CHAPTER III 
THE DIGESTION OF FEEDS 
Tue farm animals that chew their feed a second time are known 
as ruminants. Cattle, sheep, and goats belong to this class. The 
non-ruminants, on the other hand, are represented among the farm 
animals by the horse and the pig. The two kinds of animals differ 
radically in the anatomy of their digestive apparatus; the stomach 
of the ruminants consists of four divisions or sacs, of which the 
first three are mainly reservoirs for softening and holding the feed 
till it is returned to the mouth to be chewed again, while the fourth 
one is the true stomach, where a digestive fluid is secreted. The 
non-ruminating animals have only one stomach, into which the 
feed passes directly from the mouth and the gullet (cesophagus), 
and is acted upon by the digestive fluid secreted there. We shall 
consider separately the digestive apparatus of ruminants and non- 
ruminants. 
The digestive apparatus of ruminants consists, as already 
stated, of four separate compartments that are connected with one 
another, viz. : 
a. The rumen or paunch. 
b. The reticulum or honeycomb. 
c. The omasum or manyplies. 
d. The abomasum or the true stomach (Fig. 7). 
The first three stomachs are mainly enlargements of the ali- 
mentary: canal and serve as reservoirs for the feed before it is 
chewed the second time. The rumen or paunch is by far the 
largest one of the four stomachs and, in the case of grown cattle, 
holds about nine-tenths of the total capacity of them all. The 
abomasum, or fourth stomach, corresponds to the single stomach 
of the non-ruminants, and, like this, contains a digestive fluid which 
acts upon the feed. When the cow swallows her feed, which is 
partly chewed and well mixed with saliva, it passes down the gullet 
and partly into the paunch through a slit in the gullet, partly into 
the second stomach (honeycomb). It remains here for a time 
and is softened by the saliva and the watery secretions of the 
paunch wall. The contents of the paunch are given a churning 
motion which gradually forces it toward the funnel-shaped orifice of 
the gullet through compression of the paunch by the diaphragm 
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