103. Today’s menu

As this hot, hot summer progresses, Gus’s choice of forage does too.  Along with the grass, he’s delighting in big, shaggy ragweeds lately.  White clovers, even those whose flowers are gone by, are still pretty good; plantains, now most of them gone by, are apparently much less yummy than they were a couple of weeks ago.

What never changes, for Gus as for all the horses, is that bird’s-foot trefoil is universally rejected.  A friend who recently bought a small horse farm has found that one of its pastures is at least half bird’s-foot trefoil, and both her Irish sport-horse gelding and her Morgan mare eat all around it.  I’m surprised, since trefoil is a legume, like alfalfa — horses should love it.  My friend researched it and learned that it’s perfectly edible for horses, but they tend to avoid it unless nothing else is available.

In Gus’s little patch of heaven, there’s always something else available.

62. Channeling Eeyore

With the forage around the farm beginning to toughen and dry out as autumn creeps in, Gus gobbles up as much as he can while the gobbling is good.  Plantains are flowering but still emerald-leaved; grasses are yellowing at the tips but mostly still green and fresh enough; chicory and chickweed remain off the menu. 

Today Gus suprises me by grazing around the gate of a paddock where boots and hooves have trampled the ground to barren dirt.  The nearby grass is dry and powdered with dust, but Gus rips it up hungrily.  This micro-desert also hosts mats of tiny, wiry, vining weeds.  Gus works at gathering a sizable hunk between his teeth, so that a yank of his head succeeds in tearing off the whole tangled skein.  He stands in the sun, chewing and chewing until the stringy stuff is swallowed. These scrubby plants are literally “the odd bits which got trodden on” that Eeyore dolefully expects when picnicking with Pooh and crew.  In fact, Gus’s unexpected Eeyore impression is so complete that, though he has never given a thistle the time of day, now he sniffs a big thorny one before deciding to move on.

When, too late, I identify the stringy little plant as a spurge, I worry.  Spurges are notoriously toxic to humans and many animals.  They can cause vomiting, which equines are structurally unable to do — so is Gus in real danger??  I quickly recall that he ingests the occasional mouthful of oak leaves, ragweed, buttercup, and God knows what else, all with apparent immunity, so I trust his iron constitution can handle today’s garnish of spurge with the same gay abandon.  

Sure enough, he’s hale and hearty on my next visit.  Nevertheless, I do not let him graze near the patch of spurge again.