David Dunawayi age 13, of West Somerset, Ky.,for his question:

What exactly is a cow’s cud?

Bossy comes from a long line of grass eating ancestors. Her distant relatives were eating grass long before there were any human beings in the world. This, of course, was before Bossy became a domesticated animal. In those far off days, a cow had t o fend for herself. She had to find grass and keep out of the way of her enemies.

A grass eating animal must spend many hours feeding, during which time she is out in the open. All this time, she must be looking up for hungry meat eaters and be ready to run. Bossy' s remote ancestors developed special stomachs to make this difficult task easier. They learned to grab a hasty meal, swallow it whole and go off to some secluded spot to digest it in safety. Bossy no longer has to fend for herself. But she still has the special stomach developed by tier ancestors.

A cowls stomach is divided into compartments. She dines by taking a mouthful of hay or grass into her mouth where it is rolled loosely into a ball and swallowed whole. This gobbled food passes down into a compartment of the stomach called the rumen. One mouthful follows another until this first chamber is comfortably full.

Bossy now settles down to digest this gobbled meal. She gives a little hiccup and up from the rumen comes a damp ball of food. This is the cowls cud. It must be well chewed, then swallowed a second time. On the second trip down .the chewed cud passes to a different compartment of the stomach called the reticulum. When this bite is safely settled, Bossy gives another hiccup and up comes another cud to be chewed and sent down on its way for proper digestion.

Bit by bit the cud is being removed from the rumen.

When Bossy finishes chewing the cud, the rumen is empty and the well chewed food is in the reticulum compartment. From there it passes on through two more digestive chambers, the omasum or psalterium and lastly the abomasum.

All cattle, wild or domesticated, have this type of stomach and all of them chew the cud. Deer and other hoofed grazers also chew the cud. In the wilds this trick of being able to eat in haste and digest at leisure is a great life saver to the grass eating animals. But our pampered Bossy does not need all these precautions and we wonder why she still goes to so much trouble to digest her food. The answer is in her special stomach. For, when nature develops such a specialized organ in an animal, that animal cannot return to a more simple organ.

So long as there are cows, then, they will chew the cud.