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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."
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!
That's why I only drink human milk. It can be tough to find, but you can find pretty much anything on Craigslist.
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.
You have things exactly backwards. I don't know where you saw such lazy, filthy unprofessional dairy farmers, but I can assure you the norm is for family operations to want the highest ratings in inspections of farm, cows, and testing of milk. I have relatives and friends who are dairy farmers and they run a very clean tight ship and take supreme care of their animals. It is normally the huge corporate farms with underpaid help who have the problems because executives in a building in a city far away don't know farming and don't give a crap. Don't even get me started on massive chicken or hog farms (again, many friends and relatives in the business)....let's just say you definitely would want the small farm product rather than corporate swill.
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!
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.