I’ve seen dogs and cats gobble up milk, cheese, ice cream.
I know that bears, coyotes and racoons will raid dumpsters and scarf discarded butter and yogurt.
How about non-mammals? If given the opportunity, how do they respond to dairy? Will a gator scarf up haagen-dasz? Will a Komodo dragon lap up a milkshake? Will raptors swoop to grab some fried cheese curds?
If they do, I’m sure they regret it, as I suspect they lack lactase and will have some nasty gas and diarrhea. But do they do it anyway?
I’ve tried the Dairy Council, but no good answers were forthcoming. You’d think that residing in Wisconsin, I’d be able to find out more on this topic…
In the early 20th Century Blue Tits learned to open the caps of bottles containing unhomogenized milk to get at the cream. Although they lack lactase, they were able to consume cream because it doesn’t contain lactose. This behavior spread rapidly through the species due to cultural transmission. However, today it seems to be dying out along with home milk delivery and the ubiquity of homogenized milk.
I would expect that many kinds of birds would eat cheese.
I remember having read, years ago, of some ancient culture where they would leave a shallow bowl of milk out for the snakes at night. There was an illustration of a small circular table that was specially designed for this, with the bowl at the middle and four snake-grooves at 90-degree intervals. (IIRC it was the Mesopotamia, but I’m not sure).
One well-known among Sherlockians because of its use in The Speckled Band.
The criminal trains a snake to respond to a whistle (though snakes are deaf) and climb a bell-pull rope (which would not be rigid enough for a snake to climb) by rewarding it with milk (which snakes will not drink).
Arthur Conan Doyle was a brilliant writer, but cared little for research.
Every parrot I’ve ever owned has been happy to eat dairy, whether milk or cheese or sour cream or whatever.
In general, things like yogurt and cheese are easier for them to digest. Some milk is apparently OK, but too much gives them diarrhea. Then again, too much of a lot of things will have that effect on a bird. Or me, for that matter.
They may not be able to digest the lactase, but they might well be able to utilize other nutrients like calcium, protein, and fat.
It should be noted that bird “milk” differs in composition from mammalian milk, being almost entirely fat and protein. Pigeon milk lacks carbohydrates such as lactose.
