‘Such a good hunter’: Mama cat puts an end to suckling kittens with one quick trip to the pantry

One of the great challenges of modern parenting is fighting the urge to not plop your kid in front of an iPad in hopes of getting a morsel of peace and quiet out of your day. After all, you always go out of your way to ensure that they’re fed, healthy, and safe, and iPads have plenty of educational, child-friendly apps on them. Why shouldn’t you tag the iPad in?

This is a debate we can go back and forth on forever, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. No, we’re hear to talk about how our furbabies have their own version of the iPad problem, as evidenced TikTok‘s @hayl316, who caught her pet feline throwing in a similar towel for her new kittens.

Your eyes do not deceive you, folks. This is 23 adorable seconds of a mama cat digging around a cabinet for a bag of Purina cat food, and dragging it over to her puddle of quadruplet kitties for them to eat, because she’s just that fed up with their needly little chompers gnashing on her stomach for their daily dose of dairy.

Now, the act itself is hilarious on its own, but it’s the gait that mama adopts here that’s the real kicker. She doesn’t give away how eager she is to feed her children with proper groceries; she just calmly walks over and places the bag in front of them. You can immediately tell that mama is the type of adult who gets very, very quiet when she’s upset, and the unceremonious way she’s delivering this food tells us that she’s barely hanging on here. It’s the feline equivalent of giving her kittens an iPad, which if she could, we just know she would. And she would be so valid for that.

Of course, these kitties were only ever going to rely on mama’s milk for so long before getting to drink out of the milk saucer like all the other big kids, right? Well, despite what television, film, comic strips, and pretty much every piece of media that could conceivably involve a cat tells you, milk is actually harmful for grown cats.

Per Hastings Veterinary Hospital, the reason kittens can and do drink milk from their mother’s body is because they have an enzyme in their bodies called lactase, which is what allows the kitten to digest its mother’s milk, as it breaks down all the sugar in the milk. This enzyme shrinks as the kitten grows up, and without that enzyme, a cat’s body cannot tolerate milk. In other words, cats are pre-programmed to become lactose intolerant, so really, this mama is helping them get over a guaranteed disappointment that much earlier in life.

Moreover, this business with lactase further explains why cats and mice tend to be sworn enemies; just as popular media had us believe that cats regularly drink milk, it stands to reason that cats think the same thing about mice and their popularized, if ostensible, affinity for cheese. Perhaps the cats are just jealous that mice are capable of enjoying a scrumptious dairy delicacy while they’re left with only memories of their mother’s teats. Oh, the cultural misunderstandings we can bridge with science…