Heavy!!! the video only shows those mothers who take care of the puppies and denies the ones who have abandoned them.
That is how a discourse is constructed, and how these discourses construct the posibilities of being: mother is the one who takes care and not the one who abandons. (sorry 4 my english)

I think the subject of the 'mothering instinct' is a fascinating area for social theory to explore. To me, it raises questions about the constitution of desire itself (a la Deleuze & Guattari, perhaps). But social theorists have, for the most part, neglected to take a trans-species perspective on this issue, and socio-biologists and evo-psych have largely had the field to themselves.

On a more mundane and personal level, as a loving 'mother' of a couple of wonderful non-humans, and as someone who has never felt any motherly desire at all towards human young, there's nothing at all mysterious to me about the actions of the animals in the video!

Were there no humans nominated for the mother of the year award? This reminds me of that list of top female athletes which included horses.

So mothers just instinctively know how to mother, eh?

I guess MY mother never got that memo. She lost custody of me when I was 5 years old and has had no interest in my life since then. I haven't spoken to her in over 20 years.

Not every female who bears children is instinctively nurturing. I'm proof of that.

Well it just goes to show, you can't actually take any credit for good mothering because it's just "what you do" and "natural instincts" but if you fail in any way or don't want children (and it's oh so easy to fall off the pedestal of nurturing loving mother) then you are OMG!! unnatural!!!

One word, oxytocin.

Whoever looks after the child in the first few weeks of life, and spends time learning the baby's signals, will appear to be a "natural" at nurturing to outsiders - including fathers.

@MissaA
Good point.

"For most mothers, it’s just what they do. An instinct so deeply wired into them, that often all they know is to love and care for life."

Hell, *I* didn't get the memo. Mothering has been very hard for me. I like it and all that, and I had some helpful biological aspects (vagina, uterus, breastmilk) but Really? Just: any mom can do it "naturally" and "all they know" is mothering? PFFffft. That kind of statement manages to be condescending to women with children, women without, female and non-female caregivers. Nicely done.

This web site is rapidly devolving into virtual transcripts of The View or something.

Well, it's a relatively saccharine statement, but I don't see that it's so absurd. It's also hedged up the wazoo, as any reasonable claim with respect to this kind of domain should be: *most* biological mothers have an instinct for nurturing that *often* overrides other interests that one might have thought would take priority (e.g., the desire for food). So it's beside the point to suggest that some mothers don't have this instinct, or that it isn't operative all of the time; it also says nothing about fathers. Surely what was said was a zoological claim that might be true or false. Which one is it? If it's radically false, then I suppose a case might be made that this reflects a cultural strategy for surrounding motherhood with a certain image; if it merely reflects the facts, then that's much less plausible. I'm not a zoologist, so I can't say...

The news story is also a great example of how news stories are written with annoying stupid puns that the writers think are So! Clever! but actually they are distractingly irritating. Just like "weighty matters" whenever they talk about fat people.

Sure, it's instinct. Hormones are involved in mother/child bonding. Hormones are also involved in sex and bonding between sexual partners, and yet somehow we still assign praise and blame to the related behaviors, and recognize how they're influenced by societal values.

I'm getting so tired of the reduction of motherhood to "animal instinct". Instead of dehumanizing us for mother's day, how about addressing the obstacles human mothers face in America as we try to honor our oh-so-beautiful "instincts": poverty, housing and employment discrimination, lack of maternity (and paternity) leave, barriers to breastfeeding, inadequate or harmful and outdated maternity care, underfunded schools? Nah, let's just spout some feel-good nonsense about how nurturing is "all mothers know" - it makes it that much easier to write them off.

And even as a crack fiend, mama
You always was a black queen, mama
I finally understand for a woman it ain't easy
Try'na raise a man

Dear Mama - 2Pac

Obligatory mention of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's "Mother Nature."

often all they know is to love and care for life.

Hmm, yay for contraceptives. I certainly don't want to forget all my graduate education the second I get knocked up! Do mother's have to relearn basic skills, like anything that doesn't pertain to babies?

Mother: "Oh, no, I forgot how to drive! It's not instinctual!"

Non-mother bystander: "But don't you have to drive to go get baby formula? You have to feed your kid!"

Mother: "...food-gathering instinct... battling loss of all non-maternal knowledge... need food ...hey, it's coming back to me! I remember how to drive! Thank god it's a baby-related skill or I'd be done for!"

/snark

Yes, this video is very silly. When I was a teen I had a cat who had a litter. Probably because I was not old enough to understand how hard it is to take care of kittens I would often wake the sleeping kittens to play with my younger next-door neighbor. The cat got annoyed with us waking the kittens, ran away, and was hit by a car. I then quickly learned how difficult it is to bottle feed a whole litter of kittens. Lucky for me, my male dog (a lab/setter mutt) decided he would take care of the litter. It is not just "mothers" who have the instinct.

Also, it is weird to reduce this to *just* instinct, with the implication it is *just* instinct for human mothers, too (especially if this is in "celebration" of mother's day). Everything humans do involves a degree of instinct, but also a degree of culture and learning. Language, for example, involves some facility for acquiring the language, but you will never hear people say that authors write *just* because of instinct. There seems to be some facility for math and logical reasoning, too. But no one will say that mathematicians, logicians, or philosophers are doing what they do "just because" it is hard-wired.

My psychology professor spent time during a lecture dismissing the idea of a "mother instinct" in many animals. He showed us experimental evidence that there were other factors at work for the behavior of animals toward their offspring than an innate mothering instinct. Made me quite happy to see.

I always get a little annoyed when evolutionary psychology is taken for granted as truth, as opposed to sociological/cultural reasoning for behaviors and attitudes.

The filmmakers who got the cheetah/baboon footage did a TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/beverly_dereck_joubert_life_lessons_from_big_cats.html

At the 10:25 mark, the tell the story of the baboon, and how it ended up dieing, after 5 hours of being "cared for" by the cheetah.

Of course, they never mention that some of these dogs that feed kittens play huge favorites and kill other kittens or puppies. Females killing other females' offspring to maintain favorable status for their own is actually an incredibly common activity amoung wolves. So, have I seen a dog nurse kittens? Yes, but that same dog killed kittens other than her favored three whenever they annoyed her. How does that fit into the whole "mothing instinct" thing? We also had a male dog who would share his food with any animal (really, any animal, including chickens and the occasional bold rat) that wanted some and he would snuggle with them.

I think the point about this stereotyping issue is that we read into animal behavior meaning that conform with our social norms and ignore the huge swaths of behavior by the same animals that conflict. It is confirmation bias 101.

"all they know is to love and care for life."

ugh.

Mothering instincts precede complex evolution; and thank goodness, because without competent parental care, highly organized or socialized organisms, specifically mammals but also birds and others, are essentially dead species.

These clumsy attempts to sentimentalize mothering/parenting detract a little from the pure genius of a wild, very primal, and very successful strategy of insuring reproductive offspring (and scaffolded by an orchestra of literally primeval hormones). Specifically, k-selection reproduction is an amazingly intelligence-dependent mode of raising offspring with greater behavioral input, yet less physical cost, than r-selection (that is, many offspring with more mortality).

I often wonder if sentimentalizing mothering isn't a feeble cultural attempt at insuring continued K-selective parenting in a world where the very desire for offspring has in some circles (and countries) literally fallen to the wayside. The fact is, intensive parenting in many species is dependent on a solid social structure which evenly distributes parental responsibilities across the "tribe" or pack, and human culture has all but abandoned a concept of tribal responsibility, let alone a desire for individual reproductive success.

Are these cultural stereotypes a crude unconscious striving for these old, internal evolutionary strategies? Though simplistic, I would argue Yes.

I'm intrigued at the idea that nurturing is natural; even animals have differing levels of maternal instinct. My family bred dogs, and I've seen firsthand, dogs that are terrible mothers, dogs that are hyper-broody (even to the point of false pregnancy, lactating, etc), and in some cases, dogs that are both of those things.

Dogs that are terrible mothers step on puppies, get up and walk away from puppies as often as they possibly can (and fidget to get away from sucking puppies frequently). At times it looks, to an outsider, as though these dogs are going through the motions, as though they really don't enjoy it, but don't see an alternative.

The nurturer dogs, on the other hand, will take any baby animal and treat it like its one of their puppies.

Seeing this vast diversity of nurturing instinct and capability in dogs has made me feel much more relaxed about my lack of desire to be a mother.

Don't forget about female animals who kill and eat their own offspring!

they seem to be as extreme as the taliban. Should we invade?

There are examples of the male of certain species nurturing their young, such as penguins, and there are plenty of examples of females who aren't very nurturing at all.

The narrative that this article describes ignores these facts completely.

Not to mention that dogs often reject the runts of their own litters, starve them and sometimes kill them. That doesn't quite fit with this romantic idea of a divine instinct for nurturing motherhood.

I think it is easier for people to call it 'instinct' when they see kindness and caring in an animal, rather than call it what it is: An animal who is kind and caring. Personally, whenever I see these stories of animals caring for babies of another species, I feel very sad for them. 9 times out of 10 the story includes the fact that this mother has lost her own young, either because they died or were taken away from them. They're clearly trying to replace what they've lost, and that is sad.

People seem to think the concept of animals have personalities and and psychological issues is some kind of new-age idea invented by vegetarian hippies. I suppose it is easier to dismiss an animal's sadness at the loss of it's young as the simple base instinct of a dumb animal.

Different species have different ways of doing things. Implying that nurturing behaviors associated with "women" (not one mention of a human female...) is sexist, is silly. Human women, as do many mammals, share a nurutring instict, as their young don't just go off in the world, like many other animals. Birds do too, raising their young. An animal that has offspring ready to go out into the world doesn't need a mothering instinct, and a rival's offspring is a threat. Using them as a counterexample to mothering instincts in women and other mammals shown in these videos is like apples to oranges. Compare like species, if one must push some agenda. Human females cannot be compared to pihranna females, or hyena females (which are told to be quite masculine!) for example! Women can be compared to fellow women alone to judge the nature of women.