We feel peaceful when we are in a landscape that has short green grass, some scattered trees with their branches pruned up high, and some closely hedged shrubs. We like this sort of landscape because these queues suggest that there are a lot of animals. We feel peaceful and content in this environment because that is the signal created from millions of years of evolution that made us linger in those places. Those places are good human habitats. As I always say, that is why we try to surround ourselves with a miniature Eden in the form of our lawns and parks. As a rancher, I can surround myself with a much-expanded example of just this sort of landscape. That’s the problem.

Because our cattle are also savanna animals, their psyches evolved their feelings of peace and contentment in a savanna environment. They use their feelings of peace and contentment to keep themselves in good habitat. Some of the landscapes that we see as beautiful are going to be just fine for our cattle. But you have to figure that their peaceful signals are not going to line up perfectly with ours. We are hunters; they are grazers. At a certain point, they will look at our close-cropped lawns, dense hedges, and pruned-up trees and see something different. Something… crowded.

Over the next few blog posts, before I wrap up my specific observations from this fantastic season on the ranch, I want to throw out a few general observations that have come out of it. The first observation is that one way we go wrong in our grass management is that we make the pasture look the way we want it to look, not the way the grazing animals want it to look. I think this is a problem for hardnosed fifth-generation ranchers as well as for prepubescent eco-grazers. I know we make this mistake because I have made it. We rely on our instincts to tell us what good grass is. However, we have a hunter’s instincts, not a grazer’s. We have to learn to make pastures look the way the cattle want them to look. The question is, what does that look like? Spoiler alert, our ideas seem to be as bad as our instincts when looking for the perfect grass. And how can that help us make other modern decisions where our instincts are even less suitable?