124 THE FEEDING OF ANIMALS 



it does tend to secure a thorough appropriation of the 

 nutrients which enter the alimentary canal. Without 

 doubt, the success of one feeder as compared with the 

 failure of another may sometimes be due, in part, to a 

 superior manner of presenting a ration to the animal's 

 attention and to manipulations that add to the agreeable- 

 ness of its flavors. (See Par. 162.) 



182. Influence of quantity of ration. — ^Early experi- 

 ments by Wohf, in which he fed larger and smaller rations 

 of the same fodder to the same animals, have been made 

 the authority for the statement that a full ration is as 

 completely digested as a scanty one, provided the former 

 does not pass the normal capacity of the animal. It must 

 be said, however, that the testimony concerning this 

 point is not unanimous. Since Wolff's experiments, 

 Weiske, in feeding oats to rabbits, foimd the digestibil- 

 ity to be inversely as the quantity of food taken. In 

 experiments with oxen, by G. Kuhn, at Mockem, when 

 the grain ration was doubled the digestibility of the malt 

 sprouts used was decreased about 9 per cent. Results 

 at the New York Experiment Station from feeding full 

 and half rations to four sheep showed uniformly higher 

 digestion coefficients with the smaller ration, the differ- 

 ences being too large and too constant to be considered 

 accidental. Other experiments give varying and con- 

 flicting figures. If we assume that the constituents of 

 feeding-stuffs have a certain fixed solubility in the 

 digestive fluids, then within reasonable limits the amount 

 of food should have no effect upon the proportions of 

 nutrients digested, but such an assumption cannot safely 

 be made. 



Doubtless no single statement concerning this point 

 will be found applicable to all animals and all rations. 



