Rex Trulove
If a cow or steer gets into a rich food source, they can easily and quickly die. However, many people don’t fully understand why or why it is necessary for ranchers to intervene.
First, it is helpful to know what they die from. The death is caused by foundering and the foundering is caused by the way ruminants digest their food. Ruminants are animals that ‘chew the cud’. They have stomachs that are divided into four chambers and this group of animals includes cattle and deer.
One of the chambers in the stomach isn’t much more than a glorified holding tank. As cattle eat, the food ends up in this chamber, where it will stay until the animal has the time to chew it up. This is what chewing the cud is; regurgitating mouth-sized portions of the food from that first chamber, thoroughly chewing it, then swallowing it so it passes into the next chamber.
This is necessary because normally, grass and forbs (weeds) are low in nutrition, so it takes a lot to ensure the survival of the animal and to get the maximum nutrition from what they eat.
However, if the animal consumes a large amount of rich, dense, green material, it can easily ferment in the first chamber of the stomach because of the bacteria found there. The fermentation releases both carbon dioxide and methane. The animal can’t expel this gas in the quantity it is produced and it can kill them. This is foundering.
For instance, if a steer gets into a growing field of thick, rich, densely-packed green alfalfa, it is bad news. Ranchers who know what foundering is can treat the condition by poking a hole in that first chamber of the stomach to relieve the gas. (This isn’t for the faint of heart since it almost always means that a large quantity of green, stinky “goo”, under pressure by the gas, is expelled with quite a bit of force.)
Poking the stomach of cattle doesn’t harm them and the wound quickly heals. If the gas isn’t relieved, though, the stomach can literally explode inside the animal, like a burst balloon, killing the creature.
So why does man have to intervene? What is true of cattle is true of other ungulates and ruminants, like deer, yet deer don’t usually need the intervention of people.
The reason is that thick, rich, densely packed sources of food rarely exist in nature. Wild ruminants aren’t exposed to the issue. However, a steer that gets into an alfalfa field needs help because they are exposed to something that is unnatural. They will literally eat themselves to death.
At times, deer can get into an alfalfa field and have to potential to founder, too, however it rarely happens. This is because deer are almost always on the go, moving from bedding grounds, to watering locations, to feeding grounds. They don’t spend much time in any one place and almost all of the food is eaten while they are moving from one place to another.
Even when they find an alfalfa field, they are usually not there long enough to eat enough of the green alfalfa to cause them to founder. They may return to eat more, but overeating isn’t an issue. They simply aren’t there long enough. Domesticated cattle have the leisure to eat in excess.
Thus, people need to intervene at times to aid the cattle, while this isn’t necessary for deer.
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Is any of this new or surprising to you?
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Yes
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No
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I didn’t know most of it or any of it
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This is disgusting
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Great information on this subject , thanks for sharing
I have no doubt that a lot of people would be surprised at many things that are involved with raising livestock. I spent a lot of my life living in cattle country, and to a point, I still live in cattle country, just in a different state.
Thank you for sharing this information. I had no idea I just figured cattle do what comes naturally to them and no worries.
I’m sure that most people think that. The problem is that cattle aren’t naturally exposed to a large amount of very rich foods, so they’ve never had to adapt and come up with a way to deal with it. Cattle are also domesticated to the point that they rely on man for food and water. That has sort of dampened their instinctual drives.
This is the first time I have encountered that term foundering. Thanks for sharing the info about cattle.
Horses also founder and it is something that ranchers have to be alert to.
You can see from this account why it takes a lot of land to raise a lot of cattle. They need to roam widely over land that is not particularly rich in food so they can graze rather than gorge.
The tragedy of this, from an ecological perspective, is that you then get situations such as that in Brazil, where vast areas of forest are being cleared so that more cattle can be raised.
Unfortunately, it is also why so many cattle in the US are feedlot cattle. A lot of space isn’t needed for feedlot cattle.
Most of the cattle in Montana are pasture cattle that are also fed hay. Most of the cattle ranchers around here figure between 2 and 3 acres per beef steer. There are only a little over 94 million acres of land in Montana. Not all of that land is usable for pastureland and a lot of it is taken up in national forests and parks. Some of the national forest lands are used for open grazing, but that isn’t significant.
It would probably be pretty accurate to say that only about 20% of the land in Montana is suitable for grazing cattle. That would be 18.8 million acres. At one beef for every three acres, that would be a little more than 3 million beef per year that can be raised without altering the land. As it turns out, that is very close to the number of beef that are raised here every year. There is currently about 2.6 million head of beef cattle in Montana and that is our number one industry, not counting tourism, hunting, and fishing.
There are a few pasturages that can handle more than one beef for every three acres, though. One such area is just south of Crater Lake National Park, a location called Wood River Valley. The grass is so rich that a beef cow per half or three-quarters of an acre is common. That is an exception. Also, milk cattle are specifically not raised there because the milk tastes weird.
Still, the US is large enough with so much land that is suitable for growing cattle that in 2017, the US produced 93.6 million head of cattle. That is one reason the US exports such a huge amount of beef; around 2 billion pounds per year. So far this year, the US has exported 1.76 billion pounds of beef, with about 500 million pounds of that going to Japan and a bit more than 600 million pounds, combined, going to South Korea, Mexico, and Canada.