Tigerlilly - Lobsang Rampa

cat food or the dog food, that alone is not sufficient—I wish I
could put that in print the size the newspapers use when they
have something super-sensational, but remember it again; cat
food or dog food alone is not sufficient. You need other things.
You need vegetables. You need a bit of meat, and you need
water. Many people have the peculiar idea that cats will drink
only milk. They have the idea that milk is the only drink for
cats—definitely, definitely it is not so, they must have water as
well .
Do you know what causes constipation? Inside the intes-
tines there are a lot of hairs called villi. These villi are tubes,
something like—let us say—hypodermic needles. They pro-
trude into the mass that is being propelled through the in-
testines. Now, in the small intestines the contents are liquid,
becoming semi-liquid as they approach the beginning of the
large intestines.
As this material reaches up into the ascending colon, it is
turning from a semi-liquid into what one might term as semi-
solid, because the villi are extracting all the nourishment from
the material and with the nourishment—water.
As the material—now becoming waste material—goes up
the ascending colon, it becomes harder, more of a paste and
then when it goes down into the descending colon towards the
rectum it is getting harder and harder, but still within the
range of the muscular effort necessary for its expulsion.
If an animal—or a human either for that matter—does not
have enough water in his make-up, then the waste material
becomes harder and harder, so that in the end impaction takes
place, and then the poor wretched animal or human has to
have an enema to provide water to soften the hardened mass
and make it so that the bowels can expel that mass.
An animal, or human, who is correctly fed and correctly
‘watered’ won't suffer from complaints such as this, because at
all times the waste material is sufficiently plastic that it can be
expelled. Sometimes, with a debilitated creature (human or
animal) the muscles of the intestines are too weak to initiate
peristalsis and so chronic constipation occurs. In that case, one
has to introduce an irritant—a thing which irritates the colon
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