The Lady's Country Companion; Or, How to Enjoy a Country Life RationallyLoudon, Mrs. (Jane)
General
The Lady's Country Companion; Or, How to Enjoy a Country Life Rationally
Loudon, Mrs. (Jane)
Cooking; Country life; Home economics
When cows eat a quantity of grass in this state, they very often have
the disease which is called _hoven_ or _blown_. To make you understand
this fearful complaint, I must remind you that cows, in common with all
ruminating animals, have four stomachs; and that, when a cow is turned
into a field, she twists her tongue round mouthful after mouthful of
the long grass, and after biting each off, conveys it without chewing
to her first stomach or paunch, till this is about half full, when
the animal seems stimulated by nature to seek rest and quiet, for she
leaves off eating, and either stands perfectly still in some shady
place, or lies down. The paunch now begins to exert its extraordinary
power of separating a small portion of the food it contains, and
returning it to the mouth, when the animal begins slowly to masticate
it, moistening it as she does so with small quantities of water which
she draws up from time to time from her second stomach, or honeycomb,
in which water is retained for that purpose; and this operation is
called chewing the cud. The food, when thoroughly masticated, is
conveyed by another channel to the third stomach or many-plies, where
it is subjected to muscular action; and, finally, it is conveyed into
the fourth stomach, or red bag, which contains the gastric juice, and
which in calves is the part used for rennet; and here the process
of digestion is completed. Sheep, goats, deer, and camels are all
ruminating animals, and are, of course, all furnished with the same
apparatus for digestion; but in sheep the paunch is smaller, as they
bite close to the ground, and take smaller mouthfuls than cattle; and
in camels the second stomach, or receptacle for water, is much larger.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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