Abstract
Ruminants are the main pillar of our animal stock, and were crucial to the process of human Neolithization, as the first species to be domesticated for husbandry. They are an important element of the world’s economy and cultural heritage, and also play a significant role in promoting biodiversity within the habitats they occupy. They have evolved a digestive system that relies entirely on a symbiotic relationship with micro-organisms, most of their energy comes from the end-products of microbial digestion, enabling ruminants to make use of the plant cell wall, which is something that no other vertebrate can do to such an extent. This, together with an efficient mechanism of nitrogen recycling, converts the ruminant into an efficient animal able to subsist on plant fibre, one of the most abundant organic resources in nature. Ruminants also have dental and behavioural (rumination) adaptations to comminute food and so facilitate the activity of ruminal micro-organisms, and very long intestines and caeca to increase the time food is exposed to enzymatic digestion and absorption. Brief descriptions of food energy losses and the main metabolic paths of the transformation of dietary carbohydrates, proteins and lipids are given here. Food digestion, mainly of fibre, comes at the cost of gas emissions, especially methane, which reduce food use efficiency and contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the ruminant animal, its taxonomic diversity and life history traits, the relevance of domestication, and its adaptations to the use of plant-based diets and digestive physiology, in order to gain a better understanding of the relationships between diet and gas and solid emissions. We focus on the ruminant over monogastric species for two reasons: (i) the greater biomass contribution of ruminants to livestock, and (ii) the very complex ruminant digestive system, which includes both foregut and hindgut enteric fermentation, while monogastric species have only hindgut fermentation. Comments on dietary components and their metabolic transformations refer to roughage natural diets, rather than concentrate or supplemented diets. Although in many cases these are equivalent, we remark the importance of roughage diets because they have been the driver of the evolutionary adaptation of the ruminant symbiotic digestive system, and because of the importance of the use of roughage resources in reducing the carbon footprint of these species as compared to concentrate feeds, the production of which is high in carbon.
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Pérez-Barbería, F. (2020). The Ruminant: Life History and Digestive Physiology of a Symbiotic Animal. In: Sustainable and Environmentally Friendly Dairy Farms. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46060-0_2
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