By the end of the four-day Tillamook County Fair, I’d made some friends from our dairy-farm community who seeming pleased, if not amused, by my fascination with cows and were happy to introduce me to their Holsteins.
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Cow Stomach
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My first adventure was with Helen, a large and compact woman, easy going and with the most cheerful smile and disposition I’d ever seen. I was dressed like her in faded jeans, a flannel shirt, and Wellies. But while Helen filled her boots, I clunked along the twenty yards from her old blue pickup to the pasture gate. On the way, I recited what I’d learned about the four parts of a cow’s stomach, and Helen, chuckling at my enthusiasm, confirmed what I’d learned:
The Rumen holds 150 to 200 liters of partly digested food and is full of good bacteria that softens the food and ferments the carbs to produce energy.
The Reticulum forms the softened food into small lumps of cud which is returned to the cow’s mouth and chewed 40 to 60 times before being swallowed again.
The Omasum processes the cud by breaking it up and also regulates fluid absorption in the intestine.
The Abomasum works somewhat like the human stomach to digest the useful nutrients which are gradually absorbed into the blood.
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Helen opened the pasture gate. “Wow,” I exclaimed as we stepped into the vast grassy land where cows—she’d said about a 150—were grazing and ruminating. As we walked, I soaked in the sweet smell of grass, the blue sky, and the feeling that the world of the sacred cows had been opened to me.
“I think I could turn and live with the animals,” Walt Whitman had written and I began to recite, my eyes closed as I spun around in the wide open space, “they are so placid and self-contained…” Opening my eyes to look, I saw Helen laughing as over her shoulder…cows, a whole pack of them…were running, no, stampeding toward us. And fast. Oh holy shit…not just those cows…but all of the cows were coming at us from every direction. 150 of them bounding like 1500-pound gazelles across the pasture and closing in….