Why do rodents sometimes eat their babies?
It’s pretty simple, the mother identifies the baby by smell. That’s the only way the mother knows that it’s her baby. If shes smelling her babies, and one doesn’t smell like her babies, then it’s not her baby. (That’s what she thinks) She decides its not her baby, so it may be a foreign animal that may hurt her baby, or just an outsider from another litter, an outsider of which she cant waste her precious milk on. It’s survival of the fitest, and mom must make sure she has enough milk for her babies, she can’t take on the challenge of an outsider, and since the baby smells differnet, she thinks its an outsider.
