Phenotypic Plasticity and Why Overgrazing is not Overgrazing

Section 3, Chapter 5 from my latest book, Stagtine

You are receiving this because you have subscribed to Daniel Firth Griffith’s, or Robinia Institute’s, or The Wildland’s email newsletter or Substack, which are, today, one and the same. Welcome!

If you enjoy this content, if you find it meaningful to you, we encourage you to become a paid member for $3/mo! With a paid subscription, you get access to all of my four of my previously published and award-winning books (digital and audiobook versions) and so, so much more! It may be a cup of coffee for you, but it is the nourishment that keeps up alive, and we are so very thankful!

This chapter of Stagtine, my latest book that we are dripping here on The Wildland Chronicles, is provided for all PAID members. BUT TODAY, this chapter is given to you for free.

To view a full (slowly released) Table of Contents to Stagtine, my latest book made available to you all in both paperback, digital, and audiobook formats, click here!

You can also purchase all the versions of Stagtine on Amazon.

To read the previous chapter:

Anam Cara, My Soul Friend

---

Humanity’s modern penchant is control.

Nutrient deficiencies are solved by adding nutrients. Health problems are solved by calling health professionals. Cattle are destroying the world, some argue, but it is humanity that built the fences; humanity that constructed the regimes mortared by property rights and boundaries that restrict and reduce life’s actual freedom. It was humanity that forced them there.

But what if Nancy was telling us not of her nutrient deficiencies but of our delinquency? What if the problem was not pasture management or nutrient balancing or the eroding and denuded soils beneath it all, but the lack of place-infused genomics writ over ranks of generations? A problem of the ungrounded, those whose ancestors sleep in distant graves.

In 2019 I wrote an article for The Permaculture Research Institute. I argued that animals are master nutritionists, for they daily sift and sort through hundreds of species of trees, grasses, forbs, shrubs, sedges and rushes, each vegetative life infinitely unique even amongst families. If yellow Indiangrass grows alone, it grows in a particular way and possesses a particularly unique combination of primary and secondary compounds available for herbivores at certain times of the day or during certain weather patterns. If yellow Indiangrass grows in a meadowland, rich in undulating diversity and amongst a multitude of supporting forbs and legumes and slightly shaded by a community of supporting trees or shrubs, it becomes something else entirely. The nutrient profile of vegetation changes and its palatability for grazing herbivores transmutes either positively or negatively given the community, the soil, and the time or season in which it grows.¹ To know is to know communally. To know separately is to know only sadness.

To be alive, animals must recognize this. But to be alive and well, animals must be able to understand this—that is, they must have memory and cognition—and they must be able to relate to it. Life’s ability to act autonomously and intelligently is life.

A friend and mentor, an anam cara, Dr. Fred Provenza has long sought to unravel our linear and regenerative models. In his monumental book, Nourishment, Provenza discusses the instinctual and acquired cognition intrinsic in the healthy operations of our wild and living world. In his chapter, poignantly titled “Challenges for Guests,” he argues that what modern man and its science calls “idle wanderings” of grazing herbivores is really a nutritional study of the highest intellectual order.

With internal self-understanding and external observational fluency, grazing animals satiate their undulating nutritional needs by sifting through the great diversity of chemical and biological foodscapes. This behavior, it seems, simultaneously challenges their hereditary wisdom (the ancestral knowledge passed to them from their mothers) and forms their budding instincts (adaptive epigenetics developed through their own lives) that allow them to do more than simply survive, but thrive in our dynamic and ever-changing world.

Provenza is not alone in his analysis. Following their observation of a group of goat kids infected with ten thousand gastrointestinal larval nematodes, Juan J. Villalba and colleagues documented an immediate change in grazing and foraging propensities in antiparasitic plants, such as Pistacia lentiscus, or the mastic tree. The infected goats performed “therapeutic self-medication,” Villalba wrote. They were able to understand the problem and find the solution. Root cause analysis is something humans struggle to complete, or at least to complete well. But these goats excelled at it, immediately.

Gastrointestinal parasites manifest their effects as anemia, hemorrhages, weakness, increased mortality in both the young and the old, decreased milk production in does and sexual vigor in bucks, and severe weight loss, often leading to death.² Upon infection, the goats, young and inexperienced, immediately turned to anthelmintic plants containing high levels of tannins and self-medicated proportionally to their needs. Tannins are produced by plants as a defense mechanism—a palatability-limiting agent to reduce grazing or foraging pressures of undulating ungulates—but these goat kids employed as medication what the antiparasitic plants deployed as defense: a symbiotic relationship for the restoration of a holistic, balanced health. Plants produce chemicals for their external terrain’s defense and animals, to defend their internal terrain, employ biochemical alchemy through grazing and selecting their diverse diets.

How did they associate weight loss with increased parasite load? How did they understand their own infection levels so as to self-medicate properly and in proportion to their needs?

Generational genomics. A learned and given process, the orosensorial and post-ingestive feedback loops of the tannin-rich plants educate and form a medicinal behavior that becomes nested in genes. Villalba’s research discovered an interesting anomaly. Goat kids from another breed that were not infected with gastrointestinal parasites consumed the antiparasitic plants “irrespective of infection.”³ These particular kids’ prophylactic and wild alchemy was the manifestation of ancestral relationship via an adaptive landscape genomic. Their understanding was not their own, constructed from individual processing but was a collective understanding, passed through genes. Today’s prophylactic grazing was the outcome of yesterday’s learned medicative successes. Grazing is ancestral dreamwalking.

Provenza’s research corroborates and extends these findings. In a 2010 paper in the Journal of Animal Science, a group studying the interrelation of maternal nutrition and fetus development found a direct relationship between maternal nutrient deficiency during neonatal development and muscle mass in their offspring.⁴ If a mother experiences malnutrition while pregnant, that experience is handed, directly, to her offspring. Health is intrinsically linked, they found, to both one’s ability to self-medicate and one’s ancestral ability to self-medicate over many generations. Health is given in genes.