All the animals that start their lives in the bodies of their mothers grow from eggs in the same way that you did. Some of the animals take more time to do this than you needed. Most of them take less time.
A baby spends nine months in the body of its mother. An elephant spends twenty months there and a mouse spends twenty days. A horse needs a little more than eleven months in which to get ready to be born and a rabbit needs only one month. But the rabbit and the horse and the mouse and the elephant all grow up in the bodies of their mothers just as babies do, and they are born just as babies are born.
Usually babies grow one at a time. Now and then two babies—twins—will grow in the body of the mother and once in a long, long while there will be a mother who will have triplets, that is three babies at a birth, or even quadruplets, that is four babies at one birth.
Only a few animals, generally the larger ones like the elephant and the horse and the cow, grow alone in the body of the mother. Most animals are born in littets, that is two, three, six, ten or even fourteen or more are born one after another of the same mother at the same birth. From three to eight puppies and from three to six kittens are the usual number of babies that dogs and cats have, and often as many as fourteen little pigs will be born in the same litter.
At the beginning of their lives animals and babies are so nearly alike that you could not tell them one from the other. If you were to see the egg of a baby and the egg of an elephant and of a mouse you would not know which was which. A rabbit that has been growing for a week seems so much like a baby that has been growing for three or four weeks that it would be hard for you to tell them apart. But the longer that animals and babies grow the more different from each other they become.
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Animals are much stronger and much better able to take care of themselves when they come into the world than babies are, and after they are born they grow up much more quickly than babies do.
Animals can use their legs earlier than babies can. A colt or a calf can stand on its feet on the same day on which it is born. The giraffe can stand up within twenty minutes after it has left its mother's body. But most babies cannot stand before they are a year old.
Young animals can eat the same things that grown up animals eat long before babies can eat the things that grown up people eat. As soon as babies are born they are fed with milk from their mothers' breasts. If a mother cannot feed a baby with her own milk she uses the milk of the cow and for nearly a year milk is the chief food of the baby.
The animals that grow up in the bodies of their mothers are fed with milk by their mothers in the same way that babies are fed. We call these animals mammals. Mice, lions, dogs, cats, men, women, are mammals. The name is easy to remember because it sounds so much like
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mamma. Milk from the mother's breast is the first food of all mammals, but most of the four-legged animals soon start eating other things. The milk that is brought every day to our homes is the milk that the cow has for her calf, but when we drink it we are not harming the calf for he needs only a little of his mother's milk.
The animals do not need to be taken care of by their mothers and fathers for nearly so long a time as babies do. Many young animals do not even see their father. The little care they must have is given to them by the mother, and the father wanders away and forgets all about his family. There are some animal fathers, however, that stay with their children and help the mother to show them how to find their food. The lion helps the lioness to teach the baby lion how to hunt, but before the young lion is two years old he is a skilful enough hunter to find his own food and to take care of himself. Horses and cows usually have grown to be as big as their parents by the time they are two years old and so have dogs. Rabbits are full grown in less than a year and nearly all these animals do not need the care of their mothers for more than a few weeks. At the end of a month and a half a mouse is large enough and strong enough to have babies of its own.
But at two years of age a boy or girl could not live if its parents did not take care of it all the time. A lion, two years old, can roam for miles and miles through the forest, hunting its food. A baby, two years old, would be lost in five minutes if it toddled away from home.
Although children have done a great deal of growing by the time they are two years old they are then really only at the beginning of their growing. Each year they become a little bit bigger and heavier and taller and stronger.
While their bodies are growing their minds are growing too. They learn how to talk and how to think, how to use tools, how to read and how to write. It is a long, long time before they are grown up and can begin to have babies of their own.
They keep on growing and learning after the animals have stopped growing and learning, and they become wiser than any of the animals and can do many things that the animals cannot do. But babies and animals are born in the
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This baby lion is only three and a half months old, but what a sturdy little fellow he is.
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same way and start their lives in the same way, and, although when they are grown up they are very different from each other, if you were to see them as tiny little eggs you could not tell them apart.