network fails to read /proc/net/dev

I finally figured out why the network display fails on one of my servers. It is on Ubuntu 12.04.02

Apparently piping /proc/net/dev to the bash loop transmits does not transmit the entire contents for some reason.

This is what happens when this simple bash script is run. It only prints out eth1 when there is also an eth0 lower on the list.

while read line; do
     printf "${line}\n"
done < /proc/net/dev

Inter-| Receive | Transmit
face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
eth1: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0

If I pipe /proc/net/dev to a file and then pipe the file in the while read loop, then everything works perfectly.