I have a hard time believing the biological mother rejected her own young ones, I am not saying its impossible, but I am very very skeptical. The whole thing is likely a setup, either for publicity's sake..or for pushing the you-know-what agenda.
No offense but you're kidding, right? It's common knowledge that sometimes a mother dog (or cat for that matter) will reject her own babies for various reasons...I remember even as a child being warned not to get too close to a mama cat and her litter lest she reject them and let them die.
Fire on High is right... it does happen commonly enough that anyone who breeds animals needs to be prepared for it, be it dogs, cats, horses, or what-have-you.
Sometimes it's because there's something wrong with the baby, and the mama instinctively knows it -- usually one in a litter of pups or kittens that gets pushed aside and ignored, but it happens with singleton foals and calves as well.
Sometimes a maiden queen or bitch will reject the kittens or puppies out of sheer nerves.
That's why PetAg sells tank car loads of KMR (Kitten Milk Replacer).
From the article, which might help you understand:
Charlie's mother was found by the side of the road in Meriden a couple of months ago. She gave birth to two puppies, but one was stillborn. As sometimes happens with a stillborn in the litter, the mother dog refused to accept Charlie.
Volunteers bottle-fed him every two hours, but the effort was both exhausting to humans and insufficient for the puppy, who needs to feed when he wants, said volunteer Chris Chorney.
Research indicated that a suitable substitute could be Satin, who had given birth to four kittens that have quickly warmed to Charlie.
"The kittens scrum up with him and the kittens treat him like one of their own," Chorney said. "There's a certain social benefit of small animals being with each other."
We had a dog and a cat that had a litter of puppies and kittens, respectively, on just about the same day, at opposite ends of the same garage. The dog and cat got along ok, but the dog had very, very strong maternal instincts.
So strong, that a week later we came home to horriffic yowling, and entered the garage to see the cat in a frenzied panic, because the dog was laying there nursing her two puppies, and all four kittens, which she had gone and stolen from the mama cat. The dog was casually, not viciously, batting the cat away when it tried to get in and get its kittens back.
We had to keep them separate after that, because the dog was like that: she would steal the kittens and nurse them.
Very strong maternal instincts in that dog.
Also, the only time that dog ever growled at a human being or almost bit anybody was on a specific set of occasions, and one other. Whenever the dog had a litter of puppies, on the day she had the litter, even us, her owners whom she adored, would get a teeth-bared growl if we approached her and her newborn puppies. We got the message and didn't hold it against the dog. The cat didn't like her newborns being approached either, but wasn't as dangerously aggressive about it. That only lasted a day or so. By the end of the second day, we could get in there and pet the puppies and the mama dog. But not on the delivery day. She would have attacked if we persisted. It was clear. Very, very maternal. Gotta respect that. Even my dad respected that, and he had no patience for animals at all (or pretended not to anyway). Lesson: don't mess with a dog when she's just had puppies. For a day or so, she's not your pet anymore, and she will bite you, and it's nature and you cannot train it out of them and shouldn't try.
The other time she growled at somebody and actually bit him was when a big boy came into our yard and started beating up a little girl (who was his sister, BTW). He wasn't playing. And my dog wasn't either. She started to bark and snarl at him and when he kept punching his sister, she went right up his frame and bit him, hard enough to draw blood. Only time that ever happened. Dog would let MY "friends", my size, beat ME up sometimes, but she really didn't like the big boy picking on that little girl. He ran home and told his ma, who came over in high dudgeon about our vicious dog, until she heard that the boy (he was probably 14) had been beating his sister (she was maybe 6) then she walloped him and said "Good dog" and left.
Good stories, and completely true.
It's VERY common for mother animals (and mother humans, for that matter, though that usually involves drugs/alcohol) to refuse to care for their babies. First-time mothers are especially prone to this.
And that study yesterday said that adoptive parents as a whole devote more time and attention to their children than biological parents. It didn't give any statistics on gay adoptive parents, and most children of gay parents are the biological offspring of one of the parents and have not been legally adopted by the other, due to legal barriers. Nor did it say that adoptive parents were "better". Many people adopt children with shaky backgrounds (think Eastern European orphanages) or health problems who may simply require more time and attention. And all adoptive parents became parents on purpose, unlike biological parents which is a group that includes a lot of "accidents" (not to mention a lot of "slept with my crack/meth dealer"). A comparison of adoptive parents to on-purpose biological parents might well find that they devoted about the same amount of time and attention to their children.