Are elephants ruminants?
Ruminants are mammals that first partly digest food in one stomach, then regurgitate it and chew it further before re-ingesting it. Elephants do not follow this course. Their stomach is used mainly for storage of food, and more digestion takes place in the intestine. In fact, their faeces still contains much of the vegetation that they ate, which means that they need to eat vast quantities of food in order to absorb the necessary amount of nutrients. This is also why their dung is a popular choice for faeces-eating animals – much of the nutrition and substance remains fairly intact.
