That's Our Cow

Lucille the Jersey cow came to the library today. She was kind enough to let Amanda (the one on the left), milk her while we all watched.

I learned a lot about cows.

Holsteins are black and white (like the Chik-fil-a cows), Ayrshires are red and white (for the Bama fans), and Guernseys are orange (for the Auburn fans). Jerseys (like Lucille) are milk cows.

In the picture, Amanda is pointing out that you can see Lucille's ribs because milking cows are skinny (they produce milk, not hamburgers). I'd be skinny too if I had to do what Lucille does with her food.

She eats 60-80 pounds of feed every day and every bit of it goes through a rigorous digestion process. Lucille has four stomach compartments. In the first (the rumen), she makes grass loogies (about the size of golf balls and hereafter referred to as golf balls so as to avoid the word loogie). Then she sends the golf balls to the second compartment, which stores them until it's full and then passes them into the third. When the third compartment is full, she burps the food back up into the second compartment, then the first, then through the esophagus and back into the mouth.

There, she chews the golf balls (now called cud) again. After sufficient rumination, the cud is ready to go all the way through the first three compartments and into the fourth compartment, where it is finally digested.

Incidentally, this process is where we get the word ruminate, which means either to chew over and over again (like cud) or to ponder something repeatedly.

Cows use their long tongues primarily for moving the golf balls around, grinding the feed up, and picking their noses.

Ruminate on that.