Twice through a Rabbit

It appears that there is more to being a rabbit than one is led to believe, hearing only the stories and jokes about the animal's reproductive capability.

Indeed, one learns much that is surprising by reading an Avon paperback by R. M. Lockley called The Private Life of the Rabbit. Among the topics covered there is the curious manner in which a European rabbit processes its food. It is a scheme designed to allow for a relatively short eating period followed by an extended interval for food processing.

Rabbits typically graze during the afternoon and evening hours. As they fill their stomachs, they also void fecal matter in the form of hard pellets--about 360 each day. Simultaneously, the new food taken in passes down through the stomach into the eaecum. The eaecum, also called the blind gut, is a stomach-sized sack opening onto the digestive system just above the rabbit's intestine. In the blind gut the ingested food is formed into soft pellets surrounded by a glossy membrane made of mucous secretions of the blind gut.

The coated soft pellets travel down the intestine and are passed back to the rabbit's mouth through the anus. The reingestion into the mouth may occur above ground while the rabbit is still grazing, but usually it occurs underground in the rabbit's burrow. Rabbits never pass hard pellets below ground nor to they urinate there; hence their burrows remain clean.

The reingested soft pellets go to the stomach where they remain intact for about six hours in a part of the stomach removed from newly ingested food. During this time bacteria in the pellets cause rapid fermentation of carbohydrate material. Finally the pellets dissolve to yield substances of nutritional value and also the wastes that travel on down the intestine to produce hard pellets.