ATTN: This is addressed to teenagers,
tuba players and grown-ups in the news media who have gotten great
giggles out of the story that cow flatulence is a danger to mankind!
It can be expected from those that have the attention span of a Bartlett pear, but tuba players should know better.
Cows do not flatulate.
Allow
me to give you a lesson in bovine physiology. Cows are herbivores,
vegetarians. They live on grass. Cows are big. 1,000 lbs. Cows eat a
lot of grass. They have four stomachs, the biggest is the rumen. The
rumen's job is to prepare grass and roughage to make it digestible by
the other stomachs and the alimentary track. This is done by bacterial
digestion and fermentation, and physical maceration.
Now,
cows lead a fairly boring life. They graze and chew their cud. The cud
is a baseball-size wad of chewed, swallowed, re-chewed, regurgitated,
chewed and swallowed grass, ad infinitum. This cud is part of a
magnificent digestive mechanism that allows cows and other ruminants to
utilize fibrous vegetative material that is otherwise completely
indigestible by simple-stomached animals like…people. For instance,
cows can derive nutritional benefit from lettuce! Who'd a thunk it!
People
eat lettuce because it is the next best thing to eating nothing. If you
wanna lose weight, the best way is to eat…(?). No, not lettuce,
Nothing! But nobody wants to eat nothing, so they eat lettuce, which is
the next best thing.
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