70. Ambassadorial

In the spirit (and schnozz-salience) of reindeer Rudolf, Gus knows how to bring Christmas cheer to children far and wide.  In fact, he’s become quite the animal ambASSador [rim shot] to Saratoga-area residents and tourists of all ages.  

After his promotional endorsement gig for the publisher of Running with Sherman, another of his local fans brings her huge gaggle of kids and grandkids who're visiting for the holidays.  Even when the grands swarm Gus and belabor him mightily with gang pat-pats, he stands placidly and guzzles up the love.  He’s also gratified to see them troop into the arena to watch him perform.  But I’m surprised that the audio component of the crowd spooks him a bit.  He gazes at them adoringly in their chairs, but when they ooh, aah, or cheer at his tricks, he jumps and scoots.  

When Gus is on his pedestal, which is situated pretty close to the audience seating, I figure he might balk at the prospect of pirouetting, since that places the viewers behind him for a moment or two.  And behind is where wolves and cougars come from.  But he trusts his fans enough to twirl around with apparent confidence — until they approve volubly, causing him to plunge suddenly off the pedestal and crash into me.  (Not again, I think, as I feel the familiar scrub of soft fur up my nose.)  This time, though, he sidles and spins to avoid knocking me flat; the only casualty is my glasses, which get squashed against my face and are now in dire need of an optician’s pliers.  Always a gamer, Gus recovers his aplomb and remounts the pedestal for more showing off.

He wows the crowd with beach-ball bopping and basketball dunking, and especially impresses the adults with tilt-a-chair.  After farewell pat-pats, the humans head home, leaving Gus to his grooming and his dinner.  And to all a good night.

69. Ready for my closeup

Gus is a shameless ham and social butterfly.  He loves getting attention from — and returning the favor to — pretty much anybody who’ll give him the time of day.  He’s taken a special liking to the daughter of a colleague and friend who has visited him several times and provided many a treat and pat-pat.  His whole asinine face lights up whenever she comes by; they're clearly BFFs.

Back home in New York City, she works for Knopf, publisher of the new book Running with Sherman, about an athlete bonding with a rescued donkey.  For a promo on Knopf’s social media, she proposes a photo with her and Gus and the book.  In loco parentis, Sandy agrees.  So out troop mother and daughter on a gloomy, slushy day for a decidedly unglamorous photo shoot.  Sodden and muddy, Gus nevertheless acts his role — reading the book with his human chum — with passion and panache, and my friend snaps several adorable shots of daughter and donkey.  The posts, on Twitter here and on Instagram here, make quite a splash for Knopf and the book’s author.

For Gus, the 15 minutes of fame don’t matter at all, but the 15 minutes of chumming and treats and photos make his day.

  

68. VIDEO: Partnering

Thanks to an impromptu lesson from barn-manager Sandy (a natural expert at human-horse body communication) and some diligent concentration on my positioning, Gus and I are already doing better at lungeing.  Today, we get some really good walk and trot in both directions — and with less futzing and kerfuffle, as I’m able to send him, and mostly keep him, both far enough away from me and traveling forward around the circle.  The key is to aim the lunge whip toward his hip to encourage forward movement and toward his shoulder to encourage distance from me.  But the trick is to notice when he’s just even thinking about slowing or drifting inward, and to adjust the whip position that very instant.  By moving the whip early and often, I keep him circling fairly consistently.

And by clicking for just a half-circle or so of good work, I can reinforce the correct lungeing and — just as importantly — I can forestall our slipping into ugly, confused, lurching, insistent, discombobulated, half-assed lungeing.

After our modest success on the lunge line, I unclip the lead and let Gus work at liberty.  From last month’s dressage-clicker lesson with Alex Kurland, a square of PVC pipes and traffic cones is set up in the arena.  At each corner, just outside the structure, a wooden mat beckons.  Gus remembers the lesson, and anyway he loves the interesting impedimenta (which he only bops and topples a tiny bit), so we play with it.  I walk just inside the pipes, and he walks alongside me but just outside them.  I do the maitre d’ hand gesture — and lately Alex has us using more of the hand that’s near the equine’s hip than the hand near his head, so as to drive him from behind rather than only luring him from in front — and Gus eagerly walks to the mat and plants his front feet.  At the corners where a turn will follow, my arms continue to direct for a moment, until he pivots in place.  He gets a click and treat for stopping on the mat, for pivoting, and for staying patiently on the mat when I fold my hands to cue "the-grownups-are-talking(-so-just-wait-politely)."  Then, from my rear arm, a subtle traffic-cop hand wave suffices to send him forward, while my maitre d’ arm indicates the way ahead. 

The dance-partnering quality of the exercise kinda grows on both of us.  Soon Gus is striding energetically from mat to mat, and before I know it he’s trotting — and eating it up with a spoon.  He tosses his head high as he trots off, then lowers it to his knees and tosses it again as he approaches the next mat, where he slams on the brakes with a glinty eye.  If donkeys could grin from ear to ear, he’d be doing it.  I let him trot and stop, trot and stop, a few times around the square.  Then I try changing our direction of travel, but that seems to ruin the mood.  He won’t trot, even if I ask and urge.  He does walk purposefully from mat to mat, but the game has lost its goofiness and glee.  I move him over to the pedestal for some pirouettes, and I run out of treats.  

As I lead him from the arena, he balks and won’t come along toward his stall.  The barn doors are closed, and grazing is out of the question in the snow-covered outdoors; there’s no place to go.  Except back to the arena, which is clearly Gus’s vote.  But without more treats, that’s a nonstarter.  So I ask and cajole and prod and pull, all in vain.  Luckily, our shared bucket of autumn apples still has a few little seconds in it, and when I offer one to Gus, he follows me for it.  Sour and hard and rusty it may be, but he seems to savor each mouthful.  I know it’s a piss-poor substitute for more game-playing and apron treats, but he makes do.  Like the loyal partner that he is.

67. The line on lungeing

In the unprecedented cold of this early November, Gus gets mighty frisky when I take his blanket off.  I unclip his lead line and let him roll, but he wants to trot and trot and trot, so I jog alongside him.  About halfway around the arena is enough for my old lungs, so each time I reach the brink of syncope, I click and we stop for a treat (and a gasp).  For self-preservation, I pick up a lunge whip and hold it straight out behind him, like a long extension of my arm, and with the other arm I give a maitre d’ this-way-sir gesture to invite him forward.  Remembering the good lungeing training that Sandy had given him years ago, he trots around me in a circle.  Every half lap or so, I click, causing him to turn on a dime toward the circle’s center and trot right up to me for his treat.

I’m so unused to lungeing that it makes me dizzy to step around in a small circle and watch Gus moving around me.  Again for abject self-preservation, with each click I spin quickly in the opposite direction to unwind my balance.  And as soon as I’ve completed my tight, fast turn, there he is, in my face, eagerly waiting for his treat.  But the counterspin does do the trick, keeping me on my feet and able to resume the circling for another few moments.  If my long-ago experience is any guide, I know that the more I practice, the less the twirling will unseat my otoliths and set me reeling.

In the past when trying to lunge Gus, I failed at keeping him far enough away from me or keeping him moving.  But I’ve studied the “horse speak” book’s excellent chapter on lungeing, and the dressagey walking-alongside exercises of recent months have helped hone my body language.  Now, by carefully keeping myself even with his hip, and by opening my maitre d’ leading arm nice and wide, I’m able to keep sending him around.  When I drift too far ahead — across from his shoulder or neck, say — he feels my body position blocking his forward motion and he immediately slows.   Between the two of us, we manage corporeally to signal and adjust and resignal to each other, and we achieve some good lungeing.

After a particularly steady lap, I click and treat with a peppermint.  Oh, baby, oh, baby!  Then when I step to his other side and send him around in the other direction, we achieve even more good lungeing.  Yay!  This means that this winter he can get warmed up without my running myself ragged.

Next we play some less active games, like basketball and pedestal and standing on the mat.  After half an hour, my feet and fingers are starting to freeze, so I end the session and lead Gus to the arena gate.  But Caesar does not wish to leave.  We debate the options with equal conviction.  I try luring him with an apple, but he backs up.  Since the barn doors are closed, I drape his lead-rope over his back and walk away.  I busy myself in his stall — including a very audible toss of treats into his feed bucket.  When I peek at him from his stall door, he hasn’t budged from standing in the middle of the barn aisle, but he's gazing hard at me.  I repeat the apple lure, to no avail, and again I retreat into his stall.  Finally I hear his little hooves slowly clop-clopping, and he walks into the stall with me.

He gets a nice rub-down, cooperates beautifully with hoof picking and re-blanketing, and just as I head for my car, Sandy arrives to serve dinner.  Da life of Riley.

66. Cabin fever

I’m in the throes of selling one house and buying another, both of them fixer-uppers with olfactory evidence of long-resident pets.  To let realtors bring in prospective buyers for my old house, I’ve got to vacuum the ankle-deep tumbleweeds of dog hair that develop overnight, launder or hide or spray nasty extra-strength Febreze onto the throws and sheets that cover my furniture and reek of pond-swimming dog, ditto for the two dog beds and big crate that are also favorite canine resting spots, then load my car with my own dog and often one or two or three visiting dogs, and flee the premises for the 30 or 60 minutes of each realtor’s showing.  I’ve had about 20 showings in the past few weeks. 

In exile from one dinnertime showing, I drove a quarter of a block down the street to a florist’s parking lot, where I set up shop to return three different day-care dogs to their three different owners.  Dealing dogs from the back of one car to the back of another cannot have looked very kosher to my neighbors . . .

Meanwhile, I’ve been working overtime at my new house, to paint walls and remove carpet and clean windows and fight leftover litterbox stench, in between meetings with tree surgeons, carpenters, septic-system excavators, electricians, well-water inspectors, fence installers, and Habitat for Humanity donation takers.

All of which means I’m struggling to continue my every-other-day schedule with Gus the donkey.  Today, not only has Gus languished unentertained for three straight days, but it’s poured chilly rain for 24 hours so he’s been stuck in his stall.  When I show up, he’s so impatient that he nearly bursts through his stall guard.  In the arena, he gets down to business by rolling in the dirt at least six or eight times on each side.  Then he jumps up and mugs me for treats.  I take advantage of his intense focus to do some at-liberty work:  I unsnap his lead line and get him to walk along with me in circles and loops and halts.  Poor thing is so starved for treats as well as attention that he sticks by me eagerly.

He’s still antsy and feisty, so I focus on lively, determined walking, and very quickly he starts trotting.  I trot along, clicking and treating after several paces so I can catch my breath — but, without finishing chewing, off he goes again, trotting me around and around without mercy.  I use our matching-paces practice to slow my walk in hopes of influencing Gus to slow down too.  It works a little, but soon I change our focus to games and tricks.

He jumps onto the big pedestal, and before I even ask he’s pirouetting around it fast.  Next I tip over the 50-gallon drum: though we haven’t played barrel-roll in many weeks, he remembers that pushing his nose on the center of it, not near the ends, is the way to get the click.  Now we resume some walking, this time around the big circle and emphasizing self-carriage and shoulder-yielding.  He gets so limber and light doing this that he transitions almost imperceptibly into a trot again.  As I trot with him, I extend my arms and he keeps his pace and distance from me very consistent.  I click and treat for that, and I think, Oh, boy, we might be ready for actual lungeing -- sending him around in a big circle with me standing at the center.  Aping our lead-line trotting, my back hand would hold the whip toward his hip or shoulder and my front hand would hold the long lunge line toward his nose.  He could trot all he likes, without wearing me out trying to keep up.

Still full of piss and vinegar, Gus notices the toy basketball hoop.  I toss the ball for him, and he busts a trot to retrieve it.  He whaps the ball against the backboard and bangs it on the rim a few times and then pokes it right through the net.  Swish!  And click!  After many such vigorous dunks, I run out of treats and Gus agrees to end our session. 

Back in his stall, he tucks into his hay and enjoys being groomed and even reblanketed.  All our energetic work seems to have taken the edge off; now he appears content and settled for the evening.  I resolve to do my very, very best to keep up our schedule, regardless of any realty or renovation crises.

65. VIDEO: Noodling

Using the outdoor arena again, Gus is less driven to sniff every single manure pile, and he’s less distracted after I let him sniff those he finds of interest.  He gives me even more, and more sustained, periods of walking in excellent form.  He paces right alongside me, needing just a few brief and subtle takes on the leadrope to keep him light and nimble as we make arcs and turns.  When I hold the lead lightly and openly, and when I match paces with him, his walk gets more limber, relaxed, energetic, and rhythmic.  Dressage donkey!

Along with walking over the wooden bridge, and dunking the basketball there (click here for video), we walk through the arch of breeze-blowing pool noodles, which have replaced the strips of tarp.  Gus was fine with the tarp, but he seems to actively enjoy the noodles, pausing and nosing at them:

64. Here, there, anywhere

Generalizing a skill from one context to another isn’t always easy.  Especially if you’re a Bear of Very Little Brain.  But if you’re Eeyore, it appears, you’re a flexible thinker who can nimbly adapt to changing circumstances.

Today is cool and breezy enough to keep the biting flies largely at bay, so I take Gus into the outdoor arena for a change of scenery.  He’s tempted by the grass underfoot which I don’t let him munch on, and he’s enticed by the remnant evidence of the horses who spend their nights here.  Also, he’s distracted by the worlds outside the fence: people walking around, horses in nearby paddocks, a roaring lawnmower, etc.  First, the minute I remove his light blanket, he rolls in the bare dirt near the gate.  Next, we walk a full circuit of the perimeter, in both directions, stopping at each and every pile of manure new and old; he places his nose right on it and inhales in a deep, scholarly manner, then moves on.

With the tour of inspection finished, we do some walking and turning and halting and backing.  Gus doesn’t love this, and once or twice he tries his obdurate routine, stopping dead and/or pulling his head away, to see if I’ll just let him graze.  But without much effort, I’m able to resist and then cajole him back in step with me.  After just a few minutes of nice walking, I lead him to the toy basketball hoop that I lugged out earlier.

I figure that doing an old trick in a new venue will challenge his mind at least a little bit, yet he barely hesitates.  When I toss his rubber lattice ball, it takes just a half an extra second for him to fetch it.  To start, I ask only that he put it in my hand — going back to an earlier level of the trick, to compensate for the unusual surroundings.  Well, Gus don’t need no stinkin’ compensation:  the next time, he clearly turns toward the basket, so I cue him with “Dunk,” and as if nothing has changed from our usual indoor setting, he flaps the ball on the rim and backboard and then spits it into the net.  I toss the ball farther away, and he almost trots over to it, snatches it up, and heads to the basket for a lively flap-and-dunk.  He does this several times, so I figure we can up the ante yet a little more.
 

 I set the hoop at the far end of the low wooden bridge, and I set the ball on the ground near the other end.  This time, Gus does require a minute or two to wrap his mind around the new gestalt.  I chirp “Pick it up!” and he walks right by the ball, then steps across the bridge and half-off again.  We reset, standing on the ground near the bridge.  I pick up the ball and hand it right to his mouth, he takes it, and I click and treat.  The next time, I hand him the ball and get him to take one pace forward to return it to my hand; click and treat.  Now I set it back on the ground, and he reaches down and picks it up, but with a little question-mark forming in a cartoon thought-bubble over his head.  Quickly I render roadside assistance, singing “Good!” and tapping the basketball hoop.  He drops the ball, then walks onto the bridge and shoves his face into the net.  No click, but I cheerily urge him to step down and try again.  And sure enough, he bites up the ball, walks onto the bridge, flaps around the hoop a few times, and dunks.  Click!  Peppermint!

Would a dog or a horse succeed so quickly with such a new trick arrangement?  I suspect most would struggle a lot more to remember such a recently learned trick when suddenly flooded by new body sensations and surroundings and object placements. 
 
Memo to self:  try putting Reggie the brown dog’s footstool out on the sidewalk and asking him to sit on it and give a high-five.  Without succumbing to his powerful canine urges to pee on the lamppost and bark at a stray cat and sniff the neighbor's garbage can.

63. VIDEO: Globetrotter Gus

He’s way upstate, but Gus could join the Harlem Globetrotters.  His dunking-the-basketball trick is nearly perfect, with plenty of goofing around the net preceding a definitive swish.  

Our progress was a bit delayed because Gus enjoys flapping the ball back and forth, scraping it on the arena floor, and bashing it into the backboard a good deal more than he enjoys dropping it into the hoop.  To pinpoint the dunk as the sought-after behavior, I was clicking the instant the ball entered the net, because clicker-training rules clearly state that a click ends the behavior — that is, he should drop the ball immediately in order to get his treat.  But in this case, Gus prefers to continue his fun for a few more seconds, which often means dropping the ball when it’s no longer in the net, which I don’t want to click for, but I’ve already clicked . . .  aaargghhh!

Not to worry; it’s par for the course.  To teach a dumbbell retrieve to dogs, the moment they take it into their mouths, you click, causing them to spit it out instantaneously in order to get the treat, so you look as if you’re training them to drop the dumbbell.  Eventually, though, you can delay the click a teeny bit, and then a teeny bit longer and longer, to build the duration of the dumbbell hold.  Refining and chaining all the steps into one trick is a messy process at first.

Interestingly, what greatly accelerated Gus’s learning the dunk was my introducing the occasional peppermint candy as a treat for extra-special success.  Until now I never quite trusted that “higher-value” rewards would contrast with regular rewards in an animal’s mind during routine trick-training, but the first big, sweet peppermint made Gus’s ears and eyes pop visibly.  And sure enough, after just a few more peppermint specials over a couple of days, now the dunk is executed, though still with much prefatory monkey business, far more reliably.

62. Channeling Eeyore

With the forage around the farm beginning to toughen and dry out as autumn creeps in, Gus gobbles up as much as he can while the gobbling is good.  Plantains are flowering but still emerald-leaved; grasses are yellowing at the tips but mostly still green and fresh enough; chicory and chickweed remain off the menu. 

Today Gus suprises me by grazing around the gate of a paddock where boots and hooves have trampled the ground to barren dirt.  The nearby grass is dry and powdered with dust, but Gus rips it up hungrily.  This micro-desert also hosts mats of tiny, wiry, vining weeds.  Gus works at gathering a sizable hunk between his teeth, so that a yank of his head succeeds in tearing off the whole tangled skein.  He stands in the sun, chewing and chewing until the stringy stuff is swallowed. These scrubby plants are literally “the odd bits which got trodden on” that Eeyore dolefully expects when picnicking with Pooh and crew.  In fact, Gus’s unexpected Eeyore impression is so complete that, though he has never given a thistle the time of day, now he sniffs a big thorny one before deciding to move on.

When, too late, I identify the stringy little plant as a spurge, I worry.  Spurges are notoriously toxic to humans and many animals.  They can cause vomiting, which equines are structurally unable to do — so is Gus in real danger??  I quickly recall that he ingests the occasional mouthful of oak leaves, ragweed, buttercup, and God knows what else, all with apparent immunity, so I trust his iron constitution can handle today’s garnish of spurge with the same gay abandon.  

Sure enough, he’s hale and hearty on my next visit.  Nevertheless, I do not let him graze near the patch of spurge again.

61. Mammal a mammal

Gus seems to like every animal he meets — horses, dogs, chickens, humans.  He always watches them with calm interest, and if they’re nearby he invariably extends his snout to offer a greeting.  The barn manager’s little old dog has invented a game for the two of them, wherein she approaches, he lowers his nose to say hi, and she growls and snaps at him, making him jump back.  (My family once had a cat who did the same thing with our dog;  despite her hissing and nose-swatting, which made him sneeze, which elicited yet another swat, the two were great buddies.)  When Gus makes an overture to the chickens, they just waddle away at top speed with exclamation points over their little heads.  The only nice-nice he ever gets is from horses and humans.

But now some friends come to meet him and bring along their two wire-haired fox terriers, Norm and Hank.  Both are immediately fascinated by their first-ever donkey, and Gus is very keen to meet them too.  At first, the dogs shy away when Gus gets too close and lowers his big head toward them, but all parties (each on a lead line controlled by a human) try more rapprochements.  I want to show off some of Gus’s crowd-pleaser tricks, but he’s distracted and attracted by the terriers.  Norm is a bit more skittish with Gus than his brother Hank is, though both finally brave a few brief nose-bops.  At one point, Hank walks behind Gus and starts to stand up to rest his front paws on Gus’s hocks in order to reach high enough to sniff his butt.  !  Gus has never kicked that I know of, but Hank’s owner very properly brings him away.  All anybody gets to sniff is noses.

By going deeper into the arena, farther away from the visitors, I get Gus focused on some cone-fetching and tilt-a-chair games.  Then he socializes again with his new friends, and they join him for awhile as he grazes on the lawn outside the arena.  Since the entire environment is new to them, the dogs are overstimulated and getting tired; meanwhile, Gus looks gratified, fulfilled, and happy.  For him socializing is as thoroughly positive an experience as dining — and when he gets both together, he’s in asinine heaven.

60. VIDEO: Driver’s ed

In disaster-assessment mode immediately after the cart crash, Sandy and I blame ourselves.  We shouldn’t’ve assumed the best-case scenario, in which Gus remembers the enjoyable aspects of pulling the trap and is Just Fine with doing it again.  We should’ve predicated our training on the worst case, in which his memories of pulling the trap have faded except for the past episode of terrifying calamity.  In that frame of mind, we’d begin by clicking and treating Gus for staying near the trap while we jostle it a tiny bit.  And for hearing it rattle as we pull it around.  And for hearing it while his back is turned on it.  Later we’d manoever him near the shafts, immediately click and treat, and lead him away to safety.  We’d manoever him near again, have him wait one second, click and treat, and lead him away again.   We’d rest the shafts on his surcingle rings and then promptly remove them.  The most we’d accomplish, and it would be a crowning glory, would be to have him to take one or two steps forward with the cart.  Then we’d celebrate with a peppermint, unhitch him, and let him play fetch.

But now we’ve got on our hands a donkey who’s well and truly spooked.  And who, in a way, succeeded in escaping by means of running amok in the most dangerous fashion.  We need to get that taste out of his mouth and cover up that memory with a lot more positive and pleasant experiences.

First Sandy hopes that Gus might assent to being rehitched, so we try bringing the cart behind him.  Even at a distance, and no matter how rapidly and repeatedly we click and treat, he jigs and spins his hips away every time.  He insists on facing the menace head-on — perfectly natural.  Next she leads him between the shafts head-first, and he’s quite willing to make that approach.  Next she leads him across the shafts sideways, as if they’re ground poles, and he’s quite willing to step over them calmly.  But when she turns his back to the cart, he’s still not at all willing.  So:  the cart is tolerable when it’s stationary and visible.

Now she takes a Gus-rein in one hand and a cart-shaft in the other hand and walks forward.  She allows him a long rein, to let him put space between himself and the trap.  His body is tense; his ears move constantly, like ground-control signallers at a very busy airport; and he gives that rattletrap plenty of sideways hairy eyeball.  But he manages to walk along, with the trap rolling just on Sandy’s other side.  So:  the cart is now tolerable when it’s moving and visible.

These are much better outcomes than white-hot panic and emergency extraction.  

We set down the cart in the far corner of the arena, and I take Gus outside for some grazing.  He tucks in with gusto and relief, never raising his head from chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing.  After 15 minutes, we go into his stall for dinner — more oral gratification.  After gobbling his grain, he avidly browses his hay.  These are basically the equine equivalents of a carton of ice cream and a spoon.

Now that Gus’s last two experiences with the cart have ended in cataclysm, we’re definitely behind an eight-ball.  His powers of recollection are strong.  Yet so are his resilience and courage.  Each time I visit from now on, I can ask him to touch the cart and stand near it and hear it rattle, all in brief sessions and tiny increments.  Maybe that way we can work our way back to hitching up and driving with confidence and relaxation.  Eventually.

59. Cart-astrophe

Amid the riot of last week's New York State Fair — a butter sculpture depicting life-size customers in an ice-cream parlor; cage upon cage of ducks and chickens and rabbits; pen after pen of goats and sheep and pigs; a Snickers candy bar wrapped in bacon, then dipped in batter, then deep-fried; an exhibit of art made from “junk in a bucket” — I happened upon some carriage-driving contests in the equestrian coliseum.  There were pairs of dapper Belgian draft ponies, and also big Percherons in “tandem hitch,” which means one in front of the other like a tandem bicycle. 

I’ve seen a few cart and carriage accidents, and heard about others.  Driving is certainly more dangerous than riding:  if a cart bounces or tips, the humans can get catapulted from the seat while the animals can get entangled in straps and shafts.  Once upon a time, Sandy had Gus nicely trained to pull a little two-wheeled trap as she walked behind it, and after he was good with a 50-pound sack of feed in the trap, she figured she might . . . just . . . sit in it herself.  Instantly the imbalance or torque freaked him out and sent him running off wildly, causing the cart to flip over sideways while still attached to him, causing him to freak out even more.  Sandy managed to bail out and roll away unhurt, but by the time she and others got Gus stopped, the harness was so twisted and jammed onto his shoulders that they had to cut it off of him.

Happily, all went smoothly with the Belgians and Percherons I saw at the fair.  And when I tell Sandy about it, it sparks her interest in reintroducing Gus to driving.  His crash was far in the past, and he’s great with long-lining — what could go orwng??

First we fail to realize, when Gus shows some suspicion on seeing the cart in the arena, that he still associates it with bad hoodoo.  But he lets us bring the little conveyance behind him and tie its shafts with bailing twine to the side-rings of his surcingle.  Sandy takes the reins behind the cart, while I walk at Gus's head in order to deliver instant treats whenever she clicks.  Off he steps like a professional and walks along well.  Almost right away, though, he doesn’t want to stop to receive treats, and he doesn’t want to whoa on her command.  He wants to walk along smartly.  Then to quick-march.  Then to trot.  The more he accelerates, the more the light metal cart jounces and rattles.  And the more it rattles, the less he likes it.  Gus’s intent evolves visibly, from pulling the cart to fleeing the cart. 

At this point, when Sandy tries to slow him, he instead runs off blindly, pulling the reins from her hands.  He gallops to the arena gate and tries to barge out through it, toppling a couple of chairs and wooden rails loudly.  But the gate won’t give, and the trap won’t stop chasing him, so he veers back to the center of the arena and crosses it diagonally, bucking and bucking and bucking.  By this time the cart is upside-down, scraping and banging, the twine is broken away from one shaft, but the other shaft is sticking under and between his hind legs. It all started so promisingly, and now we're fearing for his life!

As he rampages away from the gate, I make like an X — standing tall with my arms extended in the air and my feet apart, forming the international (and interspecies) symbol for halt — and I aim my X at his neck.  Sandy probably does the same thing, but I don't look; I'm focused only on Gus, both to influence him with my body language and to keep my actual body far away from him and the cart.  To our amazement, he stops for us.  I put a hand on his halter to keep him still, and Sandy begins ve-e-ery carefully disentangling him.  I produce my pocket knife (exigencies like this are why I always, always, always keep it on me) so she can cut the twine and drag the cart back away from him.  Gus waits and then walks off with me.  Considering his ordeal, he now seems fine — no trembling or panting or jumpiness.  And by amazing grace, no injuries.

Of course we don’t want to end on such a negative note, so we work with Gus for awhile afterward, hoping to give him some positive, or at least not terrifying, associations with the cart.  Details about that in the next post.

58. Botanical update

Ragweed — yum?

Oak leaves — just fine?

As summer starts to edge towared autumn, Gus’s browsing preferences seem to be changing a bit with the season.  Whereas clover never gave him a thrill in spring, now that it’s blossoming it’s a huge favorite, worth strolling around in search of.  The bedstraw is acceptable, but not the special treat it seemed to be when it was young.  To my surprise, the carrot-cousin Queen Anne’s lace is still shunned; same for chicory and burdock and ragweed — until suddenly today he yanks up a big, multistalked, green-flowering ragweed plant and systematically chews and swallows the whole thing.  Wha-a-a-a??

Gus’s first choice is always grasses, especially if the blades are long and wide and rank, as they are under the fences where the mower spares them, and in the fenny and thickety areas where they’re overfertilized by proximity to old manure piles.  He also enjoys the mower-spewed cuttings when they lie on top of the recently cut lawns.  This fodder, though, is neither fresh like live plants nor cured like hay, so I worry that it could be mouldy or fermenting or otherwise unhealthy.  But this is the animal who blithely eats oak leaves with no apparent ill effects, so I guess he can digeset old grass clippings too.

57. Pigeons, plugs, and pie pans

Gus’s barn is now a pigeon exclusion zone.  Pigeons have long been numerous and ubiquitous above the stalls and arena in that barn, but we finally reached our limit of tolerance.  The makeshift ceiling over the little tack room has helped protect the saddles and bridles, but everywhere else the pigeon poop has been prodigious bordering on the epic.  The audience chairs in the arena have been covered in it, and ditto for the light switch, the entry gate, the stack of miniature traffic cones, the fetching toys, etc., etc.  In the stabling half of the barn, the residents have been shat upon, their water buckets fouled, their feed buckets caked, and their neatly folded blankets and flymasks besmirched.  Sandy was draping old towels over everybody’s feed buckets between meals, but the towels became stiff with dried excrement every couple of days.  

The cooing of easily 30 or 40 pigeons has rarely bothered me, but their frequent and  sudden flights in and out of the barn can be unnerving to horses and riders.  I think the final straw for Sandy was seeing how much grain the pigeons were  stealing from the coop of her very nice chickens while they were outside dutifully eating up bugs all over the property.  Which includes two disused barns that would make Perfectly Fine alternative homes for the pigeons to make their very own.

So, after extensive online and word-of-mouth research, Sandy has compiled an arsenal of pigeon assault weapons:  a SuperSoaker pump-action squirt gun, a toy rifle that fires plastic-foam Nerf bullets, and a big, long-handled net.  All humans who see a pigeon are deputized to grab a water or Nerf gun and let fly (and enjoined to gather up the spent Nerf bullets and return them to their ammo box for reloading).  To support her artillery and fusilier power, she became a corps of engineers, climbing up and hanging an aluminum-foil pie pan on a string to dangle in the center of each and every little window between the arena and the stable.  She tightly closes the big arena doors every night.  She has plastic owls posted around the building full-time.
 

In the face of this relentless onslaught, the pigeon population has plummeted.  There’s still a nest over Gus’s stall and a few others way high in the arena rafters, beyond the range of water hose or foam bullets.  But the barn is appreciably less shitted up these days.  Rows of pigeons now bide their time on the power lines outside, watching for a chance to retake their territory.  But our warrior spirits are steeled to keep up the good fight, never let down our guard, and beat back the invaders.  We hope the onset of winter will dampen their resolve and drive them at last to seek shelter elsewhere.

Victory won’t be declared until there are no more than a couple of pigeons resident in our barn.  And we fully expect to re-up and resume hostilities in the spring.

56. VIDEO: Dressage donkey

Another clinic day with clicker-dressage expert Alex Kurland, and while lots of lessons are learned and progress made by six humans and seven equines, for me the banner headline of the day is that Gus is declared a bona fide dressage donkey.

After auditing last month’s clinic, I’ve been working with Gus on the main lesson of that day, shoulder yielding — at least in a rudimentary, ballpark sort of way.  And he’s catching on quickly and enjoying it.  But I know my cueing needs a lot of refining, so that’s what Alex offers us.  She confirms my fear of shoving him into a stiff or unbalanced shoulder-yield, and she steps us back to a preparatory exercise focused on the tiniest, subtlest little gives of the neck.

The cue is the same — sliding down the inside rein and taking it up just a little, while using my “minuet hand” to touch or brace his shoulder if it starts to fall into the circle — but the goal is only a teensy softening of jaw and neck, a hint of releasing, a soupçon of acknowledgment.  All without any loss of energy or ground-speed as he continues walking along.  I peer intently at the faint vertical wrinkle behind his jaw, and the instant I see a little increase of crease, I drop the rein and click, following up with a treat.

And doesn’t Gus turn out to be a champ?  Alex praises the quality of his walk, his responsiveness, and the lightness with which he carries himself.  She notes how much those are improved since she saw him a couple of months ago.  And she reassures me that I'm clicking at the correct moments.

I mention my distant hope that I could joshingly call him a dressage donkey one day, and she replies that he already is one.  She figures he’s executing elementary dressage movement as adroitly as any equine classmate.  I am one proud auntie, trainer, and partner.

We practice this detailed exercise around and around in circles, and Gus only loses focus once or twice, upon which I walk him off the circle briefly and then return.  After close to an hour I end the lesson (with internal fanfares and confetti), but Gus refuses to exit the arena.  No wonder, given the quantity of clicks and treats he was earning, plus the limelight shed by his human spectators, plus his knowledge that some other equine will soon take his place and get all the fun.  I haul and cajole, but he plants his feet and leans back.  Finally, Sandy shoos him from the rear, and I wrestle him out the door.  He cooperates nicely once we leave the arena behind, and I strew imaginary palm leaves in his path on the way back to his stall.

55. How we doin' here?

Myriad and sublime are the blessings of retirement, not the least of which is the absence of annual “performance” evaluations.  If you’re on good terms with your boss, you both communicate well and often, making a yearly questionnaire just an empty ritual, a sham with the sole purpose of satisfying some CYA policy in the human resources department.  If you’re on bad terms with your boss, it’s still just HR balloon juice, plus it’s fraught with festering mistrust or veiled disrespect or baleful innuendo or uncomfortable pressures or all of the above.  Either way, it’s not a useful stock-taking or planning exercise.


By contrast, when it comes to animal training, I do find it edifying to look over the past year or so and meditate on our progress together.  It was early last September when I first took Gus’s lead rope in hand and we began sizing each other up.  While he’s still a little Caesar, mercurial and inscrutable, I can hazard a few then-and-now generalizations:


*  manners indoors and out:  steady improvement, to the point of near-angelic sweetness, except when paddock flies are most torturous 


*  refusing or pulling away during a session:  waned pretty steadily, returned a bit as the grass greened, and waning again lately


*  refusing or pulling away around the farm property:  waned in the winter, returned with knobs on [<—video] as the grass greened, and waning again lately, except when flies are most torturous  


*  busting out of paddock:  great improvement through the winter and spring, but backsliding lately when flies are most torturous 


*  personal hygiene:  quite tolerant of sponge-bathing [<—video]; much more cooperative for hoof-picking (especially if I remember to start with the right-front foot, proceed counter-clockwise, and finish with a treat); minimally more tolerant, or at least less explosive, about spray bottles 


*  distractability and sniff-wandering during a session:  gradual, steady improvement


* staying in his lane in hand:  still tends to veer wide, but good improvement since I adopted Sharon Wilsie’s matching steps and Alex Kurland’s coaching in [video—>] shoulder-yield and rope-handling


*  welcoming when I arrive:  started early and still going strong


*  complaining when I leave:  none early, then frequent in winter, but rarely now
 
*  tricks learned:  added pirouetting to pedestal standing; invented tilt-a-chair; added mat and pedestal as destinations for fetching, and added pompoms and other fetchable objects; extrapolated barrel rolling from beachball bopping



*  movement quality:  better energy and impulsion at the walk, especially as I match steps; easier backup (with my improved cueing — duhhh!); stiffer when moving to his left than his right, but overall limberness and fitness may be improving


Not too shabby, eh?  Most gratifying for me has been the slow but steady blossoming of our relationship, particularly the trust and comfort that’s now plain to see in his (almost always) soft eye and relaxed jaw and floppy ears.


Happy anniversary, Gus.

54. Gimme shelter

Gus’s refuge

The dog days of summer are not for donkeys.  As the humidity climbs, so do the biting flies, boiling up from the ground and swarming Gus from hoof to poll.  Ever resourceful, he’s managed to hollow out a donkey-shaped hidey-hole in the thickets in the back corner of his paddock.  It’s shady in there, and the ground is bare dirt, so it’s less buggy than the sun-soaked grassy areas.  He crams himself into it, stands very still, and waits for deliverance. 

When I arrive and whistle, he bolts from it and canters down to the gate to meet me.  His shoulders and legs are thick with flies, and he can’t bear to stand still for me to buckle his halter; once I shove it on and fling open the gate, we hurry straight into the arena.

In his past days of severe ennui, before he was getting enough work and fun, Gus routinely barged anyone who opened the paddock gate.  Barbara, Henry’s owner, often needed Sandy as a fender-offer so that she could safely extract her horse without letting Gus escape.  In recent months, she reports, he’s been much more polite.  As if he’s confident that his person will come and he’ll get his turn, he magnanimously grants Barbara and Henry enough space to leave the paddock unmolested.  But then last week he again became a flight risk:  he was so fly-frantic that he ignored her signals to stay back and tried to bowl her over bodily and plunge out the gate.  She resorted to yelling and swatting with Henry’s lead line to send Gus away, slipping Henry out and slamming the gate behind her just in time.  I'm ever so sure that Gus apologized like a contrite drunk, saying he was not himself and it was just the flies talking.

Sandy treats Gus with dab-on bug repellent that’s supposed to last for two weeks, but the swarms persist.  She’s able to spritz some insecticide on him, but like most brands of fly spray, it’s effective for mere minutes.  (Maybe these chemicals would be as effective as they advertise if we had cooler, breezier weather, or a habitat that’s less infested, or some strain of kinder, gentler bugs?)  His fly mask keeps his eyes and ears protected.  And his dapper new fly socks work well, but from the knees up his legs are scaly with masses of clustered scabs.  He also has spatterings of bug bites on his neck and body.

On the really tropical afternoons, all we can do is park him in his stall.  It’s not just dark and dry and cool; it has a box-fan bungee-corded to the rails, blowing a blessed breeze right where he stands to munch his hay.  As much as he usually hates being confined, he’s visibly relieved to be in there.  He even leaves off grazing after just a few minutes, entirely of his own volition, and practically walks himself into his stall.  After he has his dinner and I offer to take him back outside, he digs in his hooves and leans back; the only allowable destinations, he tells me, are the arena or his stall.  And so it shall be.

Between his shrubby self-made hidey-hole and his plush human-engineered stall, Gus leads quite the charmed and sheltered life.