At present, there are more than 5,000 species of mammals known to us in the world, whether it is a platypus or a blue whale, they can produce milk, and what we drink daily is basically after thousands of years of domestication, and the animal milk that has been included in animal husbandry, such as cow's milk, goat milk, and less common camel milk, mare's milk, donkey milk and other special milk, and pigs, as one of the mammals with the highest rate of human diets, will have reached 7 in 20228.4 billion heads, but why do we hardly drink pig milk?
Any mammalian newborn, in the original natural conditions, will be fed on breast milk, although the proportion of mammalian milk is different, but generally contains the following nutrients, lactose, milk fat, protein and rich immune factors, the nutritional content of pig milk will go through a period of ups and downs in the early stage of lactation, into the 7th day to the 10th day of lactation, that is, long milk, the nutrients will return to the mean, that is to say, from colostrum to long milk stage, The nutritional content of pig milk is changing.
On the whole, the nutritional value of pig milk is not necessarily lower than milk, taking China's Rongchang pig as an example, the milk protein in the Rongchang pig intestinal milk produced by the production, the milk fat content is higher than the most common and Stan milk, cattle are placed in the special milk track, and camel milk and goat milk are not inferior to each other, it can be seen that as a supplement to additional nutrition of animal milk, pig milk is actually a good choice, as for the taste of pig milk, although it is not as good as milk, it can not be said how bad.
According to the sensory experience of the lonely brave who have tasted pig milk at home and abroad, fresh pig milk will smell a little fishy, the color is similar to milk, goat milk, camel milk, all are milky white, the entrance taste, like a strong version of almond milk, friends with strong curiosity can do a good job of defense measures under the premise, take advantage of the pigs are not prepared, take a little pig milk to taste, the pig milk is not particularly unpleasant, and there is no lack of rich nutrition, then why pigs, but has never become the first choice for human beings to obtain milk, In the above analysis, we only focused on the nutrition of pig milk itself, but ignored the cost of obtaining pig milk.
The main reason why pigs have never been used as a milk source by humans is that milking pig milk is really a difficult and inefficient economic behavior, first of all, compared with anti-chick animals such as cattle and sheep, the udder distribution of pigs is too scattered, which is not conducive to concentration, some people may be curious, the udder distribution is scattered, and it will also have a great impact on the efficiency, the animal milk we consume the most is milk, from 2017 to 2021, the global milk production is still increasing year by year, In 2021, the world's milk production reached 5440.7 billion tons.
What can make an animal provide such a magnitude of milk, this has to return to the origin of the physiological structure of the cow, the milk pool, which is the udder of the cow, composed of billions of milk-secreting mammary vesicles, mammary vesicles draw nutrients from the blood, and convert these nutrients into milk, in the collection and discharge into a huge milk pool, only need to squeeze the four nipples above the milk pool, you can concentrate on obtaining milk, under normal circumstances, the milk pool will be pre-stored 10% to 15% of the milk, do not need to stimulate the udder for a long time, the whole ** The process saves time and effort, on the contrary, the pig loses at the starting line.
The pig's udder is located between the thoracic cage and the groin, in a double-breasted parallel distribution, according to the breed, each pig pig has at least four pairs, up to nine pairs of udders, each udder does not interfere with each other, has its own independent storage pipeline and secretion system, which means that the pig pig does not have a milk pool to store breast milk, the amount of milk produced is dispersed into more than a dozen breasts, you have to jump up and down, left and right, in the pig's different mammary glands to get milk, just like a broken shower out of the water, at the same time, Milking pig milk you still have to watch and listen to all directions, or because the pig does not have a milk pool to store milk, it takes extra time to stimulate the udder to start, a little careless, the priority rhythm is wrong, it will trigger the sow's irritable switch, the first worker to carry out force output.
The lactation period of the pig is relatively short, the milk secretion is too little, not enough to feed the piglets, within 20 to 30 minutes after the piglet is born, driven by the hunger instinct, it will stimulate the sow's mammary glands and induce the milk reflex, until the end of the natural lactation period of 21 days to 60 days, the sow will feed the piglet about 20 times a day, but due to the lack of milk, the pig's milk flow lasts only a short 10 to 20 seconds, which leads to a very low milk production of the sow in a single day, The average milk yield of crossbred Landrace sows with higher milk production is about 865 kg.
Every day, based on 60 days of natural lactation, the milk production of a single pig is about 242 kilograms, and the reproduction rate of two litters per year is superimposed, the annual milk production of a pig will not exceed 500 kilograms, which sounds like a lot, but at this point, pig milk production can only be said to be sprinkled in front of cows.
The lactation period of dairy cows is as long as ten months, only two months before giving birth to stop lactation, close to a year of lactation, can make ordinary cows produce 6,000 to 7,000 kilograms of milk per year, very few daddy breeds, such as and Zitan cows, an average of 11,800 kilograms of milk per year, and even more has set a world record of 365 days to produce 30,000 2700740 kilograms of milk, which can be called the custard of the centuryThe annual feeding cost of a sow, plus the depreciation of feed equipment, artificial water and electricity, medical care and other expenses, is about 6,000 yuan, and the annual milk output is temporarily counted as 500 kilograms.
Then it can be calculated that the production cost of pig milk is 12 yuan per kilogram, and the cost of raising an ordinary cow, and the cost of sows will be close to the annual milk production, we calculate with 6,000 kilograms, then the milk production cost is only one dollar per kilogram, the high and low judgment, the physiological structure coupled with the congenital deficiency of lactation, directly leads to the large-scale intensive production of pig milk, and the production cost can not be reduced to a reasonable level, which makes pig milk in the animal milk competition, far behind.
It is worth mentioning that in the human world, pig milk is labeled as inefficient and cost-effective, but for piglets, it is a precious essence of life, dialectically, pig milk as a human drink, is indeed an agricultural and sideline product with very low economic benefits, but if you look at it from another angle, pig milk for the pig industry, is a rare baby, due to the structure of the pig placenta, preventing the transmission of immunoglobulins from the sow to the fetal pig, a newborn piglet from birth, In the absence of a fully developed immune system, their main source of immunoglobulin intake is breast milk, 82%, piglets that do not consume enough colostrum will die within 3 days of birth due to hunger infection and hypothermia.
At the same time, in the past few decades, the modern pig industry based on the dietary needs of human fat loss, in the diet of the lean meat rate of the index soared, the result is that the pork is getting thinner and leaner, but the intermuscular fat is almost in a state of seclusion, which for human beings, only the flavor of pork is lost, and the pig is lost is the health of the next generation.
To sum up, the first difficult cost, low yield and other reasons, have determined that pig milk can not be commercialized, whether from the economic benefits or sensory experience, pig milk for us is not an excellent animal milk, of course, the ruler is short, the inch is long, there is no place in the animal milk industry of pigs, pigs after thousands of years of reproduction and domestication, now can also provide a little 2 trillion tons of raw meat to the human table every year, so we still put our minds on eating pork.