Once a mother...

Becoming a mother has given me a new perspective on life, and I've been touched in ways I never could have imagined. I got this in an e-mail from a friend this morning, and had to pass it on:

At a zoo in California, a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely, and, due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth.

The mother tiger, after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health, although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression.

The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate another mother's cubs, perhaps she would improve. After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother.

The veterinarians decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one species will take on the care of a different species. The only 'orphans' that could be found quickly were a litter of weanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger.

Would they become cubs or pork chops? Take a look...

I witnessed something like this several years ago. We had an "adopted" cocker spaniel named Lady that, to our knowledge, never had a litter of puppies. (At least not as long as we had her.)Our cat had a litter of kittens and -- for whatever reason -- she abandoned them. I don't remember exactly how Lady ended up with the kittens, but we found her in the flower bed surrounded by those little mewling babies nursing away.

Well, since she didn't have puppies, we thought she was just "pretending" to feed them. But after taking a closer look, we found that Lady was actually making milk to feed her litter! She raised those kittens just like they were hers...bless her soul!

I've heard that adoptive mothers (of the human sort) sometimes experience something much like this. I guess it's God's way of helping us help each other...no matter what species we are.

I also recently saw a video that showed the amazing nature of mothers...a leopardess, after finishing off a baboon, discovers a tiny infant - a one-day-old baboon. In that moment, this young leopard forgets she is a hunter, and nurtures the baby baboon as if it were her own cub. See it here: http://www.maniacworld.com/the-night-the-leapard-lay-down-with-a-baboon.html.