A Colorado Woman Let a Puppy Drink Milk from Her Breast

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Last week, a woman in Colorado posted a Facebook photo of a puppy drinking milk from her breast. The picture sparked an internet backlash, and she soon became a flavour-of-the-week celebrity on local Colorado news. By that time she had become reclusive and had started telling a slightly more heroic version of the puppy breast-feeding story. Her story is becoming inconsistent and never made sense in the first place. I hate to break it to you, but the lady who breast-fed her puppies might actually be an attention-starved lunatic.

Initially, she posted this on Facebook:

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The post included the text: "Yep I'm breast feeding all 5 pups. Some may think its [sic] gross. They are 4 DAYS old. Their mother was killed. And I am happy to be able to provide them wit [sic] something better than formula for pups.” So there it is; she breastfed them because she had a low opinion of formula for pups, and she doesn't give a shit what you think.

Yet there's a documentation gap here. She said people started calling her out online for her so-called crime against the natural order of things, but she's anonymous, and her Facebook account is apparently private, so I can't read the cyber bullies' words. If they were anything like the people who commented on the KRDO local news website, they sounded like this:

• "What is the world coming to? I read this and it literally made me sick."
• "I wish i could read where someone saved a baby from abortion. I'd much rather news report on that but it wont happen."
• "Sorry but that dog would just have to die. I would try to take to a vet but no way in hell would i let a animal do that to me."
• "Any person not perverted would be sick by this crappy trashy woman."

Screencap of the anonymous lady on TV, via

The TV news report in question featured a completely changed version of the story. Now it had become her last resort, and she was only feeding one, not all five. The one who needed breast milk was the runt of the litter and was refusing to drink puppy formula. She told the reporter, "Literally what clicked in my head was like, put him on you, just pray to God he will take something and not die.” She continued, “I never thought I would ever do that; it was taboo to me as well.”

She's convinced her heroic actions saved the puppy. "I did the right thing. I can’t let their criticism bring me down when I did something right and I’ve seen the results. That dog is alive because I took that initiative,” she said. The happy, healthy puppy is named Tubbs.

Perhaps she had read extensively on the subject and knew that, according to an often reprinted essay by medical historian Samuel Radbill, native North American peoples have a rich tradition of letting dogs drink their breast milk when the food supply is low, and that, according to the British tabloid Closer, a woman in California fed her puppy breast milk much more openly in 2012.

If she'd done that much research, she would also know that a human nipple is harder to suckle from than a bottle nipple, and that human milk comes out with particular difficulty. If she'd googled it, she would have seen that puppies will suck on just about anything, but if they don't have the strength, an eyedropper will let you squeeze the liquid out without the puppy's having to put forth the effort.

So maybe – just maybe – she let the puppy suck on her nipple for the hell of it, and maybe she put the photo on Facebook to troll her friends and it worked too well. Maybe all this business about saving a puppy's life is just a bunch of back-pedalling after people lost their shit at her.

Letting a baby animal drink the wrong kind of milk is far from perfect. A vet told KRDO: "I don't think it's a big deal, but for them to grow appropriately, I think it would be important for them to get on a canine formula." The following picture of a cat letting a bunch of baby squirrels drink her breast milk is cute and everything….

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The only thing wrong is that they, like Tubbs, aren't getting proper nutrition.

Follow Mike on Twitter: @MikeLeePearl