Thread by @HairyLeggdHarpy

Happy Easter!
I have an adorable picture thread for you.
On surrogacy, and motherhood.

Read on.

1. Looky here, cuteness overload, a heart-melting pic of Kia, a beautiful golden retriever, who became a surrogate mother to some teeny baby bunnies...aaaawwww ❤️

2. Baby badgers!
Here is Murray - he also stepped up to the plate, becoming a surrogate parent for 3 of the sweetest little Murray mints ever.
(See what I did there?)

3. Lucky duckies, little floofs find a new surrogate mother in Hiroko the cat who manages not to eat them

4. Squeeee...baby fluffball owl Shrek sadly had to be taken from her real mother, but no fear, a valiant greyhound rose to the challenge of becoming her surrogate mother

5. Awww. Little baby hippo Owen lost his real mother in a tsunami 😢.
But he found a new surrogate "mother" of sorts in Mzee, a big old male tortoise. Phew.

6. Koko, a very famous gorilla, adopted two wee kittens to love and nurture "as if they were her own". Which of course they weren't, obviously, because gorillas don't have baby kittens in the wild, silly! It's not clear what happened to the kittens' real mother. Who was a cat.

7. Makaia, a baby tree kangaroo, lost his mother at only 5 weeks old. So sad. Not to worry though, a brilliant wallaby became his new surrogate mother, carrying him in her pouch just like his real mother would have done.

8. Another golden retriever mummy. Bravely, in my opinion, becoming a surrogate mother to Siberian tigers, yikes

(It's unexplained why their real mum, a circus tiger, couldn't raise her own cubs. But look at the puppies and the cubs cuddling like siblings! Mmmffff)
(Keeping wild animals in circuses is very wrong, people)

9. What is it with labradors? Here's another amazing one, Lisha, who has been a surrogate mother to more than 30 animals! She's been a surrogate to porcupines (ouch), pygmy hippos (mind your toes) and baby tigers. Wow.

10. Or maybe it's just a dog thing, that means they are really good at becoming surrogate mothers? A beautiful Rhodesian Ridgeback, Katjinga, became a surrogate mother to Paulinchen, a squishy, teeny tiny Vietnamese potbellied piglet. Just look at this scrumptiousness.

11. Yep, dogs rock. Here's an Easter surrogate mother pic. Because lambs. Sigh.

12. Funny thing tho.

Did you notice something, in all of these adorable examples of surrogate motherhood? (Or fatherhood)

Who’s the surrogate?
And who’s the mother?

13. That's right.

In every case, the baby has a real, biological mother, who for whatever reason is unable to look after her baby. Which is sad.

And in every case, the surrogate is the one who steps into the mothering role when it can't be performed by the actual mother.

14. We all know instinctively, that each of those adorable babies would be better off if their real mother was around, and fit and able to raise them. The surrogacy arrangement is just a phew, avoided disaster there, sorta thing.

15. And did you feel perhaps, in every one of these animal examples, a little sadness for the fate of the actual biological mother and baby, who ideally would never be separated? And how surrogacy is about saving a baby from a sad situation of bereavement or abuse?

16. It's certainly much better than the alternative of leaving a motherless infant to suffer, but definitely not a situation you would deliberately engineer, removing a tiny animal from its mother at birth or soon after. Right?

17. I mean, crikey, it's against the law to remove puppies from their mother earlier than 8 weeks old. Because it harms them. You have to show the puppies are kept with their mother, to prevent them being separated prematurely.

18. We made a law for dogs and cats to prevent babies being separated from their real mothers to be sold to humans who really want them young and tiny and cute. Even if they would really, really love them.
Huh.

19. And if we discovered that the backstory behind one of these cute pictures was that the tiny piglet had been deliberately taken from healthy mummy pig at birth because the dog owner wanted his dig to experience motherhood?

We'd probably have some harsh words about that.

20.
Who is the mother?
The mother is the female animal, the biological mother who gestated and gave birth.
 
Who is the surrogate?
The animal who steps in and *acts in place* of the *biological mother*.

21. Now then.

Tell me how, and why, when it comes to us, to people, we completely reverse the meaning of the word surrogate?

22. In humans, we seem determined to engineer the very situation that we know to be sad in animals. We purposefully design an arrangement to create and then remove a baby from its mother, at birth.

23. And instead of truthfully acknowledging, as we do in animals, that this is really about:

a. A mother
b. Her baby, who ideally should be never separated from her
c. A surrogate parent stepping in as last resort to act in her role when she can't perform it

We do this:

24. We rebrand the real mother as the 'gestational carrier'; we call *her* 'the surrogate'.

And in humans, what do we then call the actual surrogate parent, the one who steps into the role of the actual mother who gave birth?
We call them the real mother.

25. Or we just dispense with the mother entirely. Poof. Gone. No mother here, never happened. She didn’t exist.

We supplant her.

26. We reverse the truth.

This reversal is the perfect opposite of what we know is true for all other animals.

Who is the mother?
And who is the surrogate?

27. Perhaps we do this so that we can tell ourselves we aren't deliberately doing to a human baby and a mother what would be ethically unacceptable to do to a Vietnamese potbellied pig.

Makes you think.

/End