If you have ever watched a sheep, a goat, or a cow giving birth, you have probably marvelled on how the newborn quickly gets to its feet and find its way to the udder for milk. BUt in the case of young ruminants, there is another unseen marvel.
Ruminants have a four-chambered stomach for the multiple processes for digestion. So when the newborns feed only on milk,, which does not need all those processes for digestion, a special bypass opens to allow the milk to go directly to the last chamber.
According to research, if milk were to find its way into the first chamber called the rumen, the young ruminant would suffer because the rumen is where hard to digest food is broken down by bacterial fermentation. Fermenting milk produces gas that new borns cannot eliminate. However when newborns drink milk from an udder or a buckett, a reflesx action snaps shut the entry way to the rumen.
Remarkably, something different happens when a newborn drinks water. It needs plenty of water in its rumen so that bacteria and microbes there can multiply, ready for when the youngster begins to live on forage. Although milk goes directly to the last chamber of the stomach, plain water enters the rumen. The calf's amazing bypass is for millk only.
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