171. VIDEO: Shots on goal

A true neophiliac, Gus is head over heels for the new soccer game he’s learning.  The color cards, the mailbox, the baby carriage — they’re still good, but the novelty and challenge of soccer outstrips the allure of all other toys.

It might be my fault too:  anticipating the difficulty of both precision kicking as a skill and goal-scoring as a concept, I started right out with buttermints as rewards.  What was I thinking?  Gus loves the ball enough just for itself; focusing and targeting its actions are simply new ways to love it, no extra incentive needed.  I’m going back to carrot coins, with only occasional candies.

Already the mints and the mere presence of an intriguing new contraption — the kids’ soccer net — have created a football fiend.  If he isn’t chasing and kicking the ball, he biting the top of the goal and slinging it around.  Wading through this irrational exuberance, I pursue my system doggedly.  I start by placing the ball at the very front of the goal net and inviting Gus to kick it.  He and it are so close that his kick usually succeeds in scoring a goal, accompanied by clicks and treats and celebrations.  After a couple days, I place the ball a little farther from the goal, and now a kick that’s off-kilter will be a miss.  He gets no treat for that, but I do hurry to replace the ball so he can try again.  

Basic physics make it very difficult for a hoof to kick a ball straight.  Think of a bat and a baseball, whose oppositely curved surfaces rarely meet at the sweet spot that creates a line-drive home run; instead most at-bats produce foul balls and popups and squigglers in front of the plate.  Likewise Gus’s rounded hoof rarely contacts his playball straight on, so his kicks veer and squirt in all directions. At least he’s not being thrown curveballs and sliders to spin the physics even worse.  Still, he’s gonna need a whole lot of practice.

Even if he were to break that code tomorrow, soccer skills involve more than feet.  For Gus, his body orientation is a major issue.  Since his fetlock joint pretty much only bends forward and back, he needs to stand head-on to the goal if he’s to have any chance of kicking it straight in.  That means swinging his hips around square behind his shoulders, and that takes time that he’d rather spend heedlessly bashing the ball with his foot.  I’m not sure how to teach that, but I’m hoping I won’t need to explicitly.  With only a ittle coaching from me, he learned to step around as needed when rolling the chair over and tipping it upright, so maybe he’ll figure out the same for scoring a soccer goal.  For now, I’m just luring him around as I hold the ball, not setting it down until he’s facing it pretty straight.

We’re in no rush to develop all these athletic nuances.  Right now, and doubtless for weeks to come, we’re either kicking randomly all over the arena or we’re doing stationary place-kicks very near the mouth of the goal.  And . . . he . . . scores!!

170. Barn Repairs R Us

Today is a day of recovery and restoration.  

Sandy rights the chairs and reassembles the little lounge room.  She sweeps up the small debris — from splintered wood to paper cups to donkey turds — and shovels it into the trash. Now she and I gather our hammers and screwdrivers.

It feels like Whac-A-Mole, because even if our amateur repairs do hold up under Gus’s next attack, we know he’ll just move a few inches right or left and demolish that.  The whole farm is elderly, and Sandy is super-resourceful and competent in her constant attention to maintenance, but even if we horsepeople owned the place, it’s way beyond us to rebuild or reinforce everything that needs it.  Nor can we convince Gus to adopt a more horselike approach to life:  if there’s something in your way, don’t bother to fight it; just cock one hoof and doze.

And so we begin, hoisting the broken wall section, shoring it up with a piece of scrap lumber, and nailing and screwing it back into place.  It looks as good as new.  Well, old, of course — but pretty robust now.

Next we contemplate the exploded door . . .  While we wait for WD-40 to loosen the rusted hinges before we try to dismount it, we go hunt through a couple of storage barns.  We do find several dusty old doors, but none anywhere near the right size.  I drive off to Lowe’s and Home Depot to scout new doors, which are nearly $80 for the cheesiest, hollow, thin slabs.  By the time I return, though, Sandy has phoned a friend and gotten a perfect suggestion: leave the shattered wreck on its hinges and slap plywood over both sides of it.  Like magic, Sandy dredges up two old sheets of pressboard from somewhere.  She power-saws them to size, and I use my legacy, corded power drill to screw them onto the inside and outside surfaces.  I add a third hinge, to help bear the extra weight now on the door.  Sandy tops off the job by attaching a strong hook-and-eye latch.  And, verily, the lame is made sound, the unfixable is fixed, and it’s better than ever.  We confess to each other that we’re mighty proud of ourselves.

Gus even regales us with a bassoon and bagpipe jubilee. But we know better than to celebrate — or to put away our tools.

169. Superstorm Gus

Call FEMA: it’s an official state of disaster.  The Gus-driven gale that tossed the barn a few weeks ago looks like a balmy zephyr compared to this cataclysm.

We did determine that supernatural forces were not at work back then:  yes, Sandy found Gus’s stall door shut neatly, but she can’t swear that it was also latched, so probably he pushed it open without the aid of satanic intervention, and it simply swung closed behind him while he ravaged the barn aisle.  This latest devastation also involves a door swinging to, but the result is far worse.

This time I could almost swear that I properly engaged the latch of his stall.  But in my estrogen-deprived golden years I have a memory like a steel sieve, so I can’t be sure that I did or didn’t do anything.  Also his latch is — through every fault of his own — a bit loose and crooked, making it just a little tricky to shoot home.  Anyway, Gus jiggled it open and departed.

While he didn’t toss the barn aisle as thoroughly as last time, he did again push into the little kitchenette-lounge room. Its flimsy hollow-core door is closed by a string looped over a tack, so gaining entry is donkey’s play.  Here he again upended the wicker chairs, knocked over the little TV, etc., etc.  But this time the door had swung shut behind him, trapping him in a tiny room chockablock with furniture and donkey.  He panicked and, after purging his bowels and bladder, he bashed the door to smithereens in order to escape.  Here’s Sandy's first view:

Oh, but the demolition derby was just getting started.  Gus wanted out of the barn altogether, and when he found its big sliding doors sealed, he simply entered the attached arena.  There he discovered one door left open, leaving just a chain-link gate, which he learned years ago can be pushed apart, its bungee cord notwithstanding.  That’s how he squeezed out into the great outdoors.  Who can say how long he spent grazing and strolling, but probably sooner rather than later he decided to try ransacking the other barn.

Because he loves ransacking that barn, and because its ancient door could no longer fend off a stiff breeze let alone a determined donkey, Sandy and a friend worked long and hard, in the bitter cold a couple of months ago, to replace it with a thick, new door.  Gus must’ve been peeved that his usual entryway was blocked, but I’m sure he never wavered, never quailed.  Plan B is his go-to behavior with any fence, gate, or other barrier:  he systematically tests and probes it until he finds a weak spot.  Sure enough, nosing and shoving along the three-inch-thick half-wall running the length of the barn, he finally came to a section that had been removed and then replaced a few years ago.  His sweet spot!  He rammed with his chest and shoulders, putting his 700ish pounds behind it, and caved in that section of wall.  Here’s how Sandy found him, looking a bit weary from the effort but unharmed and unrepentent:

168. Bed head? Try bed body

Gus looks frightful.  It’s a perfect storm of circumstances that have brought him to this sorry pass:

• his habit of never shedding his yaklike winter coat until June

• early hot weather and biting flies, which he hates, preferring to stay in his stall

• on and off rainstorms that may catch him out before he’s brought inside to escape the steamy sun that follows

• his habit of peeing almost always in just one spot in his stall

• his habit of napping in that same spot, no matter how urine-soaked

• a past truckload of dried-out, stiff-stalked hay, which all the equids found more useful as bedding than as fodder

The result is that I arrive for playtime to find him well dredged in bits of soggy hay and wood shavings, all clinging onto and burrowing into his dense, sleep-ruffled, three-inch-long coat.  

As soon as we enter the arena, Gus’s urgent desire is to rid himself of this clammy, tangly, itchy coating with a nice roll in the sandy dust.  First I use the back of my hand to brush off the loosest and largest hangers-on from his back and flanks and belly.  Then, as he dithers around, pawing and snorting the dirt to determine the very best rolling spot, I encourage him to get down to business by pawing with my own foot and cooing “Go roll!”  By the time he stands back up (and never shakes himself off as horses and dogs do), he’s somewhere between lightly floured and tempura-battered.  I reward him more with treats than with scritches.

After 20 minutes of tricks, followed by 20 minutes of grazing on the breezy lawns, Gus is dry enough to brush.  I flick and pick all the detritus out of his fur and mane and tail, dig the stinking mud out of his hooves, and ta-dah!  He’s a handsome hunk of donkeyflesh.  Until next time . . .

167. VIDEO: Chromatics

Gus is learning his colors.  That is, he’s learning the English words for two of the colors that equids are known to see clearly:  blue and yellow.  (Dissecting a horse eyeball, so I gather, is all it takes to see what kinds of rods and cones are inside, and the cones for blue and yellow far outnumber those for green and red.  If you stand in a bright-green field wearing a bright-red sweater, your horse will think you disappeared in a vast, undifferentiated grey fog.)

The colors lesson is dead simple, but it requires approximately 7,342,694 repetitions.  I make a start by holding up a cardboard square that I painted blue, and Gus naturally touches it.  I click and treat, and I do it again.  Eventually I say “blue” when I offer it to him.  I do this again.  And again.  After a couple of five-minute sessions over a couple of days, I bring out a yellow-painted square and get him to touch it as I say “yellow.”  Again and again.  My eyes are crossing, but Gus never gets bored — this is the easiest way to earn treats, ever!

Now we start the actual learning:  I have a yellow square in one hand and a blue in the other, and I hold them both up while saying either “blue” or “yellow.”   Now he has a choice, and one touch will earn him a treat but the next might get him bupkus.  “What is the meaning of this?” he demands.  I randomly switch the colors I say, and I randomly switch which hand holds which color.  I randomly raise the cards higher and lower.  Next I do the same with blue and yellow cardboard circles.  Lately I'm doing it with little plastic cones; next I'll use washcloths or cups . . .  He’s got to figure out what one criterion I require for granting him a click:  is it about my left or right hand?  is it about the item’s shape?  is it about where we are in the arena?  Once he can rule out the circumstantial variables, he’ll discover that the key, the only key, is the color.  And that the human-voice sound “bloo” or “yell-oh” signifies the color.  And so, more repeats.  We must be at several hundred by now; only a few million still to go.

Gus gets that two is an easy number:  after a wrong choice, if I hold the same cards in the same hands next time, the only right possibility is the choice he didn’t make last time.  What stumps me is why he occasionally rejects this logic and keeps choosing the wrong card three or four times in a row.  Is he suffering an epileptic or Tourette’s spasm that fixates him on the same wrong color?  Does he think it’s fun to insist on a mistake just to switch up the game?  Once or twice, after denying him a click for several errors, I take pity and hold the correct card closer to his nose, to make sure he’ll finally get it right.  Often, though, I can change hands and verbal cues all over the place, and he’s unfazed, getting it right every time.  Until, for some reason, he just blows it.  No matter — he’s inching his way to maybe 75% correct, and he loves, loves, loves the game.

165. VIDEO: Please, mister postman

The mailbox trick is still developing nicely.  Pulling open the door, shutting the door, and lifting the red flag are all easy-peasy, down pat.  The really challenging part is placing the rolled-up magazine into the mailbox, especially since, thanks to his horsey head and big nose and wide-set eyes, he loses sight of the mailbox as he nears it.  I’ve found that his success closely correlates to how far away I place the mailbox after I’ve given him the magazine — he needs at least a few paces to sight the box, try to lock his radar onto its location, and stay on target as he approaches and loses his view of it.  When he takes a firm and straight hold in his teeth, and when I hold the box in a good position, he can shove that magazine straight in, nothin’ but net.  

Still, for every clean, smooth insertion (eww…), he still mixes in three or four slightly off-target deliveries, or flappy deliveries to my stomach, or fumbles onto the floor.  A failure gives him nothing but a do-over, a near-miss earns a click and treat, and a success brings a click and peppermints and huzzahs.

Gus never seems to tire of this game, even postponing a grazing session on the lush spring turf in order to try and try and try again.  Little does he know that soon I’ll be mounting the mailbox against the barn wall, and he’ll have to learn how to put the magazine in without me standing right there behind it.  Betcha $50 he’ll figure it out in short order.

 

166. VIDEO: Kickball

An all-new game for Gus is kicking, rather than nose-bopping, a ball.  He rolls the huge beachball along using the top of his nose.  He perfected this trick long ago, and it’s so second nature to him that learning to steadily push the baby carriage — rather than bop the underside of the handle and crash it onto its front — took a few weeks.  Now he’s learning a ball game without any use of his nose, but it’s only taken a few days.

I bring him a cheapo kids’ ball from the grocery store, and he’s immediately intrigued by it.  But when he rolls it with his nose, he gets no click and treat.  What the . . . ?  With nose-bopping apparently off the table, he’s now at a loss; he just stands near the ball and ignores it.  I could wait until he bumbles against it by accident and click that, but I move the process along:  I roll the ball gently against his shin as he stands there.  Click! and treat.  On day one, I do that a few times in maybe five minutes.  On day two, he still tries a few nose-bops, which I ignore.  Again I roll the ball at his feet a few times and click the moment it makes contact.  Again his only reaction is What the . . . ?  But he’s starting to take an interest, sometimes turning toward the ball when I roll it past him.

Day three dawns, and doesn’t he freakin’ flap his foot at the ball All By Himself?!   He instantly gets a click and peppermint for that.  In the next five minutes, he kicks it, albeit feebly and awkwardly, several more times.  When he puts his nose on the ball and then remembers it’s about kicking, he whumps it abortively into his chin, which seems to surprise and annoy him.  Still, good little physics lesson there.

For horses and donkeys, tossing a foot forward is not a very natural movement: their ankles bend mostly backward, and that’s how they kick.  Gus is getting the hang of kicking his foot forward, but often it’s more of a stomping or pawing motion, which can bring his foot down on top of the ball.  At one point, as he’s chasing it rather avidly to kick it, he accidentally steps onto the ball, which makes him trip over it as it rolls under his foot, and he nearly faceplants, landing on both knees with a peeved little grunt.  He quickly jumps back onto his feet, and I apologize and soothe him, and he seems just fine.  Soon he’s chasing and kicking the ball again.

Next — there always has to be a next with a hairy little genius like Gus — I’m shopping for a portable kid’s soccer goal.  Learning to aim the ball and dribble it along in one direction won’t be easy.  Which is precisely why Gus will relish the whole process.

165. Gale-force Gus

I’m still here to share all the news that’s fit to blog; there just hasn’t been much lately.  Gus is still improving his mailbox trick, and also learning to hold a drumstick and tap on a 50-gallon barrel that’s in the arena, so that he can one day play the snare drum.  We’re starting on color discrimination too — more about that later.  But nothing dramatically blogworthy has been happening.  Until yesterday.

Yesterday marked the third day and night that Gus and the horses have had to stay in their stalls beause of bad weather:  when we didn’t have single-digit temperatures with dangerous winds, we had major snowstorms and/or freezing rain.  Gus has a nice double-sized stall, but being stuck within those four walls without any paddock time in the open air seems to have caused a sudden and severe case of donkey insanity. 

Here’s what Sandy the barn manager found in the barn aisle yesterday morning:

  • several upturned chairs

  • the jumbo trashbag of empty bottles

    and cans (destined for donation 

    to charity) eviscerated and scattered

  • several flipped and broken-open

    brush boxes

  • the contents of those brush boxes

    removed, trampled, strewn, and 

    flung, including but not limited to:

> 16 fly socks, large and small, 

            old and new, belonging to 

            at least three different equid

            residents, whose owners still 

            aren’t sure whose is whose

> 3 little sachets of fly repellent, 

            a bottle of Farrier’s Fix, and 

            a bottle of antifungal goop for hooves, 

            all still sealed

> 4 hoofpicks and 1 hoof knife, again of unknown ownership

> 1 thick-metal, bright-red McVitie’s cookie tube filled with 

            saltines, still sealed but crushed nearly flat in the middle

        > 2 notebooks, 0 pens

> 1 measuring cup and 2 measuring spoons 

> 4 needle-less syringes, assorted

> 9 brushes and combs, spewed from several different brush boxes

> 1 pound of after-dinner pastel buttermints in a large glass 

            canning jar with hinge-and-lock lid (miraculously intact)

> 1 plastic tub of horse treats with its carry-handle ripped off but 

            its lid still sealed

> 4 sponges, assorted

> 3 towels and rags, assorted

> 3 neoprene bellboots, with the 4th presumably MIA

> 6 Ziploc bags, tattered, none of them containing whatever they 

            used to contain

> 1 empty 4-cubic-foot brown-paper bag that shavings had arrived in

> 3 small plastic-mesh totes of unknown provenance 

  • the insulating-foam cover from the water spigot

  • Gus, standing outside his stall, the picture of nonchalance

And she didn’t even have time to get her mind around this devastation before she noticed that Gus had also forced open the door to the little lounge/lunch room and committed similar depredations in there.  He’d gleefully created a tornado of teabags, sugar packets, music CDs, etc., etc.  He’d also overturned the kerosene heater, which of course was off and unplugged and harmless — but still . . .  He’s big and the room is small, so he probably couldn’t wreak quite the havoc he’d have liked to.  

But with the big barn doors shut against the blustery winds, he couldn’t go across the yard to the other barn, so he just focused his  attentions on his own residence.  For an active, determined person to create that much mess, it’d take hours; for Gus, it was probably less.

And when he got tired, he couldn’t go back into his stall for a nice lie-down.  Because his stall door was latched and intact. Yet he was outside of it.

That’s the most demonic aspect of the whole incident:  how could he have gotten out of his stall?  One theory is that he clambered out the corner of the stall that has no jail bars above the wall.  He’s already bent his feed bucket, which hangs in that corner, from all his chest-ramming and head-craning in that corner, and perhaps he got a foot in that bucket and climbed over.  But surely the bucket can’t hold the weight of a donkey, and the wall is almost chin-high for him, and the unbarred portion isn’t much wider than he is.  And if he did escape that way, how did he crash-land out in the aisle without breaking a leg?  

Another idea is that he sailed over the other small length of wall that is free of jail bars.  That’s at the other end of his stall, where he could perhaps get a little bit of a running start (I’ve seen horses size up a fence, walk away several paces, then turn and run at it in order to gain the necessary air speed to clear it).  But even then, that stall wall comes up to his chin, and he’s built like a fireplug, not a show-jumper.

The only plausible answer, of course, is that he’s so genuinely satanic that he turned himself into smoke, insinuated himself under the stall door, and then resubstantiated into the devil-donkey that he is.