Wild armadillos may be carriers of leprosy, so that would constitute a good enough reason for me to actively avoid ingesting anything that may have come in contact with them.
Let’s see: Indian cookery relies a lot on ghee, the butter from buffalo milk ‘clarified’ (whatever that means), cheese is made from water buffalo, sheep and goat milk as well as from cow. In fact goat milk is thinner and easier to digest for human infants than cow. It tastes rather like coconut ‘milk’. Lapps use reindeer milk, though they deliver it in frozen chunks, so what they actually use it for is anybody’s guess. The ‘oriental races’ do not use milk and lack the lactose tolerance that allows Caucasians and Negroids to utilise it. Nomads on the Asiatic plains used horse milk fermented as ‘Koumiss’ that must be a kind of yoghourt as well as drinking horse blood. There is hardly any culture that has domesticated any milk-producing animal that has not used the milk except those lactose-intolerant Orientals. The cow is sacred in India because of her milk. It must have been the second thing that starving nomads learnt, that they couldn’t eat grass and instead of killing the animals that could (first thing they learnt) and then looking for more, they could milk them and let the milk curdle or ferment in a way that kept it for longer, and the animal was there to milk again.
There is a milk we should not drink because it is far too rich and causes liver damage but I’m damned if I can remember what it is. It is something so unlikely that nobody ever would or has anyway - polar bear or something like that.
Clarification basically means heating the butter for a long time to boil off the water and separate the butterfat from the milk solids. So ghee is basically butter oil – all the deliciousness of butter but without any of those pesky proteins to get in the way of the fat. 
Yak’s milk yoghurt is delicious - we ate it every morning when we were in Chinese Tibet. It has a “crust” on the top (bit like cornish clotted cream) and the yoghurt itself is wonderfully creamy and yummy.
You can have all of my share.
Besides, I don’t think they have teats, so milking one would be problematic at best.
Also, IIRC, only the males are venomous, so if one sings you, you know your going after the wrong one.
Yeah, but what color was it?
Between
and
I’m beginning to suspect that platypus milk causes an inability to spelk.
I craving some platypus milk right now.
Gee, that was hard to find.
Cheese is made from every kind of milk that humans use.
Goat’s milk has a slightly different array of casein proteins than cow’s milk. This may or may not make it easier to digest. That claim is mostly made by goat milk enthusiasts rather than scientists. It tastes more like cow’s milk than coconut milk, although all animal milk taste changes depending upon the animal’s feed.
You can’t possibly believe this, so I’m going to be kind and consider this is a deliberate whoosh.
Historically, East Asians did not have a large domesticated milkable animal. Lactose tolerance is a mutation on chromosone 2 that happens regularly and spontaneously. It is also dominant. Those who have this mutation has a slightly better chance of reproduction if they can regularly get calcium and other nutrients from milk. East Asians who had this mutation did not pass it on because it didn’t confer any advantage.
Other “oriental races” differed. Mongolians milked their horses and produced koumiss, which is not yogurt but kefir as would have taken you a second to look up. Those on the Indian subcontinent also had large milkable animals, cows and water buffalo, and so milk products are found everywhere in northern Indian cuisines and lactose tolerance is often found there.
“Negroids” are almost 100% percent lactose intolerant. Only a very few tribes that raised cows utilized the lactose tolerance mutation. The vast majority of the African slaves brought to America were lactose intolerant and stayed that way, although interbreeding with whites has made the mutation more prevalent today.
Yes! A true statement!
No! Sheer nonsense!
Well, possibly. The origin of milking goes back too far for scientists to be sure how it started. This is plausible, but I wouldn’t go any further.
Sheer unadulterated nonsense. You’re probably thinking of the concentration of vitamin A found in polar bear liver. Most animal milks have low amounts of vitamin A.
This is GQ. Could you please not post thrown-up masses of half-remembered and unresearched - not to mention offensive - stories that the rest of us have to work to debunk before they can spread their ignorance?
It looks like it also causes an inability to use proper grammar.
What is it, envisioning the milking stool?
I think it was in Marvin Harris’ The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig that he says that the Mongols used to use horse milk – but that milking a horse is a job for an expert, even among the Mongols. Not an easy task, apparently.
Monotremes produce milk, too, but don’t have standard mammal-type nipples. The echidna, I understand, lets milk collect in a hollow in its belly. I wonder if anyone ever tried platypus or echidna milk.
Simpsons already did it.
Not to beat the milk out of a dead or horse or whatever, but one of my links was wrong.
Did Mesoamericans use llama milk, to our knowledge? Were Native Americans generally lactose intolerant prior to contact with Europeans? (I’m guessing they were, given their obvious similarities to Eastern Asian phenotypes.)
Harris (see my cite above) says that many (all? It’s been a while since I read him) native Americans are, in fact, lactose intolerant, and gives cites. I haven’t read that any of the few domesticated species in the Americas were used for milk.
I know about the split hooves and cud-chewing (“Did you know giraffes are techinically kosher?” is one of my stock trivia questions), but curdled milk? You learn something new every day, I guess.
I assume that ruminent milk has some sort of molecule that makes it behave differently than other milk.
Cite? I would think that all mammals have pretty much always been able to digest lactose. What normally happens in humans is that they become lactose intolerant after weaning. In cultures where they drink milk or eat dairy products they will retain the ability since they are still consuming lactose. This has nothing to do with evolutionary benefits of dairy consumption and everything to do with compensating for dairy consumption. While dairy products use to be convenient in places where normal agriculture was difficult, and still is in some areas, most dairy consumption in industrialized areas is merely traditional or aesthetic. Dairy isn’t really all that healthy for adults.
Dairy is terrifically healthy for adults. That’s why it conveys an evolutionary advantage. Population biologists have stated for more than 30 years that it would take no more than a 5% advantage in child-bearing to spread the mutation that allows lactase formation as an adult to spread. The mutation is critical. There is no evidence that the mere drinking of milk contributes to continued lactase production in the absence of the mutation. (Although milk drinking can influence the colonization of lactose-digesting bacteria in the colon, relieving one of the ways that LI symptoms are produced.) No other mammals are lactose tolerant after weaning. There is no selection pressure for such a mutation in a non-human society.
The history of that mutation is an extremely hot topic in genetics today because it can be so easily read in the DNA. Articles such as Early man ‘couldn’t stomach milk’ appear about every week.
Dairy products are widespread in every culture that developed milking and herding. They vary from low-lactose staples in areas in which the mutation is in a low percentage to liquid milks in those in which it is the norm. And dairy is the fastest growing food segment in all of Asia today, with the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Indonesians and others heavily investing in milk and dairy plants. This cannot possibly be attributed to tradition. Their historic lactose intolerance is not a major barrier either, since the vast majority of people with the standard gene can still have some quantity of dairy without showing symptoms.
The standard book on the subject is Milk Is Not for Every Body: Living with Lactose Intolerance, by Steve Carper, which has a chapter on the history of milk drinking. Even though it was written before DNA studies were possible it contains the same history as puzzled out by anthropologists and population biologists.