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  • 2022-02-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Does Photo Show Baby Feeding from Goat's Udders in 1927? (en)
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  • On Feb. 16, 2022, a new Reddit post was created in the r/interestingasfuck subreddit. It showed a picture of a mother sitting on the floor inside a house while holding a human baby as it sucked milk from a goat's udders. The caption read: Rural homestead life in 1927. When a woman wasn't able to breastfeed or died in childbirth when a wet nurse was not available a goat nurse maid was brought in to save the starving infant's life. The Reddit post quickly took off and received well over 50,000 points. For any readers unfamiliar with Reddit, this meant that it was one of the most popular posts of the day on the entire website. We tracked down the origins of the photograph. According to the blog for the Spanish cheesemaker Quesería El Faro, it was taken on Feb. 14, 1958, in El Mojón, 31 years after the Reddit post claimed it was shot. El Mojón is a town in Teguise on the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The caption read: Goat suckling a child in 1958, El Mojon, Teguise, Lanzarote. The website also included the names of the mother and child: The picture is framed on the wall of the cheese shop and showed what looked to be a crib on the left side. One version of the photograph showed a hand petting the goat as the mother held the feeding baby. The other one from r/interestingasfuck did not show the hand. This may have been because more than one picture was taken, or that the photograph had been doctored to remove the hand. So the picture of the mother holding the feeding infant under the goat was real. Also, it was true that there was a history of goats feeding babies and serving as wet nurses in previous centuries, as the Reddit caption sort of hinted at. In Wayland D. Hand's 1976 book, American Folk Medicine: A Symposium, the author wrote that goats had been used as wet nurses around the world: It's unclear how common the practice of using goats as wet nurses may have been in 1927 (the year mentioned in the Reddit post) or at any time in the early 20th century. In sum, the picture of the mother letting the baby feed from the goat udders was real. It was captured on the island of Lanzarote in 1958, not 1927. (en)
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