I believe he is speaking of a rudiment such as a cow. These animals have an additional stomach, a fermentation pot so to speak. If the bacteria, yeasts and so forth were to be killed in that stomach, then digestion would not take place. The bacteria and so forth are necessary to break down the cellulose to more digestible forms.
The theory is that CS can kill these bacteria, and thus cause the animal to starve. The idea is not far fetched, CS will cause honeybees to starve much to my displeasure when I tested this on them. I believe I was the first to propose that this could be a problem with cattle several years ago. That said though I must confess, other than bees, I have not heard of this being a problem. It could be because people do avoid giving large amounts of CS to such animals, or it could be that the danger is overblown. I do not know. There are a couple of possible reasons why the danger may not be as great as would be thought. One possibility is that the majority of water drunk goes go the main stomach and not the fermentation stomach, and thus would not present a problem. Another possibility is that the silver is not very effective in the fermentation stomach due to the consistency of the contents, similarly to how it is not effective in the normal bowels of a person. So the bottom line is that caution on this does make sense, but as of yet I am unaware of any data to give us a good foundation to predict just how much is too much. Marshall [email protected] wrote: > In a message dated 4/16/04 6:09:59 AM Central Daylight Time, > [email protected] writes: > > > >> A grass eater might starve if fed CS for long periods of time. > > > Ode -- could you please clarify this statement for me? Thanks. MA
