I don’t think anyone claimed drinking the breast milk of other species is the weirdest thing on the planet, but I’m not sure your examples quite hit that level, although ants and aphids is a point.
I guess the counterpoint is that aphid secretions are nontoxic and largely sugar, while humans have fancy coffee that’s made from beans extracted from actual cat s***, and the cat s*** coffee farms are a lot weirder and more gross than an aphid farm.
But bee honey is just dried out nectar, it isn’t even spit or vomit because there’s no bile or added secretions. It’s just dehydrated flower juice.
As for the angler fish and praying mantis, that doesn’t seem strange at all with so many ways that evolution and reproduction have evolved.
Milk isn’t some instinctual thing, humans know where milk comes from, know the cow has to be pregnant, and know which baby animals milk is for, and chose to build an industry around artificially impregnating cows year round, sucking the moo juice from their swollen breasts, taking away their babies after they’re born and processing them for food, then artificially impregnating the agitated mother and sucking more juice out of her for a few years until she’s worthless as a moojuice producer and is moodered for our consumption. Then there’s the hormones that we used for decades and the terrible conditions the animals live in.
Factory farming, artificial insemination and separating families are choices that we are making to enjoy the elite privilege of drinking the lactation of other species.
That’s still way weirder to me.
Milk isn’t some instinctual thing, humans know where milk comes from, know the cow has to be pregnant, and know which baby animals milk is for, and chose to build an industry around …
Neither is bread, beer, pizza or any other processed food. Think about it, how weird it is, that humans decided to take seeds, that they cannot digest well and isntead of letting the seeds just seed, they grind them with stones and then they add water and they let it spoil and then they take the spoiled bunch and put it over a fire. And of course it couldnt stop there no! they all started to make it in different ways and when they imagined some standarized symbols they added these symbols together to describe how to do it. And they learned how to breed the seeds so they get more of the white fluffy stuff and they started playing with the dirt to dirigate water to where the seeds grow. And then they noticed the seeds to grow better when they put animal shit on them, so they did that too. And then they used the little symbols they invented, to measure how much seeds each human is growing and how much seeds they need to give to the alpha-humans and some of these alpha humans got so rich with seeds, they built themselves giant gravestones, that are still among the largest buildings to this day.
You can describe anything that humans did since they stopped slapping bunnies with stone and collecting roots as being super weird. I share your criticism of industrialized farming, but not because it is less or more weird, but because it is detrimental to our survival and well being.
Breaking things down to their fundamentals isn’t weird, the thing itself is weird.
No, the development of crops is not weird. Bread is likewise not weird. Capitalism, or the hoarding of resources, is more detrimental to humans than crops or bread, but not very weird.
Developing an industry around humans harvesting the non-essential lactation of other species meant for animal babies is much weirder than bread.
Bread - grind seeds, add flour, add water, add heat
Hunting rabbits - kill rabbit, process meat, add heat
Potatoes - grow potatoes, harvest potatoes, add heat
Milk - forcefully inseminate animals, confine the animals in filth, pump them full of chemicals and hormones, secure the cow lactation for the pleasure of the percentage of the human population that can digest cow milk instead of the animal babies it’s intended for, boil the milk because it’s dangerous for humans, kill the baby once it’s born, ignore the bleating and stress of the cow, pump them full of chemicals and hormones, artificially inseminate the cow, repeat
Milk is definitely weirder.
You just arbitrarily define your level of detail.
Drinking milk also just started as:
try milk from lactating cow - realize you are able to digest it - get more milk from that cow.
All the rest that lead to most Europeans being lactose tolerant, which is an insane genetical success story and the subsequent refining of that process came later.
But maybe to help you with the seeds: A common way of breeding new seeds, that isnt specific GMO, is to radiate the seeds for random mutation. How is the following process not weird? “apply death ray to seed, get defeberated seed, see if it has any useful properties, crossbreed degenerated seed with less degenerated one until you get your right mix of degeneracy”
Or should we go about processing old dinosaur meat into transparent wrappings to buy our cow lactate in? Name it and i can tell you how it is weird. The process is just creative and the result is arbitrary.
