• Question: A cow has 4 stomachs becasue of the amount of grass they eat when they graze and the amount they have to digest, but horses (particularly in the wild) also spend a lot of time grazing, they are more 'slim-lined'. Do they have 4 stomachs as well or just a more efficient digestion system than another animal, say........ a dog?

    Asked by taylh067 to Emma, Jimmy, Janet, Niall, Simon on 9 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Janet Daly

      Janet Daly answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      What a good question…horses have only one, relatively small, stomach, and the food a horse eats doesn’t spend much time being digested there – horses are called ‘hind gut fermenters’. It is really important that a horse maintains a healthy population of friendly bacteria in their intestines because they do most of the digesting of food. Digestion of fibre by these bacteria generates lots of heat, acting like a central heating system for the horse. Horses tend to have a more delicate digestive system than other animals – racehorses that are fed concentrated food instead of eating a little can get stomach ulcers and horses quite often suffer from ‘colic’, which is like an extreme form of indigestion.

    • Photo: Niall Crawford

      Niall Crawford answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      I agree with Janet – horses rely on an organ called a caecum (which is full of special bacteria) to help them digest grass. Even still, they are less efficient at digesting it, so their poo will have more grains of grass in it than cows will. ,Lots of animals which eat grass are ruminants (where digestion has lots of stages of chewing and softening of the grass in the stomach), but not all. Rabbits, for example, eat their poo to digest the grass properly.

    • Photo: Simon Park

      Simon Park answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Agreed, a good question. Mammals can’t digest cellulose on their own so both cows and horses have to rely on gut bacteria to do this for them. Some of the difference in “sizes” might be due to what cows and horses were bred for aswell. Horses mostly for speed and strength, and cows as meat and milk factories

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