Would honey count as a “secretion” of another species (albeit not mammalian)?
In fact, humans are the only animals that cook their food, period—aren’t they? Humans are the only animals who do lots of things, including worry about the ethical implications of what they eat.
How is he lighting them? 
Nevermind, I’m dumb. Read “hiding them from officials” and pictured him secreting them under his straw.
Lots and lots of animals will drink the milk of other species, if it’s made available to them. None of them have any good way to acquire it, though, so in the wild you’re not going to see it happen outside of freak occurences. I’m not sure the point would be relevant even if it were true, though. There are lots of behaviours that are unique to humans, and a great many of them are perfectly reasonable.
Anecdotal evidence ahead. I saw it:
Several years ago, my cat gave birth to 4 frisky kittens. When Mom finally said “enough,” the newly-weaned (mostly grown adolescent cats) took to nursing on the dog - long ago spayed and never whelped a litter. She loved the attention but didn’t like the sharp pointy teeth. She let them nurse anyway. Good dog. Yes, she did lactate. No, we didn’t send it to America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Kids love milk - they don’t care from whence it comes.
Eh… I’m not sure I buy that “secretions” is a dysphemism. The “rat’s milk” thing, yes , but not “secretions.” What sounds bad about “secretions?” It doesn’t bother me in the slightest to ponder that I enjoy cow secretions in my coffee. They’re trying to generalize across the animal kingdom, so if they were talking about “milk” then they’d be limiting their statement to mammals.
Didn’t we just do this? ‘Canola’ is not equivalent to ‘rapeseed’. Canola is a specific variety of rapeseed whose nutritional content has been rather drastically altered from ordinary rapeseed. Canola oil contains no erucic acid. Rapeseed oil does. Canola oil is exceedingly low in saturated fats. Rapeseed oil is not. Canola oil contains Omega-3 fatty acids. Rapeseed oil does not.
Given the very substantial differences between Canola and other rapeseed varieties, labelling Canola oil as Canola oil rather than with the more generic term is no more a culinary euphemism than calling Royal Galas ‘Royal Galas’ rather than just apples.
Didn’t know that. :smack: Good to know, thanks! 
Sorry to be snippish. Someone in another thread lectured me on how canola was “just a marketing name” for rapeseed, and I thought it had been you. Now I feel like an idiot. The topic is moderately close to home for me since (a) I live in the heart of canola-producing country, and (b) my uncle was one of the plant breeders who developed canola.
Why did the rep limit it to mammalian secretions? There’s at least one species of ant that “milks” honeydew from aphids.
PETA and any other group who have an agenda to dictate to others what they should and shouldn’t eat (aside from other humans of course) can all go hang for all I care. The use of words such as secretion and torture are deliberately chosen to disgust or offend others.
I’m sorry but our treatment of our food is only slightly differnt than other species in taht we domesticate and try to enhance (rightly or wrongly) the size and qualities of our prey.
I have watched barn cats play with their food (mice/small birds) in a way which I considered quite cruel but I wasn’t about to get a court order against them nor would I stop them from eating.
I’ve seen dogs tear apart a live rabbit. It is horrible but that is life. We can not get sustinance from inorganic material we must consume life to maintain life.
Sorry but food is food, meaning that we should not pretend that we hold it on a hogher level than us. I feel no sympathy for a carrot when it is ripped from the ground chopped and boiled. I also feel nothing towards the baked chicken sitting before me except the joy of the aroma and taste.
We as a species recognize the impact we make on other species but that shouldn’t change a thing… In so many ways we are no different than any other animal and should stop pretending that just because we understand the consequences of our actions we are different.
To be honest, I know that blood isn’t a secretion. I should have targeted the question to daffyduck who said
I was wondering if he thought that blood was a secretion.
Ahh. Well, perhaps it’ll be helpful to daffy then. 
I think some people don’t really know the distinction between a secretion and an excretion. Even more who read the word only conjure an image of things like snot. I tend to agree that while there’s nothing at all technically incorrect in their usage, I highly doubt PETA is framing things thusly to help the general public come to grips with how delicious a “secretion” can really be. You’ve got a good handle on the subject, but in common parlance, “secretions” are slimey disgusting things you find on slugs sci-fi monsters.
It’s more like a fetish actually.
I guess it comes down to your social conditioning. When I hear “secretions” I think of glands, which serve a beneficial role in the human body, and which produce some valuable and rare substances that we harvest from other animals.
Actually the first thing that comes to mind is the character in “The Naked Lunch” milking intoxicating secretions from the alien head/typewriter into a coffee cup as he typed out a manuscript. I guess the fact that I don’t consider this negative really says more about me than anyone else.
If there’s any pot invovled, I think the PETA people have been smoking far too much of it.
Elephant seals come on shore to give birth and raise their pups until they area weaned (for example, at Ano Nuevo, just north of Santa Cruz, CA). Sea birds like seal milk and will peck at the mammaries of the seals to make them express milk.
I think we’re one of the few who do this habitually without actually killing said mammalians, but keeping them alive for just that purpose. I think if other animals had been devious enough to think of that, they’d be doing the same. If you offer up cows-milk to them, a great number of animals will drink it (including porcupines, rats, etc.)
Why not? The point here is of course that we’ve not been using rats traditionally because they’re a lot harder to keep for this purpose. Cows have been bread over the centuries to give a lot more milk than they would ever need for their calf, and have been bread to give milk even if they didn’t have a calf around (it wasn’t always like that - I think cows normally only gave milk when they had a calf and even then the calf had to be actually there within smelling distance).
I’m sure that with modern technology you could develop rats and factories for them so that they can be efficient milk providers. But what’s the point? Europe is already producing more milk than it needs or can sell anyway.
This one is closed as the OP has been answered about as factually as can be.
The continuing sidetracking and rants are just—not—acceptable in General Questions.
samclem GQ moderator.