For some reason, Gus is being almost polite when I bring him away from grazing. I’d like to think he’s internalizing the new reality of his inescapable lead rope and accepting that resistance is futile. But when he gave me some protracted hell about walking out to his paddock one recent rainy day (“I don’t do mud puddles”), I was disabused: clearly lead-line misbehavior remains his go-to form of protest. More likely, it’s simply time that’s changed his grazing manners. The grass is no longer so spring-fresh and intoxicatingly succulent after a barren winter. Also I’m scheduling his grazing sessions to last 30 minutes or more and then to conclude right when Sandy is delivering evening grain. Few things trump the chance to graze, but grain is one of them. Gus hardly balks as I lift his head from the greensward, and he readily abandons the pasture to go to his stall when his feed bucket awaits.
Nevertheless, he’s still thoroughly committed to ingesting as much pasture as possible. More summer wildflowers (that is, weeds) are appearing now, and I’m whiling away his hours of grazing by noting every plant he eats or shuns. He’ll eat ground ivy, also known as gill-over-the-ground, but he steers clear of bindweed, a kind of wild morning-glory. He eats a tall chickweed and even the fuzzy leaves, stems, and blossoms of a white-flowering campion. He enjoys tickseed trefoil — no wonder, since it’s a legume, like alfalfa and clover. Among humans, lamb’s quarters are favored fodder for the tree-hugging set, and violets for the more lah-di-dah set, but Gus skips both plants. Same for betony and burdock; the low-growing, lacy-leaved pineapple weed; random potentillas, or cinquefoils; and a wild prunella known as heal-all. But his priorities are unmistakable: even the weeds he most enjoys, such as plantain and bedstraw, ain’t a patch on a patch of grass. Gus, the purist in spite of himself.
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