THE RUMINANT HARE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 766, 26 March 1954, Page 5

THE RUMINANT HARE

Sir.-Hares do chew their cud. In a personal communication to me in 1947. Mr. D. Dewar, Fellow of the Zoological Society, described the paper by Taylor, Pseudo-rumination in the Rabbit, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for the years 1940-41. Taylor was reporting the work of Eden, Southern and himself. Mr. Dewar wrote: "The rabbit and the hare have an extraordinarily. long caecum or blind gut at the junction of the small

and large intestine. The food eaten passes into the stomach, where it remains only a short time before it is passed on into the small intestine, thence it is pushed well into the blind gut, in which it stays for some hours; it is then ejected into the large intestine, through which it passes quickly and is voided from the vent in the form of soft moist pellets. These the rabbit seizes in its mouth and swallows. This time the food remains for some time in the stomach, and then passes into the small intestine, and from there goes direct into the large intestine, through which it passes very slowly, and here most of the liquid it contains is extracted, so that it passes out of the vent in the form of the hard, dry pellets so often seen in rabbit hutches and near their burrows. The scientists named above made this discovery by keeping a rabbit in a cage so narrow that it could not turn round in it or get its mouth to its hind parts; in consequence it could not eat the soft pellets it ejected. It soon died unless it was allowed to eat these pellets." The work of these Englishmen was done to confirm the experiments of Morot, and I was glad to have from a friend a copy of Dr. Wille’s Does the Hare Chew the Cud? This was first published in Denmark in 1902, and translated into English and published in 1932 by The Bible League, 45 Doughty Street. Bedford Row, London, W.C.1. Dr. Wille gives a full account of Morot’s paper Des Pelotes Stomacales des Leporides (Stomach Pellets of the Hare Family). which appeared in 1882 in Mémoires de la Société Centrale de Medicine Vétérinaire. Morot often found intestinal pellets in the stomachs of hares as well as rabbits. Hares have been observed chewing while at rest in their forms, and no pellets have been found in the forms. The inference is that, as in rabbits, the soft intestinal pellets are chewed and reswallowed. : In both hare and rabbit, the stomach, although apparently simple, is partly divided by a fold of skin, one part holding fresh food and the other part the pellets; and both rabbit and hare have the greatly enlarged blind gut. Form) and function naturally go together. "Sundowner" therefore has good svientific grounds for returning to his boyhood belief that hares chew their cud.

D. S.

MILNE

(Lower Hutt).