Browsing herbivores tend to feed selectively, focussing on nutritious species and plant parts and avoiding toxic components. Recent research suggests that this selective browsing is substantially dependent on learning about post-ingestive consequences. Thus, animals come to associate particular foods with particular effects through experience and subsequently adjust their preference accordingly. Most previous experiments have involved simple training tasks (e.g. Burritt and Provenza, 1992) which do not reflect the complexity of the diet choice problem for free-ranging herbivores. A series of experiments was conducted testing the following more realistic food choice scenarios: (1) simultaneous vs temporally separated presentation of food options during the learning phase (2) seasonal change in post-ingestive consequences and (3) trade-offs between positive and negative consequences arising from single feeds.