Quite a few animals chew their food multiple times for more effective digestion - cows for example. Plant fibers are notoriously hard to break down. Horses don’t and if you compare the digestion results, you’ll see a significant difference between horse dung and cow dung.

Besides the ruminants, there are also other animals, the best known being the rabbits, which are not able to reverse the direction of the food to bring it back from the stomach into the mouth, so after a one-way passage of the food through their bodies they must eat it again, to chew it for the second time.

Yeah. Horses are so inefficient at digestion that the largest breeds (such as Clydesdales) would starve to death in huge fields of grass. They can only survive by being fed copious amounts of grain such as oats.

Hmm. Do you have a reference for that? From what I have read, Clydesdales are fine on good pasture (hay in the winter), but they won't be able to do much if any work if they don't get additional feed. They would also likely not be as muscled as a horse with supplemental feed. A clydesdale raised on pasture only might also end up smaller, but they won't starve to death, assuming it is quality pasture.

I'm talking about a large breed raised on grain and then suddenly switched to pasture -- not one raised on pasture its whole life -- as you might see with a retired working animal. They may not literally starve to death, but they will lose a lot of muscle mass and may get sick and die from that, or may struggle to survive the winter.

Given a sample size of my dog, I believe chewing is only necessary for making bland food more delicious. The more yummy the food, the less my dog chews it - thoroughly chewing dry kibble and culminating in literally inhaling something like roast chicken.

Thus, it's because grass and weeds are bland and lacking in tasty fat that bovines and ruminants chew their food for so long and so many times.

Not really, no.

Carnivores vs. herbivores.

Also, it depends if something eats leaves (not very digestible, not very nourishing) vs fruit (very digestible, except the seeds, and highly nourishing).

Carnivores don't need to chew much.

Carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores.

Cows and animals alike (ruminant) basically chew all day and they bring the food back from the stomach to chew it again. Otherwise they cannot get enough nutrients out of gras and co.

> But it's not true that other animals don't chew their food.

I didn't say that.

If you claim that humans chew their food because their throats are uniquely vulnerable to choking, you have also claimed that animals without such awkward throats don't need to chew their food.

Putting things another way, just a few minutes of observation are sufficient to demonstrate that running the air intake past the esophagus is so irrelevant to the purpose of chewing that the absence of that problem does not affect the behavior in any way.

Isn’t that logic in reverse?

No. The two claims are contrapositives of each other:

1. Chewing -> bad throat

2. Good throat -> no chewing

Bad throat -> chewing required.

Good throat -> chewing not required for that reason but possibly for other reason.

Chewing -> bad throat possible, but not required.

Not chewing -> bad throat badge not unlocked.

> If you claim that humans chew their food because their throats are uniquely vulnerable to choking, you have also claimed that animals without such awkward throats don't need to chew their food.

No, I haven't. That quite simply does not follow, at all. There is to much variation in the definitions and permutations of chewing, throat design, air intake design, types of foods eaten, and digestive systems to make that leap.

>And, if it's alive, so that it will be dead instead.

For most animals, this is true I think. But frogs seem to be perfectly happy swallowing live prey whole. You can see videos of frogs eating live mice!