CHAT: mammals and mammaries

Andreas wrote: "Refused to eat anything with breasts? Leaving the exact
definition of "breast" aside, that'd be more or less equivalent to any
female mammal. Really weird distinction in this context, if you ask me."

Technically it would mean any placental mammal. Mammal, after all, means
"things with breasts".

Although since we also include the marsupials and monotremes as mammals and
they don't have breasts, if that were dietary law kangaroos and platypi
would be kosher. Mammaries are specialised sweat glands, and marsupials have
very primitive versions: an oozy spot that "sweats" milk. Of course, few
people realise that our breasts release milk not from the nipple (like a
stream) but from a mass of exit points all over the aureola (like a shower).

Icky note of the day: koalas, which are marsupials, feed their young pap,
which comes out of their groin opening (this contains both genitalia and the
anus). Suddenly mammaries seem so much nicer.

Anna J. Johnson
Mystif & Scrat Inscrutable
*************
Somtyme one of mankynde is both man & woman & suche ... in englyssh is
called a scrette.
- Caxton, Trevisa's Higden (1482)