Sticking Out Your Tongue

This weekend Tricia and I brought the milking buckets out to the barn for the afternoon milking.  The cows are always way out in the pasture eating grass. Normally Daisy looks up and sees us and she'll start walking toward the barn - not because she likes us, but because she knows that we're going to give her a scoop and a half of Dairy Ration with a cup of alfalfa pellets on top and maybe, a drizzle of molasses too.

Rosie, on the other hand, ignores us.  We bang on the side of the bucket.  We clap our hands.  We call her name.  No response.  So I walk way out into the pasture and get her.  When I walk up to her she lifts her head and slowly begins ambling in with me.  Every third step, however, she looks down,, stops walking and stretches her neck out and grabs a big mouthful of green grass.

I watched her for a minute and took a couple photographs.  Here's the weird thing. Cows have no top front teeth.  They only have bottom front teeth.  So they can't bite grass like a person eats corn on the cob.  So what does Rosie do?  She uses her TONGUE.  If you watch her, it is truly a sight to see.  She sticks out her long tongue and wraps that tongue around the grass and pulls it into her mouth, breaking it off. It is pretty amazing to watch.

When I watch her eating grass, I think how much that would hurt if I would try to eat grass like that. The sharp grass would cut my tongue.  OUCH!  But cows' tongues are different.  If you've ever felt the tongue of a cow, it is like sandpaper and is a tough, big muscle. It is made for the job of eating grass.  She breaks off the grass and moves forward and does the same thing - again and again and again.

Rosie's tongue

She rolls that grass around in her mouth, mixing it with saliva and swallows it whole.  The ball of grass goes into her rumen, the first stomach, where bacteria in the rumen begins to break down the grass.  Much later, she'll mosey over to the shade, sit down and belch up big wads of grass that she'll chew (her cud).  Then she'll swallow it again and it travels through her other three stomachs, where the grass is fully digested and that nutrition is converted into milk.

It all starts with the cow's amazing tongue.  But now it is time for Rosie to put her tongue back in her mouth and walk back to the barn with me to get milked.  She can come back out and eat grass once we're done milking.