Effective bacterial digestion
All gut bacteria feed animals!
When animals digest their food they extract energy from the food and use the proteins as a building material for their own bodies. Digestion is a long process of breaking down and sorting out different components and transporting the good stuff to the blood stream and washing out by-products and toxins. The animal body is equipped to do this, but with the aid of bacteria the task is overcome much more efficiently.
Grass-eaters unable to digest cellulose
Animals use bacteria to extract maximum nutritional benefit from their diet. Herbivores depend on their gut microflora even more than predators, because most of their diet consists of grass, and all animals lack the instrument to digest cellulose, the main component of plants! In other words grass-eaters are completely unable to digest by themselves! Instead they rely on bacteria.
Downstream digestion
A horse’s stomach is quite small for such a large animal. The mature horse stomach is only about twice that of the mature pig. Only 8 % of the food is digested in the stomach by the horse’s own “digestive fabric” the remaining 92 % is processed downstream in the hindgut with help from bacteria. All herbivores use a part of their alimentary canal as a fermentation vessel, in which slowly degraded plant materials are retained long enough to be degraded by the bacteria. So, part of a horse’s gut is an industrial zone, where small fabrics (bacteria) process food for the body.
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