Moo.

A colleague and friend of mine told me once that cows make him suspicious. Steadily chewing day in and day out, staring into the far distance, it seems to him that they’re plotting. According to him, gazing and grazing is not it all there is to them. I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t think they’re malicious. This is not where the answer lies.

A cow weights on average 1600 pounds or 725 kilogrammes. I am talking breed average, its weight can vary from 600 pounds (272 kilogrammes) for small breeds to 2500 pounds (1134 kilogrammes) for the larger ones. The chewing cow we’re staring at right now is a perfect average 1600 pounds cow.

Every day, it will have to eat about 2 to 2.5 percent of its body weight in dry matter. (Dry matter is what’s left of Midsummer common grass when the water has been taken out. Seeing the deluge that April has been, extracting dry matter must be a tough job.) So. Our cow Betsy needs an intake of 1600 x 2.5 % (Betsy’s no 2 percent cow. She enjoys her grass.), that is 40 lbs of dry matter. Every day. In springtime, grass is made of about 85% of water which leaves Betsy 15% of dry matter. She therefore needs to eat 267 pounds (121 kilogrammes) of fresh grass.  Every day.

That’s weight dealt with. How about time? A cow’s usual bite rate is of 65 bites per minute. Dry matter amount per bite varies between 0.4 and 0.5 grams. A tall and dense pasture should provide 0.5 grams per bite. As far as I can see from my bike at morning ‘kinda late‘ speed, I’d say Midsummer common grass looks pretty good. Besides, it’s not like Betsy and her friend are going to ever run out of it. There’s more than enough for the few of them but since it’s spring moist grass time I’ve decided a bite must provide 0.45 grams of dry matter per bite. Ok, so that’s 29.25 grams per minute, 1755 per hour. To get the 18 kilogrammes of dry matter she needs, Betsy needs to chew for about 10 hours and 20 minutes. Every day.

Now how about rumination time? Cows are ruminants, they eat in successive sessions. First they chew, and leave the grass (or grain or whatever) to rest for a while in their first stomach. There it gets softer and they can regurgitate what it then called ‘cud’ and chew on it again now that it has become easier. While she does so, Betsy can’t also be chewing fresh grass. I have to admit I struggled to find actual data about rumination time. Which maybe isn’t too bad because I’ve probably lost half of my readers already. Besides I happen to be rather lousy at calculations and have managed in the past to get a subtraction wrong between 2012 and 1992. Yes Sir. Frankly I cannot guarantee the accurateness of all the figures I’ve exposed, even though I tried really hard to get them right. I verified them against online data to make sure they made some sense and redid my math when I ended up with chewing times greater than 24 hours a day.

Anyway. It seems an average rumination time could be seven to ten hours a day. We won’t know precisely but Betsy does, which is the most important. When she starts the day, she knows that in order to survive she’s got one tedious task ahead: feeding for hours and hours. Have you ever faced a long boring task that implies repetitive actions? When I do and there’s nothing to keep me distracted, as I’m endeavouring to overcome the burden I tend to count. Only that much left. I do that distance in that much time, so in fifteen minutes I should have done such and such. By the time I get to this point that much will be achieved which mean that much percent of the overall tasks, therefore I’ve got to keep on going for that much more time.

Well Betsy (or any cow on this planet who’s got access to sufficient provision) does the same. Every. Single. Day. Of its life. All those annoying figures, dry matter, percentage of body weight, average humidity of the food, bite rate and so on they have to consider. So come on Matt, get a grip. There’s not plotting involved, the poors guys are merely counting their bored souls off.