New mothers and fathers tend to obsess over the smallest nuances of child-rearing, for the simple reason that they want to be good parents. So does every other animal, as it turns out, and over millions of years they’ve developed a surprising range of strategies for keeping their offspring safe and healthy.
At some level they — and we — all have the same goal. Karen Bales, a professor at University of California Davis who studies social bonding, explains the two (hopefully obvious) fundamentals of good parenting: “Number 1 is that the baby survives,” she says. “Number 2, that the parent is responsive to the baby’s needs.”
But behind those core tenets you’ll find crocodiles swimming around with hatchlings inside their lethal jaws, cuckoos surreptitiously pawning their eggs off on other birds, and meerkats who teach their young to hunt by bringing them disabled scorpions. In other words, you’ll find as many ways of parenting as there are animals in the world.
