40 Examples of Ruminant Animals

The ruminants are those mammals that feed on vegetables, they lack incisor teeth in the upper jaw and have a stomach composed of four cavities (for this reason they are also called polygastric). For example: bull, cow, goat.

The designation of ruminants is given because their feeding process consists of swallowing the grass as quickly as possible, and then guarding against its predators to begin to quietly ruminate the grass.

Examples of ruminant animals

Feeding mechanism

The act of rumination it is a regurgitation of the food to be able to remastize it. The process begins with the first intake of the grass where cut but not well crushed passes into the belly: Peristaltic contractions that occur there, returns to the mouth to be chewed and salivated, forming the bolus nutritional.

Then it returns to the curdling where the gastric juices actuate, continuing through the intestine where digestion takes place, and then incorporation into the general circulation.

Ruminants belong to a special category of herbivorous mammals which includes some well-known animals, and their rumination process allows them to take advantage of the carbohydrates structural elements present in plants, such as cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin. This provides them with an additional source of energy.

The "four stomachs"

The rumination process is made possible because the stomach is divided into four cavities. In this way, it can be said that ruminants have:

The polygastric structure of these animals was given precisely by exposure to hunters (faster or stronger than them) that they had many times, to the extent that the feeding process was long and slow because the grass does not provide large nutrients.

The rumination process served to enable these animals to go out into the great, open meadows where they were exposed to hunters and eat everything in a hurry. they could in great quantity, to later hide among trees and bushes, where they could begin their process of digestion.

To complement this process is that the stomach was divided, improving food from the microorganisms found in each of the cavities.

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