How do animals digest food?

Gather round children.

We’ve come to the countryside to meet animals who digest their food in different ways, starting with the barn owl.

Barn owls eat small rodents like mice, but since they don’t have teeth to chew with, they usually just swallow them whole.

The only problem is digestive juices in their stomachs aren’t strong enough to break down bones and fur, so instead, all that tough stuff gets compressed into pellets inside the owl’s gizzard, which is like a muscular second stomach.

A few hours after a meal, the owl will spit up the pellet of compressed waste.

Here comes one now.

Heads up!

MOOING

Cows eat grass which is very difficult to digest, so their stomach has four separate compartments to help process it.

In the first compartment, bacteria starts to break down the grass, and in the second, the grass gets shaped into balls called cud.

The cud travels back up the cow’s throat and gets chewed a second time to break it down even more.

In the third compartment, the cud gets packed tight and loses most of its water, and in the fourth, the cud finally gets broken down by digestive juices.

Nutrients are absorbed in the intestines and any undigested food and nutrients are treated as waste, which goes all the way throughthe cow and comes out as poo.

What may be waste to a cow, of course, can still have nutritional value for others.

Waste not, want not I say!