1. Augustus Caesar on the hoof

Gus, his imperial majesty

“Gus is loose!”  The donkey is being a consummate ass, trotting down the barn aisle, checking each stall for horse treats or human treats to pillage.  For the umpteenth time, he has worked his way around his pasture fence until he found a loose or weak spot, then craned his thick neck between the boards, pushed up with the back of his head until the board broke free, and squeezed under or through.  His pasturemates, being horses, are too big to fit, and are also more content with their lot in life; they barely look up from grazing to witness his escape.

Buckets and wheelbarrows are set down and chores put on hold while a roundup is organized.  Where did he go?  Grab his halter!  Who has some treats?  Everybody, hoofed and human, knows the routine: feed him a little grain or hay pellets or horse cookies while strapping a halter onto his head, and hope to lead him into an unbreached paddock or lock him in his stall.  Then re-repair the goddamn fence board.

He’s so friendly and so eager for interaction that he’ll take the goodies and allow himself to be haltered.  His shoulder about waist-high to a human, his fuzzy face just about level with ours, his ludicrously long ears pricked forward or swinging hither and fro, he walks along amenably.  Until.  Until at some unpredictable point, for no discernible cause, he’ll suddenly turn his head hard, stretching the lead rope flat across his bowed neck, and march off on a stiff tangent.  Weighing in at probably 800 pounds, and with a stubborn streak a mile wide, Gus in this gear is unstoppable by mere mortals.  The only solution is to drop the lead rope and let him stomp away.  Then the game begins again, with the treats and the leading and the hoping.  Sometimes it’s more waiting and watching, since he never seems to get into danger.  He’s just not ready to be confined at this particular moment.  Eventually he consents to be walked toward his barn, into his barn, over his stall threshold, and SLAM! the door is shut.  As people return to their chores and their horses, a bagpipe bellows begins faintly huffing, then some croaks and groans ensue, and finally a loud, full-bodied, multisyllabic, honking hee-haw thunders across the farm.

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Gus the gelding donkey had been acquired by a couple in upstate New York who later put him on the market, free to a good home, when he was just a few years old.  A longtime horse trainer and barn manager in Saratoga Springs, NY, Sandy A. inquired about him.   She had long been using click-and-treat training with her horses and found it amazingly effective and fun.  Knowing how well it works with zoo animals, performing dolphins, dogs and cats, even goldfish, she was game to try it with a donkey.

To explain his availability, the owners said they’d hoped to place him in a Christmas nativity scene at their church, but he refused to get into the transport trailer.  “Seriously?!  You wanted a sensitive living creature for a cardboard cutout?  And now he’s being evicted from his home?” Sandy refrained from saying.  She tranquilized him, and she and three friends each took a leg to hoist him into her trailer so he could join her equine charges at a large, lovely farm on the edge of Saratoga.  He arrived staggering drunkenly and drenched with flop-sweat, little realizing he’d fetched up in a far, far better place.

Sandy clicker-trained Gus extensively, teaching him to tolerate the farrier (after he bashed her and him against the wall in his panic at being restrained and manipulated), to walk and halt and turn politely alongside her, and to touch any object with his nose.  He especially loved to step his front feet onto a large pedestal (a tractor tire laid flat and topped with a thick circle of plywood) and stand there tall and regal. She also long-lined him and then put him in harness to pull a little cart.  

In the past couple of years, though, Sandy took on some new horses, and her few available hours at the barn shifted more to them and less to Gus.  Hence his ennui and antsiness; after a couple of hours in a paddock, he just couldn’t contain himself, and neither could the paddock fences.  

I’d visited Gus a few times, just to say hi and scritch his forehead, over the past 10 years, as my friend and colleague Barbara M. always boarded her horses with Sandy.  For many years, I’d borrowed horses and taken dressage lessons, until my bad back got too bad for all the core-muscle flexion required in the saddle.

I was sorry to stop riding, and I kept pining for it — and for the entire equine ambience.  First, that intoxicating, delicious fragrance: cured hay and sweetened grains, both raw and in the barely digested form of horse manure, blended with fresh wood shavings, old leather, and the umami of horse sweat.  Then the unhurried pace set by large grazing animals and by the physical labor of stall mucking or hay stacking or saddling up: everything takes as long as it takes, and that’s . . . ju-u-ust . . . fi-i-i-i-ine.  Plus the quiet, broken only by snuffling horse nostrils, fluttering barn birds, wind, and maybe a squeaky wheelbarrow trundling back from the manure pile.  Nothing so thoroughly quells the technological and verbal clatter of the “real” world.  Plans, worries, the noise of news — they all evanesce in the serene, languidly unfolding Now of a stable full of horses.

Tales of Gus’s escapades always intrigued and tickled me.  He’s irresistibly cute, with rounded facial features, a cushion of thick fuzz on his forehead, and the classic donkey markings of a dark body with white belly, white muzzle, and white around his eyes.  He looks like a baby musk ox crossed with a sock monkey.  I sympathized with the exasperation of his keepers, but also with the burden of his boredom.  A few times, when someone brought a horse into the arena for training, Gus broke out of his paddock and ran to the arena gate, where he watched the horse and human, his face essentially pressed to the window of the candy store.  Or he’d squeeze under the gate and sidle up to the human — “Can I come to school too?”  When shooed away, he’d yield ground but remain in the arena, nosing around the edges in hopes that the teacher might call on him.  He’s not just a hooligan: he’s depraved on account-a he’s deprived.

In September of 2018, I retired from my job and promptly offered to give Gus some occasional clicker-training, to which Sandy gratefully and generously agreed.  I’ve clicker-trained all my dogs, dabbled in it with a horse or two, and watched a lot of it with my horse-owning friends; now I’d give it a whirl with a new species.  

A zedonk/zonkey (I am not making this up)

And Gus is a very new species.  I soon learned that donkeys are remarkably less horselike than they appear.  They have 62 chromosomes, to a horse’s 64. Their ribs and backs are  a bit different, their legs are shorter, and their heads are heavier.  Crucially, donkeys aren’t as herd-oriented as horses, so they’re more independent and outgoing; they’re valiant and vicious guard animals who’ve been known to kill coyotes and cougars.  Some say donkeys are closely related to zebras, and some zookeepers say the least tameable of all their animals are zebras.  OK, then, Gus ain’t no Dobbin.