AOC’s worried about cow farts because she’s afraid they’ll sound more intelligent than the flatulence that’s coming from her own mouth...
A little correction to the physiology of cows, please.
Cows do not “fart” methane, they actually belch it, and it is exhaled with their breath. Cows are ruminants, and without the rumen, they would be quite unable to successfully digest grass or most fibrous foodstuffs.
The cow, like most ruminants, has four distinct parts to process food before it reaches their intestine. There is the reticulum, where the grass, as it is eaten, first passes to, and is compressed into small balls about the size of a human fist. When finished grazing, the cow lies down, and in a carefully controlled regurgitation, these balls of grass come back up to the cow’s esophagus to the mouth, where they are chewed to a very fine consistency, then re-swallowed, following a different groove in the esophagus, and entering the rumen, which is essentially a large fermentation tank, with a huge colony of various microbiota, which actually do the job of digesting the grass and other fibrous foods. This is where the methane, among other side products, is formed, as well as virtually all the proteins, lipids, and most of the vitamins that eventually find their way into milk. After this processing of all the fibrous foods is taken to its final point, the now dying bacteria are passed to the omasum. The main functions of the omasum are to absorb short chain volatile fatty acids (acetate, propionate, and butyrate), electrolytes, and water. From here, the material passes to the abomasum, the “true stomach”, which acts in the same manner as in all other mammalian species, using hydrochloric acid and various glands to further process non-fibrous foods and the mass of now-dead microbiota into a slurry from which the intestines can extract all the energy and protein constituents that go to fuel and rebuild the rest of the body of the cow.
A completely different kind of microbiota takes over in the intestine, in which some methane is formed, but at very much smaller quantity than that produced in the rumen. Most of a cow’s “fart” is carbon dioxide.