Chapter 1

Goats, Rats, and Clara’s Kids

O n July 4, 1976, while most folks in the United States were celebrat-
ing the 200th anniversary of the founding of the nation, my wife
and I were driving 400 miles across Utah, from Logan in the north-
east to St. George in the southwest, so we could build a fence. From July
through September, Sue and I constructed two miles of fence to form six
pastures on Cactus Flat, a mesa twenty-eight miles northwest of St. George
and roughly two miles from the small town of Gunlock. It was no vacation.
I was a graduate student, and the paddocks would be the scene of a research
study that would span the next five years of my life.
The cities and towns—Ogden, Salt Lake, Provo, Nephi, Fillmore, and
Cedar City—we traveled through on our way to St. George were small
back then. Outside of the settled areas, we traversed long rolling stretches
of arid land clothed in gray-green sagebrush and dark green juniper. As we
drove over mountains and across great valleys, I tried to imagine how the
landscape in the Gunlock area would look. I knew a shrub called blackbrush
would be common, because my research would involve goats grazing black-
brush. I’d seen samples of blackbrush mounted on herbarium sheets, but I
wasn’t sure what the shrub would look like in the landscape.
I began to get a sense of that as we descended from Cedar City (5,846
feet) to St. George (2,860 feet), and the landscape changed dramatically
from anything I’d ever seen. The Pine Valley Mountain Range dominated
the horizon to the west, with just barely visible canyonlands to the east (Zion
National Park) and the south (Grand Canyon). The black lava–strewn
landscapes were attired with a diverse mix of shrubs including banana
yucca, bitterbrush, broom snakeweed, creosote bush, threadleaf (old man)
sagebrush, indigo bush, desert peach, and Mormon tea. It was a strange,
harsh-looking land, utterly different from the Rocky Mountains where I

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grew up. The vista was at once foreboding and enticing. I wondered where
this adventure would lead us. In retrospect, I really didn’t have a clue.
We lived in a trailer in what was then the small town of St. George, and
our routine was the same six days each week for twelve weeks. At 5 a.m. each
morning, we began our hour-long drive to the study site on Cactus Flat. At
6 p.m. each evening, we began our hour-long trip back to St. George. In
the hours between, we dug holes—four-foot-deep holes for corner posts,
which we fashioned from juniper trees. Because goats can go anywhere a rat
can go, we used four-foot net wire fencing held erect by the steel line posts
that we pounded at sixteen-foot intervals into the rock-hard caliche soil,
all the time baking in the unrelenting rays of the desert sun, which typi-
cally elevated air temperatures to as much as 110°F. Nor did temperatures
moderate much at night, as asphalt and concrete that baked during the day
radiated heat into the trailer at night. Building the fence on Cactus Flat and
living in St. George can best be described as “hell on Earth.”
We used the pastures on Cactus Flat to evaluate the effectiveness of
goats as mobile pruning machines to rejuvenate landscapes dominated by
blackbrush. Our goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of goats browsing at
different densities (fifteen goats per pasture in 2.5-acre, 5-acre, and 10-acre
pastures) to improve the quality of foraging land in the future for both
wildlife and cattle that spend the winter in those landscapes. In practice, this
would then be done on unfenced land. And, indeed, many people, nowa-
days referred to as ecological doctors, are using shepherding with goats and
sheep to rejuvenate landscapes. At the time we did the research, few people
were contemplating using livestock for such purposes.
We built the fence so we could manage the goats’ foraging behavior
during winter and observe the results. When old twigs are removed by
pruning (grazing) during winter, blackbrush produces a flush of new twigs
the following spring. The new growth is much higher in energy, protein,
and minerals than are the old twigs. So, we reasoned, goat browsing during
winter would stimulate growth of nutritious young twigs, which provide
better forage for mule deer, bighorn sheep, and cattle that spend their
winters foraging on blackbrush.
Blackbrush is a small shrub, eighteen to thirty-six inches in height depend-
ing on where it grows, that dominates the transition zone between cold desert
to the north and hot desert to the south, forming a narrow band across south-
ern Utah and northern Arizona. Blackbrush, a member of the rose family and
the only species in the monotypic genus Coleogyne, was named for its gray

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bark, which turns jet black when it gets wet during rain- or snow-storms. The
gray branches are ornamented with small evergreen leaves. Blackbrush forms
vast pure stands across the desert floor and on scrubby slopes, giving the
landscape a uniform dark gray color. On Cactus Flat, blackbrush shares its
home with juniper trees, whose gray bark and dark green leaves brighten an
otherwise blackbrush gray backdrop with a savannah of juniper green trees.
Blackbrush and juniper provide forage and construction materials for
desert woodrats, mammals that have long tails, large ears, and large black
eyes. Woodrats live in houses they build from branches, twigs, sticks, and
other debris. The huge, beaver-dam–shaped structures may be up to four
feet across. They are usually constructed in a tree or on the ground at the
base of a tree or rocky ledge. On Cactus Flat, woodrats use small twigs and
leaves from blackbrush and juniper to fashion large mounds at the bases
of juniper trees, with juniper bark as “siding” on the outside. They build
tunnels to various rooms inside their houses, which provide shelter from
extremes of desert temperatures in summer and winter and protection from
predators. Primarily nocturnal and vegetarian, woodrats survive on a diet
of cactus, yucca pods, bark, berries, pinyon nuts, seeds, and green vegeta-
tion. Woodrat houses, the new growth of blackbrush, and the goats would
become my teachers as my research study commenced.
From July through September of 1976, while we were building the fence,
Sue and I observed that a juniper tree in one of the pastures had been struck
by lightning the previous summer. The blackbrush shrubs around the tree
had produced prodigious amounts of new growth, and we were eager to
see how vigorously the goats would consume those nutritious new twigs.
During the winter of 1977, we had leased ninety Angora goats from the
Navajo Nation, and we put fifteen goats in each of the six pastures we’d
built. Nearly as soon as the study began, we watched the goats engage in
two peculiar behaviors. The first occurred early in January, just a week after
we’d moved the goats to their new homes on Cactus Flats.
Near dusk one evening, while the goats were actively foraging, we slowly
herded them to the spot where the blackbrush shrubs encircled the old,
dead juniper. We fully expected them to chow down on the nutritious new
twigs. But to our amazement, only one goat sampled the new twigs, taking
one small bite. The goats simply stood there, silently gazing at us. After a
while, they walked away from the dead juniper and began once again to
forage enthusiastically on older twigs on other blackbrush shrubs in their
pasture. I was shocked. I wondered what the goats were thinking as they

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watched us watching them refuse to eat the new twigs. I even tasted one of
the new twigs. I remember vividly that it didn’t taste bad at all!
I also recalled the words of one of my mentors: “You should never study
an animal that’s smarter than you are, and you shouldn’t be studying goats.”
And although my mentor and I didn’t know it then, the same advice was
true for shrubs. At that time, ecologists were in the early stages of develop-
ing the field of chemical ecology, the study of how plants chemically medi-
ate relationships among soil, other plants, herbivores, and human beings.
Blackbrush and many other shrubs are quite good at organic chemistry and
much “smarter” than I could have imagined. During the next twenty years,
I learned many lessons from goats and blackbrush, lessons that transcend
why goats don’t like to eat the young twigs that blackbrush creates.
Their behavior that evening was not an anomaly, as we learned by
observing the Angora goats through that winter and Spanish goats during
the ensuing two winters. When goats have a choice between new growth
and older growth, most, though not all, strongly prefer the older growth.
That doesn’t make any sense in the expected framework of nutrition,
because the new growth is much higher in energy, protein, and minerals
than the older growth.
When I told a professor of toxicology that goats prefer less nutritious older
twigs over much more nutritious new twigs from blackbrush, he remarked,
“That just goes to show animals lack nutritional wisdom.” His comments
reflected the sentiment at that time, a view sadly still in vogue today, that
the animals in our care—and human beings, for that matter—seemingly
lack nutritional wisdom. I didn’t believe him, though I’m not sure why, and I
could muster no argument to counter what he was saying. I didn’t know how
to prove the body of a goat, or any creature, has nutritional wisdom. People
thought then, and still do now, that domesticated animals and humans
simply eat foods that taste “good” and avoid those that taste “bad.”

Later in January, I observed the second surprising goat feeding behavior,

one with another seemingly inexplicable cause. Overall that winter, the
goats didn’t fare well due to the poor nutritional quality of blackbrush and
their lack of familiarity with the blackbrush-dominated landscape. The
goats lost weight during the three-month trial, but the amount of weight
loss wasn’t consistent among pastures. Goats in the 2.5- and 10-acre pas-
tures lost more weight (more than 20 percent of total body weight) than in
the 5-acre pastures (less than 10 percent).

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Why the discrepancy? Had I not been living with and closely observing
the goats, I might have simply called it an outlier in the data, not unlike
many unexplained anomalies that increase “error” variation. However, I
had noticed that goats in one of the five-acre pastures had learned to eat
woodrat houses! I couldn’t make sense of it because woodrat houses appear
to be even less nutritious than the old, woody blackbrush twigs. But those
goats lost less weight than their fellow goats that didn’t partake of woodrat
abodes. Another intriguing and significant detail: During all three winters
of the study, out of a total of eighteen groups of goats, only that one group
of goats ever learned to use woodrat houses as a source of nourishment.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the outliers—not the averages—
are the most interesting part of research. The quirky behaviors of individu-
als interacting with each other and the environments they inhabit are how
nature creates new relationships—genes expressed in organisms in uniquely
evolving biophysical environments merging with chance occurrences.
But during the winter of 1977, I hadn’t figured that out, and I was puzzled
and intrigued. The goats were snubbing a food we thought was good for
them—the new and presumably more nutritious twigs. And one group of
goats was eating a “food” item—woodrat houses—that in no way resembled
any forage I’d seen. We speculated, correctly, about what was happening in
both cases that winter, but it would take me several years to demonstrate to
skeptical scientists why goats were making these food choices. Those early
observations marked the beginning of a forty-year exploration of the nutri-
tional wisdom of wild and domestic grazing animals, and my attempts to
reconcile findings from our carefully controlled studies with findings from
other animals and humans. In retrospect, my PhD project initially appeared
to me to be a boring study. What could be less interesting, for a wildlife
biologist fascinated by wild animals and plant diversity, than domestic goats
foraging on a monoculture of blackbrush? But it turned out to be a con-
trolled field study with fascinating implications. I’ve often reflected on how
I’d have never learned what I did about foraging behavior if I’d been able to
do the study I would have preferred back then—mountain goats foraging
on botanically diverse landscapes in the Rocky Mountains.

Inept Herbivores?
Most nutritionists believe wild animals select diets to meet their nutri-
tional needs but contend domestic animals lack such nutritional wisdom.

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This belief came about during the 1960s and 1970s from studies in which
researchers offered livestock a choice of different minerals or vitamins, and
those animals didn’t select the nutrients researchers thought they should.1
For example, when lactating dairy cows were offered a dicalcium
phosphate supplement, they didn’t “instinctively” eat recommended levels
of calcium or phosphorus. Many animals never approached the source of
calcium, even though they were calcium deficient; among those that did,
intakes of calcium varied greatly. Some animals ate large amounts of dical-
cium phosphate, even though researchers thought they didn’t need either
calcium or phosphorus. These results were consistent with earlier findings
that sheep didn’t rectify a phosphorus deficit by consuming supplemental
dicalcium phosphate. And in a study that spanned a period of many weeks,
dairy cows did not consistently select appropriate minerals or vitamins. Nor
did lambs eat sufficient amounts of some minerals, and they overconsumed
other minerals. The cumulative results of such studies led researchers to
begin recommending feeding mineral mixes specifically designed to meet
needs of the “average individual” for various classes of livestock.
Collectively, these studies led to the belief that domestication created
animals more responsive to food flavor than to nutritive value. Scientists
also hypothesized that acceptability of food flavors, rather than selective
appetites or cravings for specific minerals and vitamins, influences food
selection. In other words, they believed the process of domestication of
livestock had removed their nutritional wisdom and inborn ability to select
needed nutrients, a trait that from eons past to this day has enabled wild
herbivores to eat appropriate forages and prosper.
These studies stand in surprising contrast to the findings of range and
wildlife scientists who studied the foraging behavior of free-ranging animals
over several decades. They did two types of studies. Some researchers fol-
lowed individual animals as they roamed and grazed, attempting to collect
(by handpicking) a representation of all the food items they nibbled. From
their painstaking observations and laboratory analyses, scientists learned a
great deal about the botanical and chemical composition of herbivore diets.
In the other type of study, veterinarians established esophageal fistulae
(artificial passages) in the animals that allowed researchers to collect each
bite of forage animals actually ate. A comparison of the results of these two
types of studies showed that no human can pluck by hand a diet as nutri-
tious as that actually selected by free-ranging goats, sheep, or cows. Both
types of studies showed herbivores often eat twenty-five to fifty or more

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foods daily, though a handful of species typically make up the bulk of any
one meal. What they choose changes from meal to meal, day to day, and
season to season.
Collectively, these findings, which didn’t fit the notion that herbivores
are unable to select a nutritious diet, raised two questions. Why did live-
stock seem so incompetent in “nutritional wisdom trials” in confinement,
but so adept at selecting a nutritious diet under free-ranging conditions
with a smorgasbord of up to 100 plants from which to choose? By eating
so many kinds of plants, are free-ranging animals able to select a nutritious
diet merely by chance?

Clever Rats
While observations of foraging by herbivores raised questions about nutri-
tional wisdom, studies of rats suggested that palatability might link feeding
behavior with nutritional needs. Unlike livestock, rats chose a balanced diet
when allowed to self-select, even in laboratory conditions and when facing
various nutritional challenges. For example, rats whose adrenal glands are
removed can’t retain salt, so they die due to salt deprivation within two
weeks if fed a low-salt diet. However, if they are offered salt free-choice or
given access to salt water and pure water, they choose either to eat salt or
drink salt water and by so doing, keep themselves alive.2
Equally intriguing, rats that have their parathyroid glands removed die
within days due to tetany, a result of calcium deficiency. Given a chance,
though, rats that don’t have parathyroid glands prefer to drink a solution
of calcium lactate rather than water, which keeps them free of tetany and
thriving.3 (The major function of the parathyroid glands is to maintain cal-
cium levels within a narrow range to enable nervous and muscular systems
to function properly.)
Furthermore, rats fed diets deficient in various essential amino acids
detect the deficiency within minutes. Given the chance, they select food
that contains the specific amino acid they are lacking and thereby retain
the ability to create proteins required for their proper form and function.4
Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, cannot be created from
other compounds by the body, and the nine essential amino acids must be
obtained from the foods animals eat.
Finally, rats can be rendered diabetic with an injection of streptozotocin,
a compound that causes them to display all the symptoms of diabetes,

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including polyuria, polydipsia, and glycosuria as well as elevated fasting

plasma glucose levels and glucose intolerance. Diabetic rats allowed a choice
consume more protein and less carbohydrate than nondiabetic rats.5 As a
result, they lose their symptoms of diabetes: Blood sugar levels return to
normal, they gain weight, they eat less food, and they drink normal amounts
of water. The same happens when diabetic humans increase their intake of
protein and reduce carbohydrates in their diet.6
Unlike with livestock, these and many other studies suggest domestica-
tion didn’t do away with the nutritional wisdom of laboratory rats.7 How
were rats able to select nutritious diets when challenged with a range of defi-
ciencies, from minerals (calcium and sodium) to amino acids to diabetes?
Are human beings more akin to livestock or rats in confinement?

Clara’s Kids
In June of 1939, Clara Davis, a pediatrician from Chicago, told attendees
of the 70th annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association about
findings from what is the world’s longest and most involved dietary experi-
ment on self-selection in human beings. In a six-year study, Davis became
the “mother” of fifteen infants who had been put in an orphanage at ages
that ranged from six to eleven months.8 She chose infants because they
had not eaten adult foods previously nor were they influenced by beliefs
of older people. Davis stressed they were without preconceived prejudices
and biases regarding the foods she offered. Her studies were destined to
become a citation classic in the Canadian Medical Association Journal and a
basis for argument, discussion, and reinterpretation for anyone hoping to
untangle perplexing questions about how children’s appetites, food choices,
and health intersect.9
During her studies, the children selected nutritious diets when offered
a wide range of foods of animal and vegetable origins. The thirty-four
foods Davis offered the kids, procured fresh in the market, jointly provided
requisite fats, carbohydrates, amino acids, minerals, and vitamins. Even so,
the children easily could have become deficient by selecting the wrong com-
binations of foods. As she emphasized to her Quebec audience, no adult
was allowed even to hint to the children what might be a proper choice or
portion amount. The children typically ate several foods and a beverage at
any one meal, including brains, raw beef, bone jelly, and bone marrow—
foods that are repulsive to many adults. No two children ever selected the

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same foods and no child ever selected the same mix of foods from day to
day. Nevertheless, their fervent individuality fashioned fifteen uniformly
well-nourished, healthy children, as attested to by attending pediatricians.
As Dr. Joseph Brennemann noted in an article in the Journal of Pediatrics,
“I saw them on a number of occasions and they were the finest group of
specimens from the physical and behaviour standpoint that I have even seen
in children of that age.”10
Despite these findings, many scientists don’t believe humans have nutri-
tional wisdom.11 They cite as evidence the obesity crisis. The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projects that 70 percent of people
in the United States today will die of diet-related diseases. Humans ostensi-
bly can’t do what wild or free-ranging domestic herbivores do without a bit
of advice from dieticians. Perhaps that’s why some people write—and other
people read—an endless stream of articles and books that tell us what and
how to eat to stay well. Now, for a few hundred dollars, you can even get
personalized nutrition recommendations.12
The foods Davis offered included: four fruits (apples, bananas, peaches,
pineapples); ten vegetables (beets, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, lettuce,
peas, potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, turnips); five grains/grain products
(barley, wheat, cornmeal, oatmeal, Ry-Krisp); six red meats (beef, lamb,
liver, kidneys, brains, sweetbreads); one white meat (chicken); one fish (had-
dock); one high-fat food (bone marrow); bone jelly (rich in collagen, gelatin,
amino acids, minerals, glucosamine, chondroitin, hyaluronic acid, and fats);
sea salt; and four drinks (water, orange juice, sweet milk, sour milk). Today,
depending on which authority one asks, many of these foods are thought
to lead to diet-related illnesses including cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Why do humans like foods that are thought to be “bad for us” such as
red meat and sugary, salty, fatty foods? Why do so many humans dislike
fruits and vegetables, which are reputed to be so good for us? Why did each
of Davis’s kids eat such different combinations of foods, and why did each
child select different foods from meal to meal? Davis was concerned about
culturally inherited food prejudices and biases: Have we become so mal-
adapted culturally that we no longer know how to enable the nutritional
wisdom that resides within our bodies or those of the animals in our care?
Can herbivores help us rediscover nutritional wisdom?

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