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Discovery Brings Us One Step Closer To "Milking" Pigeons
Are you tired of boring old milk in your cereal? Is the half and half in your coffee leaving you flat? If so, the recent discovery of the gene responsible for pigeon crop "lactation" might be the good news you've been waiting for. While mammals are the only animals that produce true milk, a number of birds produce a nutritious, liquid "crop milk" for their chicks. From the article: "The idea of drinking pigeon milk may bring a shudder to every sane and rational person in the world, but it's actually quite nutritious. Although it's high in fat, to help the young squabs develop fast, it's also packed full of antioxidants and immune-system-boosting proteins."
Pigeons are infested with diseases and like to live in the middle of their own crap and other filthiness. Oh wait, so do cows! :(
Sig? Heil
I actually checked the date to be sure.
Better known as 318230.
Pigeon Milk? Seriously? That's what they're working on?
How about working on a way to keep them from crapping all over my balcony? I've begun calling it the poop deck.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"The idea of drinking pigeon milk may bring a shudder to every sane and rational person in the world"
There is nothing rational about that shudder. The disgust comes from our outdated and inaccurate instincts that come from a time before we understood infectious disease (like when we where Homo habilis).
Only sane and rational people can push past the shudder and have a drink. Unfortunately that significantly limits the market for this.
The Glastonbury Festival is held on what is for the rest of the year a working dairy farm. The festival peopled by a mixture of mainstream music fans and old-school hippies, including, of course, a number of militant vegetarians and vegans.
Every morning, a truck circulates the campsites selling pints of milk. One year, upon the tailgate of the truck, was sprayed "MILK: RAPED FROM COWS".
To this day, I don't know whether it was written there in earnest, or in jest. It could so easily be either.
But yeah, balking at pigeon milk is as irrational as spurning horse meat.
"Hey, I hope you don't mind, I got up a little early, so I took the liberty of milking your cow for you. Yeah, it took a little while to get her warmed up, she sure is a stubborn one, whew."
"We don't have a cow. We have a bull."
"I'm gonna brush my teeth."
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I have a relative who breeds pigeons. They are not even close to those infected zombies you see in a city. In fact, they are much closer to a chicken in size. And they are delicious.
"Nipples" is now censorship fodder? Come on.
Pigeons, however, don't have nipples. The "milk" arises in the crop. RTFA.
I had to look it up since avian anatomy isn't common knowledge aside from which piece is which in a bucket o' KFC.
It's the part of their esophagus that can store food for later regurgitation to their chicks. So basically they throw it up. Wikipedia also describes it as looking like "pale yellow cottage cheese".
Yum.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I apparently messed the link to crop.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
It's not a true milk, but it serves an identical function: It's a liquid produced by the parent to feed the young. Milky enough.
"Fuck", "cunt", "cock" and "prolapsed asshole" are not censorship fodder on slashdot. Nor is "nipple".
Unless you are an AC. I fucking hate ACs.
Doves and pigeons are very closely related and some of the few birds that produce crop milk.
Very specifically, crop milk is the sloughed lining of the interior of the crop. Pigeons and doves will stop eating a few days before they lay and fill their crops with seeds, insects, and sometimes fruits or berries. They will keep these foods items in the crop, grinding them over and over with the gizzard while the skin cells lining the inside of the crop get irritated and engorge with fluid. Once the chicks start feeding, which is very soon after hatching, the cells detach, burst, and mix with the well ground food items.
The resulting mix smells horrible and is my least favorite part of dealing with my birds.
So, yeah. Cooing Farms Crop Milk will never find a place in my refrigerator.
Is that any more gross then Cows Milk? Or any Milk as of a matter.
I am not a Vegan or a Vegetarian, and I do enjoy drinking milk.
But the fact that we are drinking an other animals body fluids is a bit gross, if you think too much about it.
But so is if you thinking when you eat an Fruit that you are Eating a plants Reproductive Organ. The fact if you eat a carrot or some other vegetable a full life form needed to die in order to keep you alive.
Many plants have a much more complex Genome then us animals do, in many ways they are far more evolved then we are.
Yes us animals to survive we need to do things if you think about it is rather cruel and/or disgusting in order for us to survive.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Drink from the udder
/going home now
Doing it with a pigeon
Makes you shudder
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
I was promised dog or higher!
Yea lets free the cows... Oh wait they have been bread over thousands of years to produce more milk, by us not milking them they will die a slow and painful death, from udder infections.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'd rather drink human breast milk. At least the source is more appealing.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I'm pretty sure that the Polytron can "milk" virtually any animal, producing a protein-rich nutrient fluid... Also available in larger and more powerful sizes...
of course, breast don't fully mature nor give milk until later terms of pregnancy. Tell you want, I'll handle the tedious and boring initiating breast maturation part at no expense (if they're nubile and beautiful) and you can do the milk production end of things
Thanks for ruining fruit for me.
It's hard enough to drink milk without thinking about where it came from.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Drinking something that your ancestors have drunk for thousands of years but balking at something new is not irrational. Boring sure, but rational.
Once it is shown to be safe - which depending on your level of trust might mean waiting a few generations - it would be irrational. Well maybe once it is shown to have some benefit over the traditional item too.
Some people in south america eat the shit of animals that feed on certain kind of berries, but come on, we don't have to take every secretion that comes out of an animal and put it in our mouths just because it has protein, fats and carbs in it. You could give a horse a blowjob to completion too and get that.
The fact that it's high in fat shouldn't be a problem: just produce a "skim" version of it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
a great way for gals to make a few bucks on the side.
They moved them?
"Both male and female adult birds produce crop milk and share in the feeding and care of the young."
Now not only would pigeon milk be regurgitated, it could even be man-milk!
In "Animal Crossing", Brewster the barista is a pigeon, and his special coffee contains a dash of pigeon milk.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
There was another species which we havent fucked up in pigeons, and we are now fucking them up too. Good going.
Read radical news here
Sweet!
is not what a nation that stands in the midst of an obesity epidemic needs.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They should do it with emperor penguins (that my own pic), that's the only way they feed their chicks, so you'd gets loads of that stuff. And to add to the 'Eeeew factor', it's bright green !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Like all our fellow mammals, cows only give milk when they have young to feed. To keep dairy cows producing, they are repeatedly inseminated; most of their offspring are slaughtered so that people can eat their flesh, while a few of their daughters are allowed to live for a few years in the same enslavement as their mothers before meeting the same fate when they can no longer produce. The natural lifespan of a cow is 20-25 years, but with this exploitation burning out their usefulness to humans most are slaughtered before reaching a third of that.
"Raped from cows"? Not exactly how I would phrase it, but not (given a bit of rhetorical license) inaccurate.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?"
Mammaries are capable of producing milk as soon as a child is born. It's been known of cases where an infant's nipples has leaked milk.
Breast milk production can be induced through certain supplements and medication that increases hormones, and they can be manually induced to start producing milk. Back in the old day there was such a thing as milk maids midwives who never bore their own children yet were well capable of producing breast milk, all of which was made possible by performing one or more of what has been aforementioned.
All of this can happen because the breasts operate on a supply-and-demand basis. If the body detects there is a need to produce milk, it will produce the amount of milk to supply the demand, even to activating itself from an otherwise inactive state. Even a man's chest can produce milk when induced and given hormone supplements, as they have the same tissues, glands and whatnot that women have.
As a Bird i welcome this. I have hate cows, cow milk is nasty, just thinking about cow utters and my breakfast is disturbing. Why oh why cant we just milk humas? Plunety of out of work Moms out there that could use the cash. I would rather have that then cow milk. Bird milk sounds good to me though.. Rice Milk and Soy Milk have been good to me and with cooking it is ok. How would butter milk busquets come out with all Bird Milk? Bird Butter.. hmmm maybe i need to jump on that before Land O Lakes does ;-) lol
Holland, Zaandam, were most of the worlds chocolate is processed. At the end of the process molten chocolate is stored in large vats, sometimes somebody taking samples forgets to close the tap or it is filled while open and it poors onto the floor. The floor everybody walks on and where dead bugs collect. But chocolate is expensive so what do you do with the spilled chocolate? Scoop it back up and poor it back into the system, dead bugs and all.
Enjoy your chocolate turd with real crunchy bits.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why and under what conditions would you want your immune system response to go up?
Overactive immune systems do kill people. Inflammation is often an overactive immune system in action. In the lungs it can lead to quick massive pneumonia with aggressive flu virus.
Just exactly how would a person know if their immune system is already "too high"?
The media overuse of the marketing phrase "improved immune system" does a disservice to average consumers.
correct, but of course we want naturally induced mother's milk, we being the insatiable horny-toads of the world
Nipples are just modified sweat glands, so milk is really just sweat with a different balance of ingredients. Is pigeon vomit any more disgusting than cow sweat?
Korma: Good
"The idea of drinking pigeon milk may bring a shudder to every sane and rational person in the world[...]"
Or maybe it's just the insane and irrational people in the world who shudder when thinking of drinking pigeon milk. What does that quotation imply about its author?
To
I am not a Vegan or a Vegetarian, and I do enjoy drinking milk.
Does that mean you are a Venusian? I knew you'd be visiting soon, most kind and venerated ones.
hehe :)
To
Highly nutritious pigeon vomit!
May the Maths Be with you!
Mike Tyson former heavyweight boxing champion is a lifelong Pigeon Fancier.
To
I've heard it tastes like chicken milk.
It gets better: rennet, the enzyme used to make cheese, is extracted from these slaughtered calves' stomachs. So if you're against the production of milk due to it causing the slaughter of newborn bovine then stop eating cheese, too. I'll assume that if you're the type to do this, though, that you've already avoided veal on principle.
As for me, I drink milk, I eat cheese, and I avoid veal only because it costs too much. I'm fine with "exploiting" cows for their milk, and insemination to encourage lactation is good animal husbandry. Good tasting meat and well cultured cheese being a byproduct is a benefit in my opinion, not a fault. As long as the animals aren't treated cruelly during life I don't have an ethical or moral objection to the practice. Feel free to join PETA if you disagree, just don't be surprised if I stand with the farmers when you come to "liberate" their livestock.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
You are doomed to a nervous, horrible death. I hope no one ever tells you what goes into the average supermarket hotdog.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
a great way for gals to make a few bucks on the side.
They moved them?
That made me laugh out loud. Nicely done!
(And also evidence that you need to get out of your mother's basement more.)
The fact if you eat a carrot or some other vegetable a full life form needed to die in order to keep you alive.
I don't think many people care about a plant (something that, to us, doesn't visibly feel pain or have any sort of intelligence) dying.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
"Pigeon...the other white milk!"
After all, they're going to have to work pretty damn hard to get anybody to buy this crap, er, I mean crop.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Would you feel better about eating doves?
Pigeons are domesticated birds brought here from Europe...for eating.
Here's a Scientific America podcast about it all: Superdove!: The Straight Poop on Pigeons.
Last time I looked, "milk" was liquid secreted by blood-fed specialized glands for the nurishment of offspring.
Mamals happen to use glands on their chests that apparently evolved from sweat or scent glands.
Looks like birds, such as pigeons, use glands in their digestive tract that evolved from saliva or other digestive enzyme emitting glands (judging by the location).
In both cases the secretion is nourishing and white (no doubt due to the calcium content).
Looks like "pigeon milk" is "milk" by that definition.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It gets better: rennet, the enzyme used to make cheese, is extracted from these slaughtered calves' stomachs. So if you're against the production of milk due to it causing the slaughter of newborn bovine then stop eating cheese, too.
Um, I imagine if you're against the production of milk you're probably already avoiding cheese...
Really... I was wondering what the dried goo that I pick out of my nostrils has to do with milk.
Ya, I've often wondered at what point the first human decided, "Hmmm. There's some white fluid coming out of those penis-looking things under that cow. I ought to get a mouthful of that!" It's left me eating my Lucky Charms magically dry...
At least with fruit the plant does "want" you to eat it ;).
:).
In contrast think about a "US breakfast" of
fried slice belly of pig, aborted chicken embryos, mashed grass seeds digested by yeast and toasted. Now add cheese, yoghurt, waffles/pancakes and honey
I think it's a good idea for people to know what they are eating. That way they'd at least regularly realize that some poor animal died so they could have fried chicken etc.
When you are back in them olden time. You either ate/drank everything off the animal you can or you died from starvation because who know when the next time you can eat.
If it didn't kill you, and it was soft enough to chew. Then they ate it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You could well be right, but I don't think so, for a couple of reasons:
- you need a live cow to drink its milk, don't you? That means you're not hungry enough to kill the cow and eat it but are rather patient (and presumably well-fed) enough to keep the cow around and forgo its meat in exchange for the milk;
- if I recall, the subset of humans capable of tolerating lactose only arose around 9,000 years ago, and it's still a relatively uncommon trait (ie more people are lactose intolerant than not).
Unfertilized.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Bert has told Ernie for years now that a nutritious glass of pigeon milk makes you keep a healthy yellow pallor. However, thinking about it is making me turn a bit green to be honest. Crop Milk indeed.
-JWR
Holly: We're a bit short on a few supplies.
Lister: Like what?
Holly: Cow's milk. Ran out of that eons ago. Fresh and dehydrated.
Lister: What kind of milk are we using now?
Holly: Emergency back-up supply. We're on the dog's milk.
Lister: Dog's milk?
Holly: Nothing wrong with dog's milk. Full of goodness, full of vitamins, full of marrowbone jelly. Lasts longer than any other type of milk, dog's milk.
Lister: Why?
Holly: No bugger'll drink it. And the advantage of dog's milk is that when it goes off it tastes exactly the same as when it's fresh.
Lister: Why didn't you tell me, Hol?
Holly: What, and spoil your tea?
if you think that's gross.. you haven't been on the internet long enough
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Luckily, like most things in my life, I don't particularly give a damn about ethics when it comes to what I eat. Have fun trying to convince a woman to sell you her breast milk though.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
... we haven't cured cancer or AIDS... built flying cars or gotten 100 mpg on gasonline.
A far more impressive headline: "Discovery Brings us One Step Closer to driving 100 miles on one Pigeon."
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
It gets better: rennet, the enzyme used to make cheese, is extracted from these slaughtered calves' stomachs. So if you're against the production of milk due to it causing the slaughter of newborn bovine then stop eating cheese, too.
Um, I imagine if you're against the production of milk you're probably already avoiding cheese...
You know, when you put it that way...
Seriously, though, my point (awkwardly put, as you pointed out), was that cheese was a double whammy - not only is milk production causing more calves to be born than is natural, but the production of cheese requires the slaughter of those same calves. The people who think that veal production is the only reason calves are slaughtered are often ignorant of the veal-cheese connection. But, yeah, for people who would rather go veg than drink milk over the veal thing this would be yet another reason, not reason #1.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
There's actually artificial rennet that can be used in cheesemaking, but you'd still be stuck with the issue of milk production.
I'm pretty sure a bright hominid noticed that female mammals lactate (starting with Mom and then his wife as she fed his progeny.) It doesn't take any imagination to presume he did a little taste testing first with his wife... found it Hhhmmmm? Not bad. Then tried collecting the milk of cows, goats, sheep, probably anything that wouldn't bite his hand off when he tried to milk it (namely herbivores for the most part, Ogg likes the wolf milk but has a hard time drinking it from his left stump.)
The real kick was when he found out you could add things to milk to get cheese (the curdling agent is called rennet and you're better off not knowing what the most common rennets are), which was a tremendously more concentrated food, and would easily store for weeks, months, even years. That and with dozens of different ingredients and hundreds of different bacteria and molds to choose from, there was a endless supply of vastly different colors, flavors, and textures to make cheese into.
Can you make pidgeon cheese and is it good on a burger?
If birds come from dinosaurs, and we can activate a gene in birds for milking. Then once we create a dinosaur from recovered DNA, we can start milking dinos. Think of the economy of scale. Instead of 10,000 birds, you'll only need like 10 dino for the same level of milk production.
I can't wait for my all dino breakfast:
1) velociraptor bacon (in place of turkey bacon)
2) t-rex sausage
3) Brontosaurus milk
Other species of humans may have died off when they tried to milk the bull.....
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
Mr. Hilton: ...and garnished with lark's vomit.
Inspector: LARK'S VOMIT?!
Mr. Hilton: Correct.
Inspector: It doesn't say anything here about Lark's vomit!
Mr. Hilton: Uh, it does at the bottom of the label, after monosodium glutamate.
Inspector: I hardly think that's good enough! I think it would be more appropriate if the box wore a big red label "WARNING: LARK'S VOMIT"!
First against the wall when the revolution comes
Well as some wine or beer lovers say: "Water? No, thanks. Fish sh%t in it."
Beer is made with that same water. While the water in wine has been filtered through a plant, both wine and beer are full of yeast excrement.
I think our hipersentiveness is already going too far.
Technically, yes. See "Milk: The Mammary Gland and Its Secretion" by Cowry, et al. (IIRC) Males have functional mammary glands, that can secrete milk under the influence of certain hormones (especially prolactin), and rarely with physical stimulation (suckling).
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Perhaps "regularly" reminding consumers they're eating cooked, dead animal carcasses might be of some use to ethical vegetarians/vegans, but for the rest of us: Animals are damn tasty.
He who has no
"Oh you can milk just about anything that has a nipple."
Maybe some of us keep eating animals so that PETA will keep providing us porn ;) :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/21/peta-plans-porn-website_n_972497.html
Tell you what...let's make a deal...
I'll drink the pigeon milk, if I can milk the pigeons by kicking the hell out of them. Deal?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Plants, insects shit on them. Traditional wine making involved people walking through the grapes to crush them.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
I was going to argue with you over this, but then I re-read the wiki page I linked to earlier and got depressed. It turns out that in the US we're at something like 80-90% of cheese manufactured using artificial rennet (obtained from genetically modified bacteria). There's no way that using just chymosin expressed by bacteria gets the same result as actual rennet from real calves (which contains other important enzymes like pepsin and lipase, balanced by evolution for the mother's milk).
I'm not sure I buy the argument from the GM industry that natural rennet isn't sufficient for the national cheese demand, it's probably just cheaper. At least I have an excuse to give for my snobbish disdain for US-produced cheeses.
tl, dr: you were right, and my initial point about cheese being derived from animal cruelty is 10% moot and 90% invalid.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
No I will not.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hah!
I somehow suspect that's unlikely to achieve the desired result.
He who has no
Would you like to live next to a pigeon dairy? Would that be better or worse than living next to a cow dairy? I lived just up from a cow dairy a few years ago. At least the cows didn't fly up to my house, pooping all the way.