Pat:

> David: after giggling for 10 minutes at the mental sight of you and your
cat  eating corn on the cob  together, I still must ask:What is un-instinctual
> about your tale? How do cats come to delight in other specie milk, since
> they were domesticated fairly recently, unless this is an instinctual
need  for the other species fats they evolved eating? How do birds come to seek
> milk at ALL, unless there is an instinctual need for any fat at all (both
> carnivores and scavenging crows, ravens, vultures, no matter the species,
> developed this need via evolution)?

Hi Pat --

I agree that the fat could be key, but the "packaging" seems all wrong. Of
course, the fat could be analogous to the "super-stimulus" that has been
demonstrated in animal behavior research (for ex., a facsimile that
manifests to an exaggerated degree certain characteristics of a gooses'
natural predator elicits a flight response in the goose that is comparable
(or perhaps exceeds) the response to the real thing). In fact, I have
wondered recently whether attraction to cooked food even in us humans might
be an example of this phenomenon (that is, some of the pyrolytic products
are super-stimuli). Now there's a burning question.

david
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