by No Dogs Allowed
Mommy issues? Terri Graham says she enjoys breastfeeding her pug, Spider.
In this month’s publication of British tabloid Closer, Terri Graham, 44, a mother of two human children, says she enjoys breastfeeding her pug “Spider” because she missed out on nursing her daughter Leesa, 9, and son Lucas, 2, and likes having a “unique bond” with her dog. “Having Spider suckle on my boob means I finally feel complete and a better mother,” says Ms. Graham.
I think this woman has serious issues. And by the way Ms. Graham, as a mother of two who did breastfeed her children (for a few months, at least), I can tell you it was a TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS AND NOT THE BIG DEAL IT’S MADE OUT TO BE! If you hate breastfeeding, I hear you. Just go buy a big can of formula at Target and be done with it. Your children will NOT suffer for your decision. I promise.
Okay? I say this for the benefit of all pregnant women, women with children who felt guilty about feeding them formula, women contemplating having children, and even women who may be nursing a baby or two while reading this post. Let me repeat my message: IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL! IF YOU HATE BREASTFEEDING, DON’T SWEAT IT! I nursed my boys for approximately 6 months each, and hated doing so most of the time. Doctors make out breast milk to be a cure-all for all of life’s ills, especially the ones that strike in childhood – low IQ, obesity, ADHD, cancer, etc. – and guess what? It’s all HOOEY! At least in my opinion. Okay, sure, breast milk is good for a baby as long as you’re not drinking fifths of vodka or smoking a crack pipe, but if you hate the sensation of having a small creature pinch a VERY SENSITIVE portion of your body for hours a day, forget about it! I’m serious. Breastfeeding is perversely overrated. Take my word for it. Or don’t – how about reading Hanna Rosin’s excellent essay The Case Against Breastfeeding before you decide?
I know plenty of intelligent, successful people who consumed nothing but formula as infants and lived to earn advanced college degrees and tell about it. So if breastfeeding is not for you, or perhaps not all the time, don’t feel guilty for a minute. Just enjoy the time you and your baby spend together. A visiting nurse told me a secret when my older son was a newborn: she said that breast milk is like drinking skim milk for a baby – nutritious, but tasteless and watery – and that drinking formula is like sucking down a milkshake – delicious and satisfying! Which one would you rather have?
Okay, so now that you know my position on breastfeeding, let’s return to the pug wet nurse, Ms. Graham. She has been nursing Spider for about two years and believes the pug enjoys it. She also says the act of nursing her dog makes her feel better.
Some psychologists are encouraging Ms. Graham to seek therapy, in the belief that she suffers trauma from the inability to nurse her human children.
And some people on Reddit who commented on the Closer article say that what she is doing is harmful to the dog and that makes it downright rePUGnant.
What do you think?
Seems like the “weird woman breastfeeding dog” story kinda got lost there for a while. I was breastfed until either 5 or 6. I am 58 years old and, women just didn’t make a fuss about it back then. When formula came along, some women rejected it as, they just preferred what they were doing. A group of us got together and investigated Similac babies and found, most of them were seriously emotionally troubled. I’m sure that was because Similac mothers just didn’t give as much attention to their offspring as did breastfeeding mothers. How it was in other areas I don’t know but that was the problem where I lived. That is surely true today as all too many young mothers don’t want to be tied down with a baby they didn’t plan anyway. Not all the fault of formula but, it just makes it too easy for some mothers to neglect a baby. Oh my goodness, now you got me off the subject too. I don’t believe that story is even true but, in the remote chance it is, she and that dog should be “stoned.” There is enough perversity in this world without this. Certainly the other dog worshipers don’t need any new ideas. I almost expect a rush of fools in this country making it “Chic” to do so.
P.S. For some reason I almost feel a “Roses” lecture coming at me from you.
I think I just got the “Roses” treatment from you, RW!
Not really. I was pointing out how different things were when I was younger and how lazy the young girls in my old neighborhood. Nowhere did I even try to include you or, anybody outside the circle of people I know from the old ‘hood. That’s one of the problems when you paint with a broad brush. These were opinions formed by my observations of people in one community and, having read opinions in womens’ magazines years ago. I don’t even go there.
Egad. TMI, Ms. Graham. Newsflash: dogs are NOT children.
I’m so sick of people acting like their dogs are their offspring and members of their family. And worst of all, expecting everybody else to share in their delusion. I feel sorry for their real children.
If you wanna play make believe in which your dog is your son or daughter, fine, but don’t expect me to play along with you. I live in the real world.
That’s just wrong and disgusting.
I just came across your blog from Craven Desires and I don’t have an opinion about it yet. However, I wanted to express my support for your opinions about breastfeeding in this blog post. I don’t have children, but I know women who do, and they feel tremendous pressure to breastfeed. Some women just can’t manage to produce enough milk, or they find breastfeeding painful, and they feel guilty or inadequate because of it, which is unfair.
Also, formula helps working mothers function at their jobs.
A blogger I read, The Skeptical OB, has an excellent article about the realities of breastfeeding. You might like it.
http://www.skepticalob.com/2012/06/why-do-breastfeeding-researchers-ignore.html
Hi Miss Margo,
I look forward to reading the Skeptical OB article.
I apologize for going off on a breastfeeding tangent. I think this woman suffers from a severe case of guilt from not being able to nurse her children. You’re right, some women can’t produce enough milk, and formula is a godsend for them and their babies. And for women who work and can’t afford to spend all day at home with a kid hanging off them.
Again, I apologize to everyone for going off on a breastfeeding tangent. I think it’s a good thing to do if you can, but people have blown it way out of proportion. And breastfeeding seems to be a divisive issue, just as abortion and pit bull ownership are.
I intended this post to be humorous but couldn’t find the original story in Closer, so instead wrote about my opinion on and experience with breastfeeding, and oh boy – I can see from the comments I touched a nerve!
The skeptical OB is a horrible woman with little integrity. She likes to bully women online for making different reproductive choices than she would. The worst of it is when she finds women who have had their babies die and claims to know why it happened and that it was the mother’s fault. I can’t think of something worse to do to someone online. She also parted ways with science based medicine for being too sensationalistic and failing to meet the standards of the skeptic community. She also does original research instead of using the peer-reviewed calculations and presents it as equal to the peer-reviewed figures. She called women who divorce husbands (for any reason except physical abuse) “selfish” and therefore bad parents, so are single and gay parents. She writes pro-circumcision articles. Keep in mind that she was trained as an OB long ago and is not a psychologist/psychiatrist, parenting expert, or pediatrician.
That doesn’t make this specific article wrong, I just wanted to point out that she has strong ideological stances despite trying to present herself as just being a doctor telling-it-like-it-is. I would be careful to accept anything she says at face value.
This skeptical OB woman sounds like a woman who read the Bible and, wishes to use her own interpretation of it. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, Let’s not turn this into a religious argument. Just making an OBservation.
Breast feeding is a medical decision. Like every medical decision its about the risks vs the benefits. If the benefits outweigh the risks then fine, buy formula. Pretending there are no risks isn’t cool though. If you have a baby allergic to every kind of formula but quit breastfeeding because you weren’t informed of the risk you would be pretty peeved.
Breastfeeding is not simply a medical decision, just as the decision to have children is not. The mother is still a human being, and if she doesn’t like breastfeeding or has to return to work and can’t pump (some employers frown on this), then formula is the best choice. And there are excellent lactose-free formulas available for babies allergic to cow’s milk.
Again, I’m not against breastfeeding, just against all the hype that accompanies it. And the choice to formula feed is – or should be – a decision that is as valid as nursing your kids until they’re in college, or whatever the vaunted “paragons of motherhood” do these days.
I think it makes her a worse mother. Can you imagine the taunting her daughter is getting at school? She clearly has a few screws loose. I’ve seen a few other cases of this and all the women were fat and ugly. If she wants to be a hero she could donate the milk to a bank- they use it for very premature babies whose digestive tracts aren’t fully formed and who can’t digest food yet; their lives depend on the donations. And it’s not likely good for the dog either.
A milk bank would be a better use than the dog. I’ve read about other women doing this.
Here’s a woman breastfeeding a puppy:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiDF9NpHHq8?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360%5D
And this woman in the UK said she started breastfeeding her dog to make it stop barking:
http://www.thefrisky.com/2011-01-06/to-stop-your-dog-from-barking-breastfeed-her/
Anything that’ll make the damn mutts stop barking can’t be all bad…
Lol, whatever works to shut up the dogs is fine with me…..
A kick in the ass would have the same effect and not make you look like a nutjob.
I now feel bad for complaining about how much my mom loved her dog over me. At least she didn’t breast feed it. I feel bad for her two biological children.
I feel badly for her children, too. I always felt like my mother loved her poodles more than she did me. What kind of dogs does your mom have – did you say Chihuahuas?
Yes. We got “Misty” (named after a poke’mon character) the Chihuahua for my 6th birthday. I was always a cat lover, but I wanted a dog for some reason. The apartment we lived in was too small for a large dog, so we ended up getting Misty because of that. She paid something like $600 for her at the time. The lady who was selling the Chihuahuas, though, told me that they cost $1,400. My mom worked long hours and was depending on child support to pay for dinner sometimes, and she still paid $600 or $1,400 for that stupid dog. I left not soon after, but continued to visit her on supervised visits. That dog tormented me for years, yet she would rather watch me suffer than to lose that dog. At almost every visit, there would be an incident which left me crying because of Misty, and she seemed to turn a blind eye and play dumb. This is only one of the reasons why I’m DogHater#1.
Oh, I’m sorry. Was the dog annoying? I hated my mother’s poodles because I had to walk them every day after school, I had to wash crap out of their furry butts when they had diarrhea, which seemed to be often, and I had to clean up crap off the carpet and kitchen floors. I started to think “yuck, I’ve had to deal with enough crap.”
My mother was such a dog fanatic that she used to spend a fortune on sweaters, vests, rhinestone collars, etc. for the dogs at a time when we sometimes had barely enough food for dinner. We ate a lot of Tuna and Hamburger Helper. Actually, I started to become a vegetarian when I was young because of all the disgusting food my mother fed us.
I guess that makes me Dog Hater #2!
Annoying doesn’t even begin to describe Misty. My mom was way over the top with that dog. Misty has a ballerina outfit which cost $50, and a little white fur jacket that my mom would put her in for walks (since chihuahuas don’t like the cold). Misty has major food aggression. Even if you were all the way across the room she’d start to growl at you and bark. My paternal grandmother has two shih tzus which are just as annoying as Misty. Her previous two she had cremated when they died, which cost $3000.00 for one and $2000.00 for the other. My mom’s sisters (my Aunts) had small little dogs (I think most of them were poodles) and they used to torment and get all aggressive on me when I was as young as 2. My two older cousins had two terriers, one was very passive, the other was loud and obnoxious. I had to deal with them whenever they’d babysit me. So I’ve been surrounded by dogs for nearly my whole childhood, and hated every second of it. That’s why I love this website so much. There’s finally people I can relate to when it comes to my hatred of dogs, because in my family and in my circle of friends every one of them loves dogs. I think dog-free neighborhoods would be my ticket to freedom. (I can only wish).
Wow… I may be the only one here who actually liked the dogs she grew up with!
We had several when I was a little kid, and two when I was older. I liked all of them, but I didn’t like having poop all over the backyard, having to clean it up off the carpet, having fleas, or… the barking. I HATED the barking. And my family didn’t give a damn and didn’t want to do anything about it. I found an anti-bark collar in a catalog and pointed it out, but nobody cared. That annoyed the hell out of me.
But our dogs were nice, even if they were loud and messy. What I really hate is aggressive dogs and… well, the refusal of dog owners to keep their dogs in line. Like letting them poop on my lawn, bark their heads off, jump up on me (a stranger in a public place) and put their dirty paws on my clean shirt, things like that.
Not to mention the biting. Didn’t like that at all.
Oh, and I HATE the rampant dog-worship in our society. If you don’t like dogs, you’re crazy. If a dog attacks someone, it isn’t necessarily automatically euthanized. Or it gets breast-fed (barf). And people acting like their dogs are literally their children. One guy I knew referred to his mother’s dog as his brother! OMG barf barf barf!!!
They’re just dogs, people. They may be perfectly nice (SOME of them), but they are not idols!
This site got almost 1,400 hits yesterday, mainly because of this stupid breastfeeding dog story. I wish people were not so interested in this kind of garbage.
LOL! Human beings are so ridiculous sometimes. They worship dogs, and then they’re mainly just interested in tabloid trash.
I know, right? There’s always someone crazier out there. “At least she didn’t breast feed it” — ! How sad that that’s even a point to make. Almost hilarious, but… just sad.
I saw this on Huffpost and I couldn’t believe it….I just could not believe it….this woman is 1)mentally ill and delusional, and 2) in dire need of attention because it seems as if she is actually proud of this perversity and borderline bestiality….I was disturbed and disgusted….she could have donated her breastmilk, or even volunteered to breast feed another HUMAN child if she felt the overwhelming need to boost her self-esteem by breastfeeding….this is just another example of the psychosis in this country where dogs are being valued above and replacing human interaction….why doesn’t Time Magazine proudly display her photo on its cover? or better yet, why doesn’t this sad crazy woman volunteer to breastfeed all the animals at her local zoo? With regards to breastfeeding-it doesn’t make or break you or define you as a mother….if you can do it, great…if you can’t do it then life goes on and that’s what formula is for….I both breastfed and gave my baby formula….why? because most babies are not fully satisfied with only breastmilk and that’s the reality most people don’t want to talk about (I also did not want to go insane from the lack of sleep)….nothing wrong with doing both or just doing formula….life goes on….in the end you do what is best for your family and your HUMAN baby and screw what others think.
Well said, Mercedes! Blind dog love is a psychosis that seems to be spreading throughout our country.
And yes, I think most mothers nurse and give their babies formula. Otherwise, they go insane or do insane things. My sister-in-law used to nurse her daughter for 7 hours at a time because she wanted to breastfeed exclusively and had trouble producing enough milk. To me, that seems stupid. Give the kid a bottle and be done with it.
WHAT AN EFF-ING IDIOT! Thank God I’m not her kid…or had a mom like that, I’m messed up enough already! I fear that this kind of ‘parenting’ is a real trend now, so I worry about this next generation, the ‘Post-POST millenials???’ It ‘might’ be possible though that they MAYBE will be the ones to finally REVOLT against all the mass stupidity of today, (not JUST dog-worship, but corrupt politics, no morals, no respect for elders, poor literacy, etc. etc.)…but I highly doubt it!
You’re not messed up at all VM – you’re smart and funny! But yes, I worry about the next generation, because there’s a whole generation of people between me and my kids who were not taught to think for themselves. They’re just blind sheeple following the herd mentality.
My older son already thinks for himself and forms his own opinions – he already refuses to wear Halloween costumes because he thinks they’re stupid. But my younger son seems to have a “sheeple” mentality, so I worry about him.
Oh, give him a couple years, you never know!
This kind of unspeakable, hellish stuff goes to show you what these fanatical dog owners do behind their closed doors. This woman that lives behind me with two Aussie healers (that I want to soon eliminate) no doubt does the same thing.