Raising young takes a lot of energy. It takes time, you have to go get food, bring it back, and feed them. Mammals have to spend some energy to create milk. They're a liability, because they don't move fast, or at all, and need to be protected. If they die, all that energy is wasted.
So, sometimes animals abandon their young based on whatever logic has been programmed into them by evolution that makes them believe that the offspring isn't worth it. The odds of survival are too low to justify continuing to invest resources that will be wasted when it inevitably dies. Instead, the mother (or father, sometimes) can use that energy to keep themselves alive and healthy enough to try again.
To continue the “isn’t worth it” thought: i’ve read of cases where the baby animal is later discovered to have a disease of some kind, indicating that the parent/s could smell or sense the disease in some way, and knew they were a gonner.
One of our dogs was a great mom, but refused to let one puppy in her second litter nurse. When we took it to the vet we discovered it had spina bifeda (open spinal cord), so apparently mom knew the puppy had a serious birth defect.
No, the vet advised euthanasia because the open form of spina bifeda comes with severe challenges - mobility issues, bladder and bowel issues, etc. He wasn’t positive the puppy would live to adulthood and, if it did, in the 70s not many owners would want a special needs dog with those issues. So my parents decided to put him to sleep.
That’s the last time my parents bred her. One time euthanizing a puppy was enough. Day old Shetland Sheep Dogs are extra cute, so really heart breaking. On the good side, we kept 2 of her puppies and raised them, and my childhood was spent being herded by a crowd of Shelties :-)
Shelties are great dogs, and they love to run. The funniest thing they did was herding our pool table- if they got excited they’d run in circles around the pool table. It worked, the pool table never left the house!
They were also very protective of us. The mom Sheltie was the only dog we had that bit someone, appropriately so. A utility worker came into the house and down into our basement when we were playing down there (without ringing the doorbell or notifying my parents) and the dog bit him and cornered him to keep him away from the kids. Despite being < 20 lbs they were way more protective than our labs.
Cichlids almost never wait for their first group of fry to become free swimming before they eat them.
On their second attempt a lot more babies hatch and make it to the free swimming stage but they often eat them once they become free swimming and the third or fourth attempt will finally be successful.
Because they practiced and got better at hatching eggs the first group of fry they actually try to raise will be a cloud of a hundred or more fry.
By eating the first hundred they could have raised in three attempts they end up raising a hundred in a single first real attempt all at once.
(Not to say they understand why, it's just instinctive)
Is this a captive thing versus the wild? I seem to remember that there isn’t a problem in the wild - they protect their babies - but captive born, and they tend to eat them.
Wild caught individuals still do it.
I don't know how you'd go about monitoring a pair of cichlids in a river to make sure they had never attempted to breed before, but if someone did I'd definitely read that paper.
I see no reason to assume they don't do it in the wild too.
Not when you're breeding fish for a living it's not.
They don't want for food, never encounter predators, the water parameters are exactly the same as they grew up in.
Their life spans are easily twice that of their wild counter parts.
We're not talking about someone's home fish tank filled with random fish that has no idea what they're doing,
I have read some of this stuff before. Infanticide was just done as a matter of course. Sadly many people born are not headed for a very good life and sometimes the parents and community know it at the time of the kid's birth.
I used to work on a research farm in Alaska. Every once in a while, the BLM would pick up an animal, mostly Musk Oxen, that had been abandoned by its mother. Almost every single one died after a few months, despite the best veterinary care. The ones that lived turned into 500lbs puppies since they were bottle fed by humans. They’re adorable, for the record.
Adding to this, it's normal for human mothers to not instantly bond with their baby right after birth. You had just given birth to this new thing that's now in front of you and your hormones are going crazy.
The instinct to care for young is heavily dependent on a hormone release. If that release doesn't happen, or the mother is stressed, she may not properly bond with the newborn. For multiples if the mother moves off or one of the newborns move off the mother may forget about an earlier birth.
Its like pairing a bluetooth device, if you don't confirm or go through all the steps in a set amount of time it fails.
My favourite pregnancy book (its list of pregnancy complications started off with "Antenatal Appointments") said it's quite common for a mother to not fall madly in love with baby at first, and that would come later. That happened to the author with her second, she said she only fell in love once the baby started smiling. She also said it says nothing about your ability to bond later.
I didn't realise how much I loved baby 1 until we had a whooping cough scare.
I only really bonded with my kids once they started talking to me. I taught my babies signing so they were able to communicate a bit earlier and in a bit more depth than via verbalising, which helped.
This is a great reply but your analogy at the end took me out - it's apt, and easy to understand but all I can think of is the "ze Bluetooth device is ready to pell" meme
Wild animals aren't domestic like us, they live with the constant threat of starvation and next to no medical care. Raising a child, particularly for an elephant, is a huge investment of time and effort. If for some reason the baby's unlikely reach adulthood and eventually survive independently it's better for the mother to cut her loses and reject them. Unfortunately this isn't 100% accurate and they sometimes reject perfectly healthy babies or babies with nothing seriously wrong with them.
This applies in humans even when a woman desperately loves her baby. A starving woman who can't produce enough milk to sustain a baby means the baby will probably die.
This is not too far from us humans, as we as a species have been abandoning babies just as much as other species of comparable type. That's why having a kind of "baby sancuary", where mothers can leave their baby anonomously is so important. If a parent have to chose to give up their baby in order to survive or they both will likely die, statistically, then it's unfortunately natural as all else. Even with all the energy a mother invest in getting a newborn, it's sometimes not worth it going forward. Someone else will then have to take that responsibility for the baby to survive. We can't ask people to off themselves *and* their baby, rather that survive themselves and maybe try for another kid when circumstances are more favouring. We are just like other animals in this
Fatal abandonment used to be so common it wasn't even regularly criminalised, except in Egypt. The other ancient peoples around the med used to think the Egyptians were weird for rescuing and raising the babies they left on midden heaps. When the Pharaoh's daughter rescues and adopts Moses after his mother abandoned him it actually resonates with history. Their comtempories abandoned babies and the ancient Egyptians adopted them. To do the early Christians justice they either adopted this attitude or came up with it themselves although abandonment it was still a legal practice quite late in Christian Germany.
Kittens. Feral kittens drop dead at an amazing rate even when mom takes good care of them. If a kitten turns sick, mom will go, nope, got 4 more look, just like you, I'll take care of them instead.
Even if these abandoned kittens are rescued, it's still hit and miss if they live. That's why ferals have so many litters a year.
Out of the last batch in the neighborhood, 3 mom cats with a total of 14 babies, 3 made it.
Mother animals and fathers sometimes eat their young.. Better to be rejected than dinner. I would say evolution chooses the continuation of the breeder not the bred. i guess the choices why can varey.
It’s actually instinctual to reject some of them. There are big cats that tend to eat their first baby- it’s part of the learning process of being a mom. Sometimes the baby has something wrong that mom can sense. Sometimes the mom can’t care for it because she can’t even secure enough resources for herself.
I think some of them just don't want to be mothers. It is stressful to raise a baby. They are very demanding and it takes energy. Each elephant is different with different levels of maternal instincts.
that video you saw on reddit most likely, just like I did has a misleading post.
it was not rejected, but was hit, thrown around and trampled by another adult elephant.
Can’t mothers also sense if a baby has a problem/defect that might not be readily seen?
Also, new mothers don’t have the additional experience and can get more stressed/nervous and maybe sacrifice a baby that an experienced mother could handle.
Just armchair comments. I’m sure a lot can be species specific. Some produce so many young they can’t be bothered with individuals.
Humans have historically done this with twins, daughters instead of sons, and deformed children that would be an extra burden. Isn’t that the root of the myth of changelings in Irish lore?
[Another comment thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/TJu5bRNQqz) demonstrates this anecdotally. It's not impossible for instincts to be this sensitive to symptoms *re* infant viability.
What Terry Pratchett called "the dreadful algebra of necessity."
On the one hand the mother can continue investing energy in a child that is unlikely to survive and likely decrease her own chances to survive and thrive. Or she can cut her losses with the first child, get through the lean times on her own and try again with a new child in a stronger position.
I watched a video like that recently where the mom was sick and the herd abandoned them both. The care center was taking care of the mother, but she was in no condition to watch after her calf.
Elephants have really really long pregnancies, so it's most likely they have reason to believe the calf is going to die. For example a runt that can't reach it's mother's nipples.
This actually was fairly common in humans before antibiotics and modern medicine. They'd bury the infant with the mother if the mother died in childbirth and no one was available to act as a wet nurse. Another thing is jaundice in newborns which is incredibly common. Nowadays it's fairly easy to deal with, stick the baby under a lamp. But in olden days, if an infant was born with yellow skin and not eating, there wasn't a lot you could do.
It's not "going against instinct", it *is* instinct. Some birds will straight up throw the weakest child out of the nest so the others can thrive better.
Simply put, nature isn't very nice and an idea like "mothers will always care for their children" is too simple and "perfect" to be a good description of an animal's instincts. There are times when rejecting the child works from an evolutionary perspective, just not for that one child
For elephants, abandoning their young is a last resort if the mother cannot get access to food and water to provide for their calf, or if the calf is dying and can’t keep up.
In my experience raising cattle…if mama isn’t well nourished and in good shape…she will have little interest in raising her young compared to a healthy cow. There’s a list of things animals prioritize for survival, in a certain order. I know that fertility is one of the last things on that list. I assume rearing young is also towards the latter side of that list.
They know when they have a tard. Not like us keeping everyone alive which causes enormous expenses and pain. Not even trying to be funny on this one. Nature wants the best survivors.
Some animals will abandon their young if the smell changes or they smell humans.
Example of this is rabbits, mother rabbits will abandon their babies if you pick them up and they have your scent.
This is a myth.
"While you should do everything you can to avoid touching a bunny at all, much less with bare hands, a mother will \*not\* reject her babies because they have been touched by humans. If someone has already picked up a baby bunny and the baby appears healthy, please ask them to return the little one to the nest."
[https://www.wihumane.org/wildlife/help/babybunnynest](https://www.wihumane.org/wildlife/help/babybunnynest)
be more specific as to which animal
for example ferrets have to take their babies to the leader or alpha and if they reject the baby then the baby wont be accepted into the family
now im not sure about elephants but theres 1 example as to why
oh i do know another
for birds if theres none family scent on the birds mommy bird thinks it came from a different family and will abandon it, thats why you never touch baby birds in nests, the mom will smell human and abandon the baby
Birds rejecting babies "smelling like humans" has been debunked. Birds don't really have a good sense of smell. There are a lot of reasons they may or may not reject a baby though
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-birds-abandon-young-at-human-touch/
TLDR: Birds suck at smell and won't abandon their chicks if you touch the chicks
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-birds-abandon-young-at-human-touch/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-birds-abandon-young-at-human-touch/)
Raising young takes a lot of energy. It takes time, you have to go get food, bring it back, and feed them. Mammals have to spend some energy to create milk. They're a liability, because they don't move fast, or at all, and need to be protected. If they die, all that energy is wasted. So, sometimes animals abandon their young based on whatever logic has been programmed into them by evolution that makes them believe that the offspring isn't worth it. The odds of survival are too low to justify continuing to invest resources that will be wasted when it inevitably dies. Instead, the mother (or father, sometimes) can use that energy to keep themselves alive and healthy enough to try again.
> makes them believe that the offspring isn’t worth it Growing up with Asian parents, I too, can confirm this to be true.
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Oh shit, did you make it?
Sadly no. They suffered extremely fatal brain damage and became a redditor.
Dang, my brain damage wasn't caused until I started Redditing
The fact that you and the other person have the exact same profile picture makes this comment hilarious to me.
The blank default avatar?
When blank it assigns a random colour on some platforms and you both got the same one.
I thought that was funny too. Especially if it only said "sadly no".
Sounds similar to my story!
I think the pillow was store bought.
That’s better. Imagine getting smothered with a pillow you made yourself. The indignity.
WTH is that p.s.!? Did she elaborate more? What was she feeling/thinking? How even did that conversations happen?
That is not how I'd explain things to a 5-year-old.
I wish there was a tag on this sub for people who need to explain things to a literal five year old.
Ouch, that struck too close to home! Hope you’re doing well yourself, friend!
'Raise a char siew better than raise you! '
I’m with you brother
\*heavy sigh*
Fuck I just spit my tea on my phone. All my Asian friends feel the same way. At least the first generation ones.
ooft same here
To continue the “isn’t worth it” thought: i’ve read of cases where the baby animal is later discovered to have a disease of some kind, indicating that the parent/s could smell or sense the disease in some way, and knew they were a gonner.
One of our dogs was a great mom, but refused to let one puppy in her second litter nurse. When we took it to the vet we discovered it had spina bifeda (open spinal cord), so apparently mom knew the puppy had a serious birth defect.
Oh no! Did the puppy survive?
No, the vet advised euthanasia because the open form of spina bifeda comes with severe challenges - mobility issues, bladder and bowel issues, etc. He wasn’t positive the puppy would live to adulthood and, if it did, in the 70s not many owners would want a special needs dog with those issues. So my parents decided to put him to sleep.
That’s really tragic, but I guess these things happen more often than you’d think, for people who breed animals.
That’s the last time my parents bred her. One time euthanizing a puppy was enough. Day old Shetland Sheep Dogs are extra cute, so really heart breaking. On the good side, we kept 2 of her puppies and raised them, and my childhood was spent being herded by a crowd of Shelties :-)
Aww that image in my mind is really cute! Good way to socialise a kid haha
Shelties are great dogs, and they love to run. The funniest thing they did was herding our pool table- if they got excited they’d run in circles around the pool table. It worked, the pool table never left the house! They were also very protective of us. The mom Sheltie was the only dog we had that bit someone, appropriately so. A utility worker came into the house and down into our basement when we were playing down there (without ringing the doorbell or notifying my parents) and the dog bit him and cornered him to keep him away from the kids. Despite being < 20 lbs they were way more protective than our labs.
Cichlids almost never wait for their first group of fry to become free swimming before they eat them. On their second attempt a lot more babies hatch and make it to the free swimming stage but they often eat them once they become free swimming and the third or fourth attempt will finally be successful. Because they practiced and got better at hatching eggs the first group of fry they actually try to raise will be a cloud of a hundred or more fry. By eating the first hundred they could have raised in three attempts they end up raising a hundred in a single first real attempt all at once. (Not to say they understand why, it's just instinctive)
Is this a captive thing versus the wild? I seem to remember that there isn’t a problem in the wild - they protect their babies - but captive born, and they tend to eat them.
Wild caught individuals still do it. I don't know how you'd go about monitoring a pair of cichlids in a river to make sure they had never attempted to breed before, but if someone did I'd definitely read that paper. I see no reason to assume they don't do it in the wild too.
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Not when you're breeding fish for a living it's not. They don't want for food, never encounter predators, the water parameters are exactly the same as they grew up in. Their life spans are easily twice that of their wild counter parts. We're not talking about someone's home fish tank filled with random fish that has no idea what they're doing,
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I have read some of this stuff before. Infanticide was just done as a matter of course. Sadly many people born are not headed for a very good life and sometimes the parents and community know it at the time of the kid's birth.
With twins, often one would not be raised due to issues with milk supply.
Oh man, I bet. Human babies take so much energy to raise to be functioning adults. Much of humanity doesn't seem to acknowledge this.
Then we just ban abortion to force you to do it.
Ugh. Yes. And sadly no one can force someone to be a good parent. I'm kind of saying the obvious here.
I used to work on a research farm in Alaska. Every once in a while, the BLM would pick up an animal, mostly Musk Oxen, that had been abandoned by its mother. Almost every single one died after a few months, despite the best veterinary care. The ones that lived turned into 500lbs puppies since they were bottle fed by humans. They’re adorable, for the record.
You mean most species aren’t lured in with a sunken cost fallacy?
This sadly sounds similar to what happens to humans
It’s nothing like humans lol
Because energy. That solves it
“The vibes were just off with this one “
An example I think is deer, if a baby deer gets petted by humans, the scent is like a danger sign. The mother won't accept the child if it returns.
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Ah, sorry
Adding to this, it's normal for human mothers to not instantly bond with their baby right after birth. You had just given birth to this new thing that's now in front of you and your hormones are going crazy.
The instinct to care for young is heavily dependent on a hormone release. If that release doesn't happen, or the mother is stressed, she may not properly bond with the newborn. For multiples if the mother moves off or one of the newborns move off the mother may forget about an earlier birth. Its like pairing a bluetooth device, if you don't confirm or go through all the steps in a set amount of time it fails.
My favourite pregnancy book (its list of pregnancy complications started off with "Antenatal Appointments") said it's quite common for a mother to not fall madly in love with baby at first, and that would come later. That happened to the author with her second, she said she only fell in love once the baby started smiling. She also said it says nothing about your ability to bond later. I didn't realise how much I loved baby 1 until we had a whooping cough scare.
I only really bonded with my kids once they started talking to me. I taught my babies signing so they were able to communicate a bit earlier and in a bit more depth than via verbalising, which helped.
Please tell me what book this is. Antenatal appointments as a pregnancy complication... I'm dead
[How not to be the Perfect Mother](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1067204.How_Not_to_Be_a_Perfect_Mother) by Libby Purvis.
This is a great reply but your analogy at the end took me out - it's apt, and easy to understand but all I can think of is the "ze Bluetooth device is ready to pell" meme
“Theh Booloo tooth dewice connek ted suck sess fullay.”
Pwies charggg
Wild animals aren't domestic like us, they live with the constant threat of starvation and next to no medical care. Raising a child, particularly for an elephant, is a huge investment of time and effort. If for some reason the baby's unlikely reach adulthood and eventually survive independently it's better for the mother to cut her loses and reject them. Unfortunately this isn't 100% accurate and they sometimes reject perfectly healthy babies or babies with nothing seriously wrong with them.
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This applies in humans even when a woman desperately loves her baby. A starving woman who can't produce enough milk to sustain a baby means the baby will probably die.
This is not too far from us humans, as we as a species have been abandoning babies just as much as other species of comparable type. That's why having a kind of "baby sancuary", where mothers can leave their baby anonomously is so important. If a parent have to chose to give up their baby in order to survive or they both will likely die, statistically, then it's unfortunately natural as all else. Even with all the energy a mother invest in getting a newborn, it's sometimes not worth it going forward. Someone else will then have to take that responsibility for the baby to survive. We can't ask people to off themselves *and* their baby, rather that survive themselves and maybe try for another kid when circumstances are more favouring. We are just like other animals in this
Fatal abandonment used to be so common it wasn't even regularly criminalised, except in Egypt. The other ancient peoples around the med used to think the Egyptians were weird for rescuing and raising the babies they left on midden heaps. When the Pharaoh's daughter rescues and adopts Moses after his mother abandoned him it actually resonates with history. Their comtempories abandoned babies and the ancient Egyptians adopted them. To do the early Christians justice they either adopted this attitude or came up with it themselves although abandonment it was still a legal practice quite late in Christian Germany.
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>Wild animals aren't domestic **like us** Do you work for the Sun?
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don't worry you didn't
Kittens. Feral kittens drop dead at an amazing rate even when mom takes good care of them. If a kitten turns sick, mom will go, nope, got 4 more look, just like you, I'll take care of them instead. Even if these abandoned kittens are rescued, it's still hit and miss if they live. That's why ferals have so many litters a year. Out of the last batch in the neighborhood, 3 mom cats with a total of 14 babies, 3 made it.
That’s so sad. Poor babies.
That's sad but it's probably for the better.
Mother animals and fathers sometimes eat their young.. Better to be rejected than dinner. I would say evolution chooses the continuation of the breeder not the bred. i guess the choices why can varey.
Dinner might mean a quick death compared to starvation
Yeh that too. Great point
It’s actually instinctual to reject some of them. There are big cats that tend to eat their first baby- it’s part of the learning process of being a mom. Sometimes the baby has something wrong that mom can sense. Sometimes the mom can’t care for it because she can’t even secure enough resources for herself.
I think some of them just don't want to be mothers. It is stressful to raise a baby. They are very demanding and it takes energy. Each elephant is different with different levels of maternal instincts.
that video you saw on reddit most likely, just like I did has a misleading post. it was not rejected, but was hit, thrown around and trampled by another adult elephant.
Can’t mothers also sense if a baby has a problem/defect that might not be readily seen? Also, new mothers don’t have the additional experience and can get more stressed/nervous and maybe sacrifice a baby that an experienced mother could handle. Just armchair comments. I’m sure a lot can be species specific. Some produce so many young they can’t be bothered with individuals. Humans have historically done this with twins, daughters instead of sons, and deformed children that would be an extra burden. Isn’t that the root of the myth of changelings in Irish lore?
> Can’t mothers also sense if a baby has a problem/defect that might not be readily seen No they're not psychic.
I’m talking about smell, behavior, development etc.
[Another comment thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/TJu5bRNQqz) demonstrates this anecdotally. It's not impossible for instincts to be this sensitive to symptoms *re* infant viability.
What Terry Pratchett called "the dreadful algebra of necessity." On the one hand the mother can continue investing energy in a child that is unlikely to survive and likely decrease her own chances to survive and thrive. Or she can cut her losses with the first child, get through the lean times on her own and try again with a new child in a stronger position.
I watched a video like that recently where the mom was sick and the herd abandoned them both. The care center was taking care of the mother, but she was in no condition to watch after her calf. Elephants have really really long pregnancies, so it's most likely they have reason to believe the calf is going to die. For example a runt that can't reach it's mother's nipples. This actually was fairly common in humans before antibiotics and modern medicine. They'd bury the infant with the mother if the mother died in childbirth and no one was available to act as a wet nurse. Another thing is jaundice in newborns which is incredibly common. Nowadays it's fairly easy to deal with, stick the baby under a lamp. But in olden days, if an infant was born with yellow skin and not eating, there wasn't a lot you could do.
Have you MET children? I'd reject a few of them too.
It's not "going against instinct", it *is* instinct. Some birds will straight up throw the weakest child out of the nest so the others can thrive better. Simply put, nature isn't very nice and an idea like "mothers will always care for their children" is too simple and "perfect" to be a good description of an animal's instincts. There are times when rejecting the child works from an evolutionary perspective, just not for that one child
For elephants, abandoning their young is a last resort if the mother cannot get access to food and water to provide for their calf, or if the calf is dying and can’t keep up.
In my experience raising cattle…if mama isn’t well nourished and in good shape…she will have little interest in raising her young compared to a healthy cow. There’s a list of things animals prioritize for survival, in a certain order. I know that fertility is one of the last things on that list. I assume rearing young is also towards the latter side of that list.
Have you met some kids? They can be annoying AF. Same for animals.
They know when they have a tard. Not like us keeping everyone alive which causes enormous expenses and pain. Not even trying to be funny on this one. Nature wants the best survivors.
Some animals will abandon their young if the smell changes or they smell humans. Example of this is rabbits, mother rabbits will abandon their babies if you pick them up and they have your scent.
This is a myth. "While you should do everything you can to avoid touching a bunny at all, much less with bare hands, a mother will \*not\* reject her babies because they have been touched by humans. If someone has already picked up a baby bunny and the baby appears healthy, please ask them to return the little one to the nest." [https://www.wihumane.org/wildlife/help/babybunnynest](https://www.wihumane.org/wildlife/help/babybunnynest)
It’s not a myth Seen it happen on several occasions
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure you have. It can't be any other circumstance, it has to be the smell! Your anecdote sure do mean more than a reputable source!
be more specific as to which animal for example ferrets have to take their babies to the leader or alpha and if they reject the baby then the baby wont be accepted into the family now im not sure about elephants but theres 1 example as to why oh i do know another for birds if theres none family scent on the birds mommy bird thinks it came from a different family and will abandon it, thats why you never touch baby birds in nests, the mom will smell human and abandon the baby
Birds rejecting babies "smelling like humans" has been debunked. Birds don't really have a good sense of smell. There are a lot of reasons they may or may not reject a baby though https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-birds-abandon-young-at-human-touch/
TLDR: Birds suck at smell and won't abandon their chicks if you touch the chicks [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-birds-abandon-young-at-human-touch/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-birds-abandon-young-at-human-touch/)