Can't gather resources while riding Beefalo using Spacebar (Auto-Gather)

It's a bit hit and miss whether your character will gather things off the ground when ontop of a Beefalo. Sometimes it works, other times the gathering animation will begin only to be interrupted by your character caught in an endless loop of "re-positioning" themselves closer to the thing your trying to collect.

It seems to occurs predominantly (if not exclusively) for overworld generated plants (Grass, Twigs, Reeds, Mushrooms, etc) but doesn't seem to occur for things that don't require an animation to pick-up (e.g. Wood from a fallen tree). Picking flowers is the exception to the rule, it's quite iffy 

Note: In the past where I've had this occur, exiting and re-entering the world seems to help(?) if the server mode is set to Online; this same trick doesn't seem to help on Offline however.