Rabbi Yossi Haglili derived an important rule about the meat-and-milk prohibition from the juxtaposition of two verses. The Torah places "You shall not eat all carrion" next to "You shall not cook a kid in its mother's milk." One might conclude that anything forbidden as carrion may not be cooked in milk — including poultry.
Birds are forbidden as carrion. A bird that dies without proper slaughter becomes neveilah — and eating neveilah is prohibited. If the proximity of verses created a link between carrion prohibitions and the meat-milk prohibition, then cooking a chicken in milk would be biblically forbidden.
But Rabbi Yossi Haglili blocked this inference with three words: "in its mother's milk." A bird does not have a mother that produces milk. Birds are not mammals. The phrase "mother's milk" is biologically inapplicable to poultry. Therefore, the verse's own language excludes birds from the meat-and-milk prohibition.
This interpretation meant that, at the Torah level, cooking poultry in milk is not forbidden. The prohibition was later extended to poultry by rabbinic decree — but Rabbi Yossi Haglili's reading established that the biblical prohibition applies only to mammals, whose mothers actually produce milk. The phrase "its mother's milk" is not metaphorical. It is a precise biological limitation that determines which species fall within the Torah's scope and which do not.