Milk Day

 
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a.k.a. MLK Day, or, as us rodents like to call it, “Milk Day.” You humans celebrate the recognition of the equality of the races, which later led to equal-rights status between genders, and I think that’s pawsome. We in the rat world also have a celebration: equal-rights consumption between scarfing cheeses vs. the actual drinking of milk as a beverage.
 
Though it may surprise you (especially in light of the fact that rats generally gobble everything we can get our paws on), drinking milk was once outlawed because it was thought to result in higher incidences of constipation. But for rodents whose incisors were too small or too weak to nibble off chunks of hard cheeses, milk actually became a dietary staple. It was only 48 years ago, in fact, that the Rodent Food and Drug Administration ruled that milk could no longer be consumed after a pup had been weaned. It took the efforts of lesser-known species, like the African Pygmy Mouse, to claw back against the establishment and set liquid dairy on equal playing burrow as curdled, fermented, soft, and hard forms of the stuff. This certainly came in handy during the gas shortage you humans encountered in the ’70s when cheese transport by truckers slowed to a crawl. (It was at that time that rodents underwent a mass and temporary migration to dairy farms where they could be closer to the source.)
 
So while the days of the milkman leaving glistening white bottles on people’s doorsteps have gone by, thanks to the efforts of Pygmy Mice and others who refused to silent their squeaks in the face of tremendous opposition we rodents today have the right to slurp cow juice any time our little stomachs desire – that’s, of course, when we can slip by you humans and raid the fridge.
 
Keepin’ it squeak,
Bob