Eli5: How is it that Cows can consume the same fibrous grass that makes every other herbivores scat into tight balls, somehow manage to produce turds of such low density as to be called “cow patties”? ?
In: Biology
Cows have a digestive system heavily optimized for grazing on low-nutritional-value grass.
Your small intestine is 5m, theirs is 40m. Your stomach is a small bag, theirs is a giant 4-chambered complex organ that they use like a fermentation vat.
Plant matter that passes through this system is thoroughly destroyed and fermented by bacteria into nutrition for the cow.
“Non-ruminant” herbivores that don’t use this layout tend to leave more undigested fiber in their poo.
can someone explain the QUESTION like im 5?
Because they basically have constant diarrhea. The bad thing about diarrhea is that you get dehydrated quickly so in the wild, they had to put more energy in conserving water. But domesticated, they were taken care of, so they had an abundant supply of water, and breeding (and thus evolution) could focus on other areas.
This is a little different than OP, and doesn’t need to be ELI5, but can someone explain why cows poop differ from sheep/goats when all are ruminants then?
They’re going to be different than hindgut fermenters which is kinda the root of OPs question, but goat scat versus a cow’s are very different even though they’re in the same family (Bovidae)
Basically because cows are not as good at conserving water as other herbivores. Because their bodies aren’t trying to save water they don’t spend the energy to reabsorb the water in their poop. An herbivore who lives in an environment where water is scarce wants to loose the least amount of water through its poop as possible, so their bodies spend the energy to pull as much water from their poop as possible. Water is not a limiting resource for cows, so their bodies are not adapted to be efficient at saving water.
Ok so there are 2 types of plant eating animal. There are foregut digesters and hindgut digesters. Why are they called this? Because it takes a lot of time to digest plants and nature has evolved two ways of doing this.
Foregut digesters do most of the digesting at the START of the digestive tract. Cows have several stomachs filled with digestive juices that do this BEFORE the food enters the intestine. Ever hear of chewing cud? That’s a cow swallowing some grass, then regurgitating it up into its mouth to give it another chew. The idea is it’s as mashed up as much as possible. Then digested as much as possible before getting to the intestine where the nutrients are absorbed.
Hindgut digesters do their digesting at the END of the intestine. They normally have a very large appendix filled with digestive juices that digest plant matter. Just like the foregut digesters have in their stomachs. This means that they need to eat more plants. Because they digestion happens at the end, they don’t get as much nutrients. So they need to eat more to make up for it. Some hindgut digesters like rabbits will eat their own droppings to give them a second pass.
Because of the different nature of their digesting systems they have very different poop. If you look at horse poop you can actually see the grass blades. Cow poop, not so much.
Fun Fact: in Iowa we have Cow Pie Bingo. We have a bunch of numbers spray painted to the ground and put a cow in a fence surrounding the numbers and where ever he poops, if you have that number, you win.
For other grazers, they don’t effectively digest the fibrous material in grass and other plants -so what comes out is a bunch of cellulose fiber left over from extracting everything else in the leaves.
Cows have a 4-chambered stomach, and they have a digestive process where they will regurgitate partially digested grass and chew it again (“chew their cud”) to grind down the fibers more and more. Then it goes back into the next stomach. In those stomachs are bacteria that break down cellulose into digestion-friendly nutrients.
So that’s the short answer – cows have bacteria that break down the fibers to mush, so there’s no compilation of left-over fiber to form a nice firm road apples like horses or sheep.
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