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Because it's very common to feed cows subsidized grains instead of letting them graze on grasses. Definitely the kind of thing that would create too much methane during digestion. Corn especially has way more sugars than the grasses they're supposed to eat.
Edit: It appears it's not necessarily grain but does have to do with the quality of their feed.
this is post hoc ergo propter hoc. you haven't shown causation
You've probably heard at some point in your life that cows have 4 stomachs (or a 4-chambered stomach)
The purpose for that is because in their natural environment cows eat grass (not that there's really "natural" cows anymore, the aurochs is long-extinct, but other ruminants like bison are similar)
Grass is kind of a shitty food source for most animals, it has very little sugar and starch that your body can use for energy.
But it is full of fiber. Most animals can't really digest fiber very well, but ruminants with those extra stomachs and the help of some bacterial fermentation can. Grass and such basically gets churned around in those extra stomach chambers with some bacteria to ferment and break down into something the cows can actually use for energy.
Fermentation, of course, creates gases like CO~2~ which is why beer is fizzy and bread rises.
And while that bacteria can and will ferment fiber, it will ferment sugars and starches even better.
So grains like corn end up creating more gases than if they were eating grass.
that sounds like it's just a natural, common problem cows have. good thing they are under our care, or bloat would be fatal.
Naturally, cows wouldn't have access to a limitless supply of corn that has been selectively cultivated over the years to have higher sugar and starch content. They don't tend to have this issue when they're eating primarily grass and can easily release it on their own by burping.
There would surely be some odd cases here and there of cows getting bloated on a less grain-heavy diet, but not nearly as common
corn isn't supernatural, and if humans disappeared today they would still have access to it
Yes, but they wouldn't have access to it in the first place if humans hadn't existed, since corn is a new world plant, and the aurochs that domestic cattle descended from were from Eurasia.
And corn as we know it today is very much the product of thousands of years of agriculture. The wild teosinte plants that cars descends from didn't have the big ears of sweet starchy kernels we know as corn today, it looked a lot more like grass that hasn't been mowed in a long time that's starting to go to seed, except scaled up a bit. If you look up pictures of "Zea diploperennis" or "Zea perennis that's more like what natural corn looked like before humans started fucking with it.
And even if wind cows had access to wild corn, which they didn't, they probably would have been chowing down on the whole plant, so mostly fiber with a bit of starch and sugar from comparatively few and small seeds, instead of just all corn kernels.