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Variation in the Excretion of Chromic Oxide by Ruminants

National Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Chiba, Japan

ABSTRACT

Compared to the conventional method of determining digestibility, the ratio technique offers many advantages and recently has been employed frequently to determine the digestibility of nutrients and to estimate the nutrient intake of grazing animals. Chromic oxide, plant pigments, and lignin have been used for this purpose as the index substance, and among them chromic oxide is used most frequently because of its accuracy and simplicity.

In 1952, Kane et al. (7) reported that there was a diurnal variation in the excretion of chromic oxide by dairy cows under normal conditions. The chromic oxide excretion curve indicated that there was only one peak per day in spite of feeding twice daily at 4:30 A.M. and 1:30 P.M., and they assumed that this fluctuation occurred because of some unfamiliar internal biological laws.

Reid et al. (5, 8) studied the chromic oxide excretion-time pattern by both grazing and hand-fed steers. In grazing animals the peak concentration of chromic oxide in the feces appeared at night, but in hand-fed animals the maximum value appeared during the day as in Kane's (7) experiment.