Bad Moms

Happy Belated Mother's Day!

Yesterday, your local zoo or aquarium could probably be reliably counted on to have put out some social media content about the mothers and offspring at their zoo.  Not that this is limited to Mother's Day, of course.  Baby animal content is some of the most popular material that you can put out there - the public loves it.  I love it, too.  Often, I scroll through the comments to see how folks are reacting.

Most of the reactions are what you'd expect - variations of the phrases "Aww" and "How cute," interspersed with a few snarky anti-zoo comments ("How sad, it'll never be free, blah, blah").  There is one other genre of comments that I see now and then, one that gets my goat.  They feature commenters using the animals as a metaphor to shame other people - especially moms.  "Look, she cares so much for her baby, it's too bad that so many human mothers don't care about their children."  "She's a better mom than a lot of people."  Especially in the aftermath of the leaked Supreme Court ruling about Roe v. Wade, it's not unusual to see self-righteous commenters compare the loving animal mothers to people who would get an abortion (and not to the human's advantage).

So, just taking a step back here...  I love animals.  Always have.  They've been my driving passion in life.  I love them... but I don't romanticize them.  So excuse me for a second while I call bullcrap.

Depending on how we define it, some animals are "great mothers."  Apart from humans, no mother spends longer nurturing her offspring than an orangutan does.  A cheetah will square off against lions, hyenas, and other larger, more powerful predators to defend her young.  A lapwing will feign injury to try to lure a predator away from her nest.   A crocodile will tenderly help its young escape from their eggshells, then watch over them for months.  A caecilian literally lets her young eat parts of her body to nourish them.

And, on the other end of the spectrum, kangaroos will lob joeys at predators as a diversion as they flee for their lives.  A mother eagle will casually watch as one chick bullies its slightly younger sibling to death.  Primates will browbeat subordinate females in the troop -including their own daughters - into reproductive inactivity, suppressing their hormones.  In many mammals, a mother that feels too stressed out during pregnancy will abort; if she's already given birth, she might abandon or eat her babies.  It's a lost cause in her mind, so might as well reclaim some nutrients.  And, of course, a tremendous number of females of a wide variety of species give birth, and then play no additional role.  So long, take care, don't bother sending a card for mother's day.

The thing is... none of these behaviors, the "good" or the "bad," are moral values.  Only humans possess those.  A male and female goose will raise their clutch together tenderly, whereas a cuckoo drops its eggs off than bolts - both are perfectly valid, natural strategies for survival.  Even in animals that we think of as "good" moms, there are moments which can be hard to watch.  I remember watching a female bear raise her cub.  She was (mostly) a good, attentive mom... but once that cub hit about a year old or so, it was like a switch was flipped in her head.  She became aggressive towards her cub, chasing her off if she got too close, swatting her if she tried nursing, and sometimes seeming to go out of her way to pick a fight.  It was a little hard to watch, the cub was confused and scared - the main source of comfort and nourishment in her life had suddenly turned hostile.  Still, the mother was just following natural behavior.  Biologically, she was ready to breed again, and couldn't raise a new cub while still looking after an older one.  In the wild or in the zoo, it was time to part ways.

I bring this all up, mostly, just to emphasize that animals can engage in plenty of maternal behavior which we might call questionable... but that's okay.  They're here on this planet to survive - not to serve as a moral lesson for us (it's true - it's really not all about us).  And they certainly aren't here to serve as some sort of paragon that we can use to shame other mothers for not being "good enough."

So, this Mother's Day week, if you're feeling stressed or judged, don't.  If you haven't eaten your kids, you're probably doing just fine.