Goat and sheep milk is commonly drunk. And camel. Anyone drink horse milk?
According to Wikipedia, these are the only mammals whose milk is normally drunk by humans:
- Bison
- Buffalo
- Camel
- Donkey
- Goat
- Horse
- Reindeer
- Sheep
- Yak
- Zebra
Clearly bison is recent and probably a fad, since bison were not even domesticated until recently. (The largest domesticated animal in pre-Columbian North America was the turkey.) The same is surely true of zebra, who are not even very easy to domesticate. The other animals have all been domesticated since ancient times.
The discovery was made long, long ago, that milking animals is a more cost-effective use of one's investment in them than butchering them. Typically a female animal's production of milk in a single year provides the same nutritional value as killing her and eating her, an astoundingly efficient way of using a ruminant's metabolism to convert inedible grass into a rich source of protein and fat. Dairy farming was an important new food production technology that increased the ability of animal husbandry to feed a village or even a tribe of pastoral nomads.
Horses, of course, are not technically ruminants. Unlike all the other animals on that list, which belong to the order
artiodactyls or odd-toed hooved mammals, horses are
perissodactyls or even-toed hooved mammals, like tapirs and rhinoceroses. All ruminants (animals that chew their cud in a two-step digestion process) are artiodactyls. Nonetheless horses are grazing animals that convert the cellulose in grass into protein and fat using teeth, enzymes and a bacterial culture, all specially adapted to the slow, complex, symbiotic process. In perissodactyls the bacteria work in their intestines; in artiodactyls the culture is in their stomachs.
I can find no information on the drinking of horse milk in traditional societies, even though the horse is one of the oldest and most treasured domesticated animals. It appears to be a modern fad, but I do not know this for certain. I don't think it would be a good food source for traditional people since it's extremely low in fat and, therefore, in calories. Only modern Western people, whose industrial food-production technology for the first time in history has made obesity a major nutritional problem, have a reason to seek low-fat milk.
I already noted that whale milk is about 50% fat. Other producers of extremely high-fat milk are seals and hamsters. Keep the kids away from that class rodent!
Edit: It occurred to me that llamas have also been domesticated since ancient times so I looked up llama milk. Llamas are incredibly poor milk producers and it's a miracle their calves can live on it. Llama milk is now produced by North American llama ranchers, but it's obviously an expensive fad. It appears that the other New World camelids, the alpaca, guanaco and vicuña, probably fall into the same category.
Pigs are artiodactyls but not ruminants (they don't have multiple stomachs) and therefore can't digest cellulose. Nonetheless they are good producers of highly nutritious milk. But no one milks pigs for practical reasons: they have more teats than cows and they are very difficult to restrain.
Once I got started I had to look up the other artiodactyls. There are no articles on human consumption of giraffe milk. Only one person claims to know what deer milk tastes like and he thought it was awful. All I could learn about hippopotamus milk is that it's pink. I stopped looking.
