I have seen videos of some of the animal mothers not taking care of their babies after giving birth and ignoring them completely or even acting exasperated with them . Why does this happen? Is it the same reason as some human mothers who accidently got pregnant not being interested in parenthood?
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Some animals just don’t care about their young. How animals interact with their young is very much an evolutionary trait. Some animals will never even see their young. They just lay the egg and let nature take it’s course. Others, like primates, raise and live with them for years. Social systems in the animal kingdom are incredibly complex and humans are not exempt from that.
If you mean why some species don’t care for their young, it’s because their survival strategy doesn’t rely on that.
But if you speak about some specific cases in animals that do otherwise care about their young, then that is much more complicated, because there could be multiple reasons. From some instincts being not as strongly engraved, to them not being triggered, to the personality of an individual animal. Some cats reject some or all of their litters just to continue and have successful litters later on.
The more energy you put into one baby, the less energy you have for other babies. In general, this leads to two very different strategies for having babies: some mothers put a lot of energy into their babies, but don’t have very many. Many large mammals (including humans) are like this, as are some birds, and some other animals. The other main strategy is to have a lot of babies, putting as little energy into each one as possible; a strategy used by many insects, arachnids, and fish.
The “few babies much energy” strategy tends to rely on making sure a high percentage of babies live to reproduce: if you’re only having a handful of babies over your lifetime, you need at least two to have babies of their own to ensure your species survival. These animals tend to be either higher on the food chain or communal; and therefore more able to ensure that the babies aren’t going to be food for something else.
On the other hand, the “many babies little energy” strategy mostly relies on having so many babies it doesn’t matter most of them will die. In the case of some spiders and fish, mom will have hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of babies at once – often sacrificing her own life to have a few more (and in the case of some insects, dad will let mom eat him so that she has more energy for more babies).
You would probably get a clearer answer if you said exactly which animals you’re talking about, as different kinds of animals take all kinds of different approaches towards their young.
For example, there are some species in which the mother will immediately start nudging the baby and trying to make it stand up. This can look a little callous to our eyes, but the quicker the baby starts walking, the better its chances of avoiding predators.
And don’t necessarily trust your ability to recognize when an animal is “ignoring” another animal. Humans bond with each other through talking, eye contact, hugs, etc. but other social species interact differently. In some cases they will use sounds and gestures that seem meaningless to us or that we can’t even detect.
Humans are unusual in the animal kingdom for, among other reasons, their relatively large head. The evolutionary tradeoff for this is that humans give birth much earlier in the gestation process than other animals – pregnancy would be a full year for humans if their young developed as long in the womb as most mammals. Pushing the baby out before its head gets too big means that it is not as prepared to live on its own as the young of other species, so humans have to spend a longer time raising a completely helpless child than other animals.
The same way there are some human mom’s that do that sht,they just don’t have what it takes to be a nurturing parent
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