FOOD REQUIRED BY THE HERBIVORA. 689 



Grinding of oats is only necessary for old horses or those in which the 

 teeth are changing. Oxen and hogs, as a rule, digest the ground cereals 

 better than the whole grains. According to Lehuiann, of the entire 

 grains in a fourteen-months-old ox 48.2 barley and 19.6 per cent, oats 

 remained undigested. In a five-months-old ox 33.0 barley and 6.5 per 

 cent, oats remained undigested. 



Even after mixing with chopped straw a large part of the entire 

 grains escape digestion and pass through the faeces almost entirely 

 unchanged, and still possess the power of germination. Of one hundred 

 kilogrammes of the unground grains fed to hogs Lehmann found in the 

 faeces 50.6 kilos of oats, 49.8 kilos of rye, 54.8 kilos of barley, and 4.8 

 kilos of peas. The experiment, therefore, points in the most emphatic 

 manner to the administration to the ox and hog' of all the cereal grains 

 mealed and mixed with other foods. About the only exception to this 

 statement is found in the case of oats. The chopping of dry fodder 

 enables it to be mixed readily with large amounts of more tasty sub- 

 stances. So, also, the young, tender, highly albuminous green foods 

 may be chopped and mixed with less nutritious substances, such as straw. 

 The transition of dry to green feeding and the reverse is facilitated by 

 the mixture of the green fodder with dry, chopped straw. Horses should 

 always receive good hay unchopped, but the straws of the cereals should 

 always be given in a chopped state, since horses will only take the hard 

 straw in small amounts. Chopped food for horses should not be shorter 

 than from one and one-third to two centimeters in length of each piece, 

 since smaller pieces readily lead to obstructive colic, especially if given 

 with meal in a moist condition. For the ox, straw may be chopped into 

 pieces two and one-half to three centimeters long, and mixed well with 

 corn-meal or chopped beets or potatoes in order to make it more tasty. 



The duration of the interval between different times of feeding of 

 the domestic animals is a matter of considerable importance. Too fre- 

 quent feeding should be avoided on account of the shortening of the 

 necessary pauses between the digestive processes. The ruminants, espe- 

 cially, should not receive more than at most three meals in the day, so as 

 to allow time for rumination. Horses likewise should receive three meals 

 and hogs from three to four meals a day. On the other hand, the inter- 

 vals between feeding should not be too long, on account of the great 

 increase of hunger so produced leading to faulty mastication and imper- 

 fect insalivation of the food. This state of affairs may produce much 

 more serious disturbance in the non-ruminants than in the ruminants. 

 In young cattle from four to six meals may be given a day on account 

 of the relatively smaller size of their stomachs, since three meals scarcely 

 furnish enough to sustain them. So, also, when the fodder is especially 

 fluid the meals may succeed each other every two or three hours, for ia 



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