The cow's stomach is designed in a special way - it has four sections or chambers, each of which performs its own function. Malfunction of at least one of the links digestive system entails various pathologies of animal health.
Features of cow digestion
Cows have an interesting digestive system - this animal swallows food whole, almost without processing it with its teeth, and then, when it rests, it regurgitates it in parts and chews it thoroughly. This is why the cow is often seen chewing. The mechanism of regurgitation and chewing food from the stomach is called cud. If this process stops for a cow, it means that something is wrong with her.
The digestive system of a cow has the following structure:
- Oral cavity – lips, teeth and tongue. They serve to capture food, swallow it and process it.
- Esophagus. Its total length is about half a meter, it connects the stomach with the pharynx.
- The stomach consists of four chambers. We will consider its detailed structure below.
- Small intestine. Consists of the duodenum, jejunum, and ileum. Here, processed food is enriched with bile and juices, as well as the absorption of useful substances into the blood.
- Large intestine. From the small intestine, the food mass enters the large intestine, where additional fermentation of food and absorption of substances into the blood occurs.
The structure of the cow's stomach and its sections
The structure of the stomach of a cow is also of interest - this organ consists of 4 chambers:
- scar;
- grids;
- books;
- rennet.
The real stomach in the full sense of the word is the abomasum; the remaining chambers serve for preliminary processing of food, they are called forestomach. The rumen, book and mesh do not have glands that produce gastric juice; only the abomasum is equipped with them. But in the forestomach, fermentation, sorting and mechanical processing of food occurs. Let's look at the sections of the cow's stomach in detail.
Scar
The first section of a cow's stomach is called the rumen. It has the largest volume compared to other chambers - about 200 liters! It is located in the abdominal cavity on the left side. Ingested food enters this proventriculus. The rumen is filled with microorganisms that ensure the primary processing of food.
Reference. The rumen contains a huge number of microorganisms, their total mass is about 3 kilograms. They promote the synthesis of B vitamins and protein in the animal’s body.
The scar consists of a double muscle layer and is divided into 2 parts by a small groove. The mucous membrane of the proventriculus is equipped with ten-centimeter papillae. It is in the rumen that starchy compounds and cellulose are broken down into simple sugars. Thanks to this process, the animal receives the necessary energy.
Net
This section of the stomach is much smaller in volume than the previous one. Its capacity is no more than 10 liters. The mesh is located in the chest area, one section of it is adjacent to the diaphragm. The main function of the net is to sort the feed. Small fractions of food from here move to the next section of the stomach, and larger fractions are regurgitated and enter the cow's mouth, where they are chewed. The mesh, as it were, filters the food, passing food that has already undergone primary processing further through the digestive system.
Book
Small pieces of food move into the book - the third section of the stomach. Here the food is thoroughly crushed mechanically, thanks to the special structure of the mucous membrane. It consists of folds resembling leaves. In the book, further processing of coarse fibers and absorption of water and acids takes place.
Abomasum
The abomasum is the only part of the cow's stomach that is equipped with glands for secreting gastric secretions. It is located in the area between the 9th and 12th ribs with right side. Its volume in adults reaches 15 liters.
In calves, the abomasum is actively working, while the remaining parts of the stomach remain unused until almost three weeks of age. Their rumen is in a folded position, and the milk immediately enters the abomasum through a gutter, bypassing the mesh and book.
Common pathologies
Cows often suffer from pathologies of the digestive system. They pose a serious danger to the life of the ruminant animal. Common digestive problems in cows:
- bloating;
- stop;
- blockage;
- injury.
Bloating
Tympany or bloating - very dangerous condition, which occurs due to a sharp change in the cow’s diet, the animal consuming large quantities of food, which contributes to increased gas formation. Tympany may occur due to a blockage in the esophagus. Symptoms:
- Refusal to eat.
- Enlarged abdomen.
- No chewing gum.
- Anxiety.
- In severe cases - shortness of breath, pallor of the mucous membranes.
Attention! This condition is dangerous for the life of the cow, since the increased size of the scar strongly compresses the diaphragm, preventing the animal from breathing normally. If help is not provided, the cow will die from lack of oxygen.
Methods to help with bloating include:
- Removal of a foreign body from the esophagus using a flexible probe.
- Stimulation of the stomach to start it.
- The use of medications that prevent gas formation and fermentation - Timpanol, burnt magnesia, activated carbon, ichthyol.
- In emergency cases, they resort to perforation of the scar with a trocar.
You can open up your stomach with a massage. It is performed on the left side of the abdominal cavity, in the area of the hungry fossa, with a fist. Pouring this area often helps. cold water. A cow needs to run to get her stomach working.
Stop
The digestion process often stops in cows due to improper feeding, for example, if concentrates predominate in the diet or the animal has eaten rotted hay. Also, gastric arrest occurs when the esophagus is blocked. Symptoms of the pathology: loss of chewing gum and appetite, general depression. If the cow's stomach has stopped, this can be checked. You need to lean your fist into the area of the hungry pit and listen to whether contractions occur.
Treatment of this pathology begins immediately. The first thing to do is to keep the animal on a starvation diet for 24 hours. In the future, digestible feed is gradually introduced - silage, not large number root crops, quality hay.
To start the stomach use:
- Hellebore tincture.
- Gastric lavage.
- They give you something to drink inside saline solution, vodka or moonshine (can be diluted with vegetable oil).
- Scar massage.
Zaval
Sometimes the stomach stops due to a blockage of the book. This happens when the animal’s diet is dominated by dry food, bran or grain waste. The cause of the pathology may be sand or dirt in the feed. The symptoms of a blocked book are similar to those observed when the stomach stops. Quite difficult to identify the real reason cessation of digestion. For diagnosis, a puncture of the stomach with a needle is used. If it enters with difficulty, it means that we are talking about a blockage.
If the diagnosis is confirmed, it makes sense to rinse the stomach. To do this, use a solution of sodium sulfate or chloride at a concentration of 10%. The procedure will require about a liter of this solution. To start the digestion process, use the same means as discussed above - vegetable oil, hellebore tincture, vodka.
Injury
Since the cow swallows unprocessed food, dangerous objects - wire, nails, wood chips, sharp stones - often get inside along with the food. Such foreign bodies can cause serious injury to the animal - piercing the stomach or piercing its walls. Mesh injuries are often through, sharp objects can hit nearby organs - the heart, spleen, lung.
Symptoms of traumatic reticulitis:
- Anxiety, loss of appetite.
- Stretching the neck forward.
- The cow takes unnatural poses - hunches over.
- Sometimes the temperature rises by 0.5-1 degrees.
- The animal feels pain when pressing on the sternum area.
Treatment is aimed at removing the foreign object from the stomach. Metallic foreign bodies are removed with a magnetic probe. If it is not possible to remove the object, they resort to surgery or the animal is slaughtered.
All parts of the stomach of ruminants perform their functions. If at least one of them stops working, the entire digestive system suffers. It is important to diagnose the development of pathology in time and begin treatment.
Everything about everything. Volume 5 Likum Arkady
Does a cow really have four stomachs?
No, a cow does not have four stomachs. But her stomach is divided into 4 sections. Cows, sheep, goats, camels, llamas, deer and antelopes have the habit of swallowing food and then putting it back into their mouths. Then they chew it carefully and with pleasure. Such animals are called ruminants.
The reason they evolved this method of feeding is because their ancestors were easy prey for stronger, more powerful animals. Therefore, many thousands of years ago, in order to protect themselves, ruminants got used to quickly swallowing food, then hiding in secluded places and chewing it there in a calm environment, with pleasure. This becomes possible thanks to the stomach of these animals, divided into 4 compartments: rumen, mesh, book and abomasum.
When the food a cow swallows is rough, it goes into the rumen, the largest of all sections. There it softens and goes into the net. In this section, food reaches the desired size. Later it is returned to the mouth by regurgitation. This is the opposite process of swallowing. After chewing, the animal swallows again, sending the chewed food to the third section, from where it passes into the fourth, directly into the stomach. Cows, sheep, and goats do not have front teeth on the upper jaw. Instead, the gums form a dense pad.
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The stomach of a cow, like other ruminants, has a unique structure. In this article we will tell you how many stomachs a cow has and how its digestive system works. Each department performs its own specific functions, which we will describe in detail below.
The digestive system of ruminants consists of the mouth, pharynx, esophagus and stomachs. The mouth of ruminants is well adapted for plucking grass and has only lower front teeth. One more interesting fact is the amount of saliva secreted per day in animals of this species. It’s hard to imagine, but this figure ranges from 100 to 200 liters. The esophagus, in addition to its main function, also serves to discharge enzymatic gases.
So how many stomachs does a cow have - one or four? Of course, there is one, but it is four-chambered. The first three chambers - the scar, the mesh and the book - are called the proventriculus. The abomasum is the fourth chamber of the cow's stomach. Let us consider in detail the structure of the digestive system of a cow, namely each of its parts.
Scar
Structure of the cow's stomach
It is the largest of the four chambers and has several important functions related to digestion. Functions of the rumen:
- fermentation (fermentation) - with the help of special intracellular bacteria, the initial process of digestion occurs. This organ breaks down food using the carbon dioxide and methane it produces. If the animal does not belch this gas, it may experience bloating, which will interfere with the functioning of other organs of the digestive system.
- mixing - rumen muscles help mix food and “spit” it out for re-chewing. The walls of the rumen have small formations that look like warts, they help absorb nutrients from food.
- transformative - the rumen contains more than 150 billion microbes that help convert carbohydrates in ruminant foods into fatty acids. And this is more than 70 percent of the mammal's energy supply. These organisms include bacteria and fungi. Bacteria in the rumen convert protein and ammonia ketoacids.
Net
This department can be called the “controller”. The main function of the mesh is to separate large pieces finely chewed food. The mesh returns coarser particles back into the rumen for reprocessing. There are no glands in this part. The walls of the mesh are covered with small tubercles. The main role in this part is played by the cells that determine whether the food particles are well processed by the rumen.
Book
The book is the third section. It has a folded structure, divided into narrow chambers. It is in these folds that food is placed. Digestive processes continue in this section. The food is processed by saliva and ferments. In the book, parts of the food are digested, distributed between the folds of this section and dehydrated. The special structure of the book's walls allows it to absorb moisture. Based on this, it can be noted that the main function of the book is suction. The mass of this part is quite large, but it is small in capacity.
Abomasum
This is the last section of the stomach of ruminant animals. The abomasum is most similar to the stomach of ordinary mammals. The mucous membrane of the abomasum has numerous glands that secrete acidic gastric juice. The structure of the cow's stomach (abomasum) is simpler compared to other sections. The muscle tissues of this section are formed by longitudinal rings.
The walls of the abomasum are covered with a mucous membrane, which has a prismatic epithelium, it contains pyloric and cardiac glands. The mucosa forms 13-14 long folds. It is in this part that the main processes of digestion, absorption of nutrients from food, etc. occur.
Now we know how many stomachs a cow actually has and what her digestive system looks like. The normal functioning of the sections of the digestive system of ruminant animals directly depends on their diet. Bacterial supplements are often added to cow feed, which allow parts of the animal's digestive system to work better.
Video “Feeding cows”
The video talks about feeding cows: mode, method of feeding, diet.
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Cows have an extremely voluminous digestive system with an intricate structure. The stomach of such an animal consists of several compartments, each of which performs its own function. In the presented material I would like to consider the number of stomachs in a cow and their structure.
How many stomachs does a domestic cow have?
Mammals have digestive organs with a similar structure and operating principle. However, this does not apply to cattle. How many stomachs does a cow have? The answer to this question is quite simple. These animals have only one stomach. However, it consists of 4 sections: rumen, book, mesh and abomasum.
The photo presented in this material will allow you to see how many stomachs a cow has. When examining a cross-section of an animal's carcass, you can be convinced that it is not just a solid muscle bag, like in omnivores or carnivorous mammals, but a complex system of individual digestive chambers. The stomach, which consists of several sections, allows the animal to eat fairly coarse plant foods, extracting the maximum amount of nutrients from it.
Next, we’ll take a closer look at how many stomachs cows have. Let's look at the structure of the various parts of the digestive system of livestock.
Chewing and salivation
In the mouth of cattle, there are teeth only on the lower jaw. This allows animals to more effectively grab and tear down plants. Despite the fact that the cow's mouth is ideally suited for plucking grass, during chewing the food is crushed to a frankly poor quality.
Dairy cows produce more than 100 liters of saliva per day. The drier the food an animal consumes, the more of this bodily fluid is produced by the body. At the same time, cow saliva contains a small percentage of enzymes that take part in the breakdown of food. For the most part, cattle saliva acts as a humectant that allows feed to pass through the esophagus.
Based on the above, during digestion the cow has to chew the so-called cud - a half-digested mass, which is periodically regurgitated back into the throat. This allows the animal to grind food efficiently for better breakdown in the stomach.
Scar
How many stomachs do cows have? First, let's talk about the first and largest section of the digestive system of livestock - the rumen. It is here that the digestive mass coming from the esophagus undergoes primary treatment with enzymes and enzymes.
The scar consists of 3 separate parts: dorsal, cranial and ventral regions. Muscle mass These functional bags are reduced every 60 seconds, which leads to the grinding of feed. Thus, the first stage of digestion ends in the cow's stomach.
After contraction of individual parts of the rumen, food is regurgitated into oral cavity cow and chewed again. The formed chewing gum immediately enters the third compartment of the stomach - the book, where it is subjected to intensive processing with enzymes.
Net
Let's continue to consider how many stomachs a cow has. The next section of the animal’s digestive system - the mesh - is a kind of “controller”. Here the separation of small, well-chewed food mass from coarse large pieces of food occurs. The mesh sends insufficiently crushed particles back into the rumen. This happens due to the contraction of the corresponding muscles. Well-processed food moves further through the digestive system.
Book
Considering the number of stomachs in a cow, let's talk about the next section, which is called the book. It is connected to the mesh with a kind of gutter. The compartment contains thin partitions that look like the pages of a book. This is where the strange name came from.
In the book, well-chopped feed mass is fermented under the influence of bacteria. This principle of digestion allows the animal’s body to absorb the maximum amount of fiber. In this section they are also absorbed into the blood minerals and liquid. Since complex operations take place in the book, only about 5% of the total feed mass enters here during the digestion process.
Abomasum
How many stomachs do cows have? The fourth conventional stomach is called the abomasum. A large number of glands are concentrated here, which produce large volumes of acidic liquids.
In the abomasum, the residual mass of undigested food is processed by gastric juices. This allows fiber to be broken down into proteins that are absorbed by the body. All processed waste moves into the animal's rectum due to the contraction of longitudinal muscle rings.
Conclusion
So we found out how many stomachs cows have. As you can see, there is only one organ in livestock. However, it consists of several departments, each of which plays its own specific role.
Finally, it is worth noting that the food eaten remains in the animal’s body for several days. To ensure that fiber is absorbed faster, farms often add special bacterial additives to cows’ food, which allow the digestive system to better cope with the breakdown of complex structures in the feed. Straw or hay is considered mandatory in the diet of cows. Dry food is ideal for the formation of dense evening cud, the formation of which allows the animal to better cope with the assimilation of silage, vegetable food, and animal feed.
Everyday ideas about the body structure of some animals sometimes cause quite logical amazement among more enlightened people. For example, “How many stomachs does a cow have?” may be extremely surprising to those who are accustomed to logically believing that all higher mammals have a completely standard digestive system, equipped with a single stomach.
Nevertheless, the structure of a living creature largely depends on its lifestyle and diet, so not everything is so simple among ruminant herbivores, which include the ordinary domestic cow.
Four stomachs of a cow: reasons for the misconception
In many ways, the knowledge of the average rural resident, not burdened with an academic education, is based on his own experience. And they have more experience in this than the city ones. After slaughtering a cow, you can see with your own eyes that the question “How many stomachs do cows have?” not idle - you can clearly see four different departments, and this cannot but baffle.
If after this the average city dweller is told that the villagers know better and have seen with their own eyes that a cow has four stomachs, then questions or doubts are unlikely to arise. School program, if it is not directly related to everyday activities, it does not linger in the head for a long time. That is why all sorts of incidents with information about the internal structure of farm animals become possible.
How many stomachs do cows have?
What should you believe - your own eyes or academic data? How to navigate conflicting information? The answer to the question "How many stomachs do cows have?" extremely simple - these animals have only one stomach, but it is multi-chambered, that is, it consists of four sections. These are tripe, mesh, book and abomasum.
At the same time, visually, when gutting a carcass, you can really make sure that it is not just a muscular digestive sac, like in predators or omnivores. The four-chamber stomach allows cows and other ruminants to feed on rough plant matter, while extracting maximum nutrients from it.
Features of cow digestion
Can be called ideal vegetarians. They do really well without protein supplements of animal origin, if there is a sufficient amount of green matter in the diet. Considering from a practical point of view what kind of stomach a cow has, one can only be amazed at the reasonable and unique structure of the digestive system of this animal.
Instructs herbivores to eat a large amount of plant matter as quickly as possible, but it is better to do the digestion process in a safer place. The largest section of the stomach is the rumen; it is here that the practically unchewed parts of plants eaten by the cow come. A large part of the food from it is regurgitated back into the oral cavity for thorough chewing. When swallowed again, the gum ends up in the mesh and not in the rumen.
Some experts, in response to the question “How many sections are there in the stomach of a cow?” The tripe, mesh and book are called proventriculuses, because the full process of digestion occurs in the abomasum. But at the same time, the correct answer remains the academic one - a cow has one stomach, and it consists of four sections.
How to adjust a cow's diet taking into account the structure of the stomach
Is it necessary to somehow adjust the animal’s diet, especially after the owner finds out how many sections there are in the cow’s stomach? Undoubtedly, this must be taken into account, especially in winter, when free grazing is impossible and the animal is kept in a stall.
The unique internal structure of the cow suggests that the animal spends some time methodically chewing the cud—hard, undigested plant parts. This process promotes good digestion; if a cow does not chew the cud, it means she is not feeling well, or the diet simply does not give her this opportunity.
A wet mash of mixed feed is an excellent high-calorie food that helps increase the animal's milk production, however, there is practically nothing to chew again after such a dinner. This reduces the correct balance of microorganisms in the cow's diet. It is necessary to include hay and some small part of straw specifically for evening chewing. This will allow the animal to remain healthy and fully digest feed, vegetables and silage.