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.

164. VIDEO: Finding the funk?

After a good 10 minutes of involuntary syncopations, it’s just possible that I’m finding my groove a tiny bit.  Since three times through the nerve-wracking slow torture of “Oh! Susannah” has me sticking straws in my hair, I switch to sampling one of the keyboard's rhythm backgrounds, which does help me feel the beat.  But Gus’s response is utter chaos and full entropy; his foot needs an exorcist as it flails the hi-hat pedal.  Until we return to “Susannah,” and he regains his focus, following his conductor with remarkable acuity:

If I can resist being driven ‘round the bend by its electronic inanity, I’ll try more “Susannah” again next time.  Anything for the donkey . . .

163. VIDEO: “Oh, don’t you cry for me”

In elementary school, I invariably caught the ear of every music teacher.  But not in a good way.  She’d slowly walk by the line of singing kids, with her head cocked and with a puzzled, queasy look on her face, and then she’d stop and point at me.  “You just mouth the words,” she’d tell me.  “You be a listener.”  She was a tad brusque, but she wasn’t wrong.  When I didn’t lose the tune altogether, I was always, always flat.  I don’t recall getting similarly gonged off the stage when we played simple percussion instruments, but I suspect I wasn’t much better with those.

Now many decades later, in a horse barn far away, when it comes to finding the (pretty much unmissable) beat of “Oh! Susannah,” I’m still no better than a braying ass.   And this particular ass sets the tone for our musical endeavors quite eloquently when his first gesture is to shove his hi-hat cymbals to the ground.  Nevertheless, I’m game to channel my inner tone-deaf child, and I start up up the music.  

Slowing the song’s pace seems to help us both.  Still, my struggle to give him his cue in advance of the beat, so he has time to lift and drop his hoof on the pedal, looks awkward and sounds worse:

 

162. VIDEO: Of sound mind

A couple of times, my friend Barbara has wondered aloud if Gus might enjoy real music, not just the random cacophony he produces himself.  So I unearthed a big keyboard that Sandy had found and stored in a tack room, because that one has some 40 songs and some 80 rhythmic backgrounds that it can play on its own.  The idea is to see if Gus would pick up on the beat of the sampled music and be able to clash his cymbals or honk his horn in anything like the same meter.

All the songs are electronic-sugarpop affronts to any ear, but we select a couple with simple signatures (“Sur le pont d’Avignon,” “Oh! Suzannah”), and we see how Gus reacts when they start hooting and twittering in his face. 

Sudden loud music?  Ho hum.  No concern shown, no offense taken.  All Gus wants is to play those keys, same as with his smaller piano.  Failing that, he grabs a nearby traffic cone and flaps it up and down — in time to the music?  nah, not really — by way of demanding a click and treat from me.

As with the boom of the bass drum, this twangy music leaves Gus utterly unfazed, green-lighting us for step two:  set the music going at a slowed-down pace, stash the keyboard out of sight, then present him with his regular instruments and try cuing him to stomp his hi-hat cymbals to accent the music.  The experiment begins . . .

161. VIDEO: Hoist the flag

Gus again outperforms my lofty expectations, this time with the red notification flag on the side of the mailbox.  Turns out he has zero trouble, mentally or physically, with pushing it upright.  I simply show it to him, and demonstrate that it can be raised and lowered, and he practically shoves me aside to do it himself.  After no more than half a dozen tries, he’s an expert now:

I needed a cue that’s distinct from his already extensive vocabulary for other tricks.  So I describe the action of his muzzle:  “Rub it.”  I could probably teach him to manipulate forceps or engineer an electrical switch or program a radio frequency to lift the flag, but at least for now we’ll stick with basic mouth-smooshing.

160: VIDEO: Printed matter

Gus and I have been practicing the mailbox game with an old sponge-and-handle thingummy because it’s shaped right and easy to pick up, but today we try two New Yorker magazines, rolled together and secured with a rubber band.  I’m thinking this could be our actual stage prop, as it’s recognizable to an audience, relevant to a mailbox, and biteable by a donkey.  

It requires no introduction, as Gus is immediately enamored of it and able to swap it in for the previous object without rehearsal:

As I suspected, he’s better and better at negotiating the mailbox, even though he (a) can’t see the box when it’s right in front of him and (b) has to orient the magazine roll lengthwise.  A few times he flops it crosswise against the mailbox opening, but even those are worthy efforts that earn him a click and treat.  When he aims the magazines endwise and they begin to actually go in, he gets a click and a peppermint.  Or two.  And a hug.  And acclamations on high.

He joyously takes the magazines (“Pick it up”) and desposits the magazines “(Dunk,” from his basketball trick) a few times —

— before he realizes that they’re paper and therefore eminently destructible.  Suddenly, instead of lifting the roll from the arena floor, he holds it down with a front hoof and commences shredding the exterior pages and spitting them out, like a hawk plucking a pigeon or a dog disemboweling a plush toy.  It seems the hold-it-and-rip-it instinct runs strong in a wide variety of species . . .   Well, that little misbehavior needs to be nipped in the bud, and luckily it’s easy enough to reroll the magazines and re-interest Gus in the mailbox game.  (Amazon promises the newspaper-shaped plastic dog toy will arrive soon.)

159. VIDEO: Face first

We humans get haptic cues about the shapes and textures of objects by feeling with our hands, but equids have only one big, thick fingernail at the end of each limb.  For dexterous perception, they use their sensitive, whiskered, almost prehensile lips and muzzles.  Instead of staying at arm’s length, it’s risky putting one’s face and head next to something unknown that needs exploring.  Yet even spooky horses can steel their nerves to do it.  

Gus rarely gives it a second thought.  He’s so outgoing and confident that he doesn’t hesitate to shove his face into the unfamiliar.  And chew it up and spit it out.  Manipulating an object into and out of a mailbox?  Bring it on.  [With apologies for the undersea arena lighting.] 

I start him with a cardboard eggcrate because it’s light and grippable, plus nobody cares that it will get destroyed.  I’m not sure Gus has ever tasted an eggcrate before, but he seizes on it right away.  I click and he relinquishes it, only slightly maimed.  When I hand it back to him, he grabs it and waves it toward the mailbox that’s tucked under my arm.  In fact, he drops the eggcrate onto the mailbox.  As if he's guessing what the game might be?  !?!?!!

Next I slip the crate into the mailbox and see if he’ll retrieve it.  He noses and nudges, but then I help him out with a familiar verbal cue:  “Pick it up!”  Before the first ampere could arrive at a lightbulb, he’s got it:  he authoritatively extricates the eggcrate from the mailbox.  This entails reaching for it, finding it with his lips, getting his teeth around it before it gets bumped backward by those lips, pulling it out, and presenting it like a trophy.  Okay, it’s not neurosurgery, but I’m mighty impressed.   

One more practice session with object removal, and I bet we can move on to object insertion.  The eggcrate is dead — in his zeal, Gus actually chews pieces off it, reducing it by two-thirds and mangling the remainder — but a plastic dog toy shaped like a rolled newspaper should be a handy, and relatively durable, prop from now on.

158. VIDEO: Education on a shoestring

I should know by now that Gus learns in leaps and bounds, avidly, like a five-year-old with Asperger’s.  But still I’m staggered by how easily he’s mastering the mailbox-trick skills.  In his first lesson (of no more than 10 minutes), he met the mailbox for the first time ever and then learned to slam its door shut when it was presented to him half-open.  So today [in the video-unfriendly gloom of the green-tinged arena lights] we move right along to opening the door.

First he discovers the shoestring that I attached as a pull-tab to help him yank the door open.   When I lift the string toward him, his natural instinct is to bite it, so I click and treat that.  The Very Next Time I show him the string, he bites it and instantly tugs it.  Click and peppermint candy.  Now he feels for the string with his muzzle and maneuvers it between his teeth all by himself.  Once he’s got it, he yanks promptly — and efficiently, straight out — to whip that door right open every time.  Before he spits out the string, he does indulge in assorted, random, semi-violent yankings just for fun, but I think/hope I can train him out of that fairly soon.

Clicker-training protocol requires that the animal repeat the trick many times, to be sure it’s fully understood and mastered, before the human gives any verbal command.  In fact, clicker gurus say that when you’d wager $50 that the animal will correctly and immediately execute the trick, that’s when you can start adding a verbal cue.  Well, Gus compresses that process into maybe half a dozen repetitions before he seems totally ready for a verbal.  For shutting the door, I’m saying “Bop it,” which he already knows from his top-of-nose bopping to roll the beach ball.  For opening the door, I’m introducing an all-new cue:  “Pull it.”  And, contrary to protocol, I’m already asking for shuttings and openings in the same session.  Cuz this animal be genius.

Now, I don’t believe Gus has figured out or memorized the new cue yet.  Probably he’s taking a more gestalt approach, learning that pull-it is called for when he sees the door is closed and the string is salient, while bopping works when he sees the door is half-shut.  But I’d bet $50 that he’ll understand and distinguish between the verbal cues in just one or two more sessions.

157. VIDEO: Going postal

Today I introduce Gus to a brand-new trick: pull open the mailbox door, place an envelope in it, shut the door, and raise the little red flag on the side.  It’s a common dog (and squirrel?) trick, so I have every confidence that Gus can master it in no time.  Like his push-the-baby-carriage-then-remove-the-toy-and-carry-it-onto-the-pedestal-then-wave-it-up-and-down, this one is a chain of several behaviors.  But this one doesn’t include any previously established tricks like the pedestal and the waving of objects.  This one requires finer motor skills too.  So we start small.

First I show him the main prop, a big, metal rural mailbox.  He immediately sniffs it and shoves it and bites its edges and pokes his nose inside it . . .  I half-open the door, and when he happens to nudge it, I click and treat.  It only takes a handful of times before he realizes that pushing the door closed is a trick.  In fact, he seems to catch on immediately that a hard nose-bop will slam it shut with a nice bang, so he’s extra-fascinated and doesn’t want me to put it aside.  

But that’s all for today.  Soon enough we’ll move on to the more technical maneuvers, like tugging the shoelace that I attached to the door-tab for ease of opening.  Then there’s poking a letter (or a rolled-up newspaper might be easier?) inside and leaving it there.  And smooshing the little red flag upward along the side wall of the mailbox might be the toughest manipulation of all.  Never fear:  there’s nothing on God’s green earth that Gus won't be able to learn.