Boiling Baby Goats?

A good meeting last night with an extraordinary range of topics. R.T. picked some especially unusual Old Testament laws for debate, in particular the command that the Israelites should not boil a kid goat in it's mother's milk - a command which occures three times!

Someone pointed out that the command is very specific - that it does not forbid using milk, just not the mother's milk.

A brief survey of opinions on the net suggests that the context was the local Canaanite religions, who used the practice as a superstitious way of ensuring prosperity, and so the Lord was telling the Israelites to be distinctive.

Here are some examples:

Adam Clark and other historical commentators bring out that boiling a kid in its mother’s milk was a prosperity ritual among the Canaanites—the Eternal was telling the people in the "promised land" to give firstfruits and tithes if they wanted prosperity, and not to follow a Canaanite practice.
http://www.servantsnews.com/sn9712/s71211.htm

Canaanite ritual, according to excavations at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit), called for sacrificial kids to be boiled in milk, but the damaged Ugaritic text does not clearly specify mother's milk. If it were so, then it is understandable that Israel was being prevented from copying pagan idolatrous ritualism.
Another option suggests that the dead kid was being boiled in the very substance which had sustained its life, hence the prohibition.
Until more archeological information comes to light, the specific religious or cultural reason remains as supposition.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080319201240AAkIPzO