Somehow I can't help but think of the baby spiking as a complete success, in that it helps advance the science of dwarvern child care.
Now that I think about it though, a more humane (dorfmane?) way to injure the child would have been conventional dwarven child "care", wall it in and pit a bunch of poultry or puppies in with it. A 1x1 meeting zone also helps to keep animals on top of the child care victim.
Seeing that dwarvern infant care is in it's infancy, it would be helpful to do more experimentation. I know an effective way to separate infants from their mothers, which allows the mother to survive to produce more victims infants. Dropping dwarves into a swimming pool (preferably around 6/7 deep) will cause mothers to drop their infants. The mothers climb out, leaving infants in the pool. The pool can then be sealed off and drained, leaving a pool full of stranded infants which can be experimented upon without their mothers trying to interfere with the scientific process.
In fact the ideal experimental setup would have the floor of the pool a retracting bridge over grates the next level down. Pulling the lever causes the pool to drain and filters out the infants onto the grates. The area they fall into can be isolated from the rest of the fort, populated by a small staff of scientists. If, in this context, babies are reliably fed (if the caretakers have nothing better to do they might be more eager) then it would also provide a way of raising dwarvern babies safely away from their mothers (lets face it, female dwarf's are a bit too dorfy to make good mothers).
Author
Topic: Orphaned dwarven babies (Read 1979 times)