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We moseyed on over to Yahoo!'s Cows category, where we found a few sites that appeared to have information on the anatomy of a cow. We stopped first at Crazy for Cows and soon found our way to the site's digestion section. We quickly learned that cows are ruminants. Most ruminants, including the cow, have four stomachs, although camels and some other ruminants have three. The first stomach chamber is called the rumen. This is the chamber in which large amounts of food are stored and softened. After the food is processed and softened in the rumen, it is regurgitated. This
substance is called the cud and is chewed again. The chewed cud goes directly to the other chambers of the stomach. In the cow, these chambers are, in order, the reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. Once the cud arrives in these chambers, additional digestion occurs. We wanted to double-check our work, so we headed back to the top page of Yahoo! and searched on "cow stomach." We received hundreds of Google search results and clicked on a web page from the Ben & Jerry web site. The famous ice cream makers confirmed our earlier findings.
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