The color of milk

My milk

A Melanie’s Post:

In Skipper’s last post she said that I was going to cover why her milk is green. I’ll do that now, but first I want to apologize for taking so long to get this post up. I’d give you a couple of excuses but they would ring hollow since it’s mostly because I am lazy and distracted.

Baby Mudskipper drinking milk

When Skipper was a baby, she drank goat milk replacer without adulteration. You can see in this photo that her milk was milk colored. (And isn’t she adorable?)

When she was that age, pure milk was more similar to what she would get if she had still been with her mother. Things have changed, for one thing, capybaras her age in the wild are not drinking milk of any kind. But giving Skipper milk has some big advantages, as she mentioned in her last post. The milk mixture I give her can mask the unpleasant flavor of medications.

Making her milk now can be complicated. There are five standard ingredients that are always included:

1. goat milk replacer
2. yogurt (fruit or vanilla)
3. power greens (baby spinach, kale, and chard)
4. vitamin C powder
5. probiotics

Then there are the additional ingredients which vary according to what I last picked up at the grocery store. These include:

1. fruit such as apples and pears
2. berries, mostly blueberries and strawberries
3. squash, mostly yellow or green zucchini
4. smoothy, generally one of two different flavors:
   1. “Green Goddess”: apples, pineapple, mango, banana, kiwi
   2. Strawberry/Banana: strawberries, bananas, pears, apples

That’s all I can think of right now.

Slurping green milk

I want to point out that the stuff on the wall is mud from her going outside and shaking upon return.

As you can see, her milk is hardly milk anymore. Some of these ingredients are things she will not eat outside of the milk. Actually, most of them are. Like all capybaras, she is a finicky eater. That is probably one of the defining characteristics of capybaras.

It’s not always green either. The blueberries definitely give it a dark blue cast.

She gets about three cups of milk at night and that’s it. She slurps it up like it is mana from heaven.

Although I fed both Caplin and Gari in the house, Skipper only has milk and oats inside. It is about a million times easier to keep clean. Plus, what’s up with that? Capybaras can eat outside no matter what they think!

So that’s the long and short of Skipper’s milk. What do you think? Do you have any ideas for other ingredients?