Welcome diverse plant communities in your pastures to bolster your animals’ health. Their innate nutritional wisdom will lead them to eat what they need for illness or nutritional deficiencies.
He sat on the edge of a hill, watching the deer’s clay-brown heads nibble across the West Texas plain. While they mostly browsed on typical forbs and grasses, he suddenly noticed the gathering drawn to one particularly prickly plant.
The cool-season, native buckthorn-family lotebush is known for rigid branches with sharp, thorn-tipped ends and extremely bitter berries. It’s not what most would consider palatable or desirable forage.
“They very clearly went directly for it and ate on it for about 10 minutes, got what they needed, and walked off,” Cody Scott says he noticed. “I can’t tell you why they were attracted to that lotebush that day, but I know they had a reason to be consuming it.”
Scott is a research scientist and animal science professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. He’s spent a decorated career studying animal behavior, ruminant nutrition and the intricate dance between the two.
RUMINANTS KNOW WHAT THEY NEED AND SEEK IT OUT
All species, including humans, develop cravings for certain foods, he says. While we might associate ‘cravings’ with some of our guiltiest pleasures in a world surrounded by highly palatable, highly caloric, on-demand food choices, those cravings were once what Scott and other researchers in the field refer to as nutritional wisdom – a body’s innate knowledge of what it needs for nourishment, health and well-being.
He points to documented cases of ruminants consuming a bevy of strange items to rectify nutritional deficiencies. In southern Utah, goats consumed woodrat houses when suffering protein deficiencies. A phosphorus-deficient steer in Spain was observed consuming an entire rabbit. Likewise, mineral-deficient caribou in the Arctic Circle have been observed eating bird eggs and lemmings when facing a mineral deficiency. Many livestock owners have witnessed their cattle chewing on bones, usually a sign of a deficiency in phosphorus or calcium.
“In essence, what tastes good at any particular time is providing the essential nutrients needed,” Scott says. Animals are surprisingly skilled at seeking self-remedy for illness, when given the proper options.
In another research trial, a colleague of Scott’s found that sheep with acidosis quickly detect the necessary difference between water containing sodium bicarbonate – which provides relief – and plain water. If an animal was not acidotic, it preferred plain water.
“Whatever an animal is doing, there’s a reason as to why they’re doing it,” Scott says. “There is a wealth of knowledge still to be discovered in some of the health benefits we can better understand if we really observe their behaviors.”
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