128 THE FEEDING OF ANIMALS 



Practice does not seem to have permanently ratified 

 them, and, so far as digestibility is concerned, this out- 

 come is in accordance with the results of scientific demon- 

 stration. The conclusions of German experimenters have 

 been that these special treatments have no favorable 

 influence, their effect being either imperceptible or 

 unfavorable. 



187. Wetting food. It should occasion no surprise 

 that the mere wetting of a food is without influence upon 

 its solubility in the digestive juices, because it becomes 

 thoroughly moistened during the mastication and in the 

 stomach. It is not rational to expect that previous 

 wetting would have the slightest effect unless it induced 

 more complete mastication, which certainly would not 

 be the case with ground grains. The extensive trials by 

 Kuhn and others with a hay and bran ration, the bran 

 being fed in several conditions, such as dry, wet, moist- 

 ened some hours before feeding, treated with boiling water, 

 and fermented, gave results adverse to all of the special 

 methods of preparation as either useless or harmful, and 

 no testimony so thorough and convincing has been fur- 

 nished on the other side. 



188. Cooking foods. German and American experi- 

 ments unite in condemning the cooking of foods already 

 palatable, because this causes a marked depression of 

 the digestibility of the protein, with no compensating 

 advantages. Digestion trials with cooked or steamed 

 hays, silage, lupine seed, corn meal and wheat bran, and 

 roasted cotton seed, uniformly show their protein to be 

 notably less digestible than that in the original materials, 

 a fact which may explain the lessened productive value 

 of cooked grains which has been observed in certain 

 experiments. It must be conceded, of course, that when 



