dog. Wow. Did you ever think you’d see that on anything outside some freaky bestiality porn site?

Perhaps most telling of all, however, is the story that indicates that Ms. Tumanako’s child and two dogs have all been taken away from her by government agencies. And apparently she has also been checked into a mental health unit somewhere. Big surprise.

Finally, you know what else is interesting? A zillion news outlets and blogs picked up the “breastfeeding dog” story, but the sad conclusion — which is that, with her public display of weird behavior, the woman has effectively lost her family — hardly got any notice at all.

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