On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 22:42:33 -0000, "Jim Webster"
> wrote:

>simple.
>With a ruminant you are actually working with bacterial nutrition as well as
>conventional mammalian. Hence urea is an excellent feed for rumen bacteria
>who can convert it to bacterial protein, which the cow can then use.
>Unless you have large numbers of rumen bacteria I suggest you leave urea to
>ruminents

jim, in all honesty i had no doubt that you knew very well the
functionality of a rumen. the question was purely rhetorical to show
the difference between the two. what made me respond was the way (by a
simple sentence without any argument) you simply transferred ruminal
metabolism to human gut metabolism. in reality there are few relations
between these two. you can feed a lot of chemicals to rumen bacteria,
which would be undigestable by or even nasty to human gut bacteria.
there are a lot of doubts, that metabolism studies between mammalians
(like humans and rats) are inter-tranferrable. vitamin b and vitamin c
deficient humans might be such a problem. there are a lot more
reasons, why we should accept, that there huge differences between
ruminants and "common" warm-blooded digesters.


klaus