11. Chairmanship

Just for grins, I take a cheapo molded-plastic chair and set it in the middle of the arena, step back, and do nothing.  Gus wastes no time sniffing, nudging, and tasting it.  He bites it, knocking it sideways, and tries to hand it to me.  Enterprising, but potentially destructive, so we practice “leave it,” with a click when he turns his face away from it.  Our prohibition on teeth gets expanded to forelimbs when he paws at the toppled chair and gets his foot caught between its arm and seat.  Yikes!  Luckily he lets me lift his foot and winkle the chair off.  I’m repeating slow, whispery whoas, but it’s only to calm myself; he’s unperturbed.  

Like Godzilla, Gus has never seen an edifice or object that he doesn’t want to knock down, and within a few seconds he bowls the chair over onto its back.  I figure a new trick can be tipping it back upright.  I start by setting the chair on its arms, with the top edge of the backrest facing Gus.  During his freestyle nosings, the instant he slips his snout under the edge of the backrest and nudges upward, that’s when I click.  Over the course of three or four sessions, he’s consistently lifting the chair-back, raising it higher, and resting it on his nose for a second or two.  Next session, he understands the hold-it-on-nose concept so well that he takes it further by walking one or two paces forward with it balanced on his nose. This pushes the chair far enough for it to tip upright onto its feet.  Big click-fest!  As with the cone-retrieving, Gus soars ahead and gets the trick down pat in mere minutes.  

Trying to keep one step ahead of him, now I set the chair on its side or its back, and Gus methodically rolls it and flips it. It’s a donkey Rubik’s Cube.  When he can’t get it to settle with the backrest available head-on, he’s learning to lift it from a corner, where it rocks and twirls on just one foot and he has to maneuver his nearly prehensile upper lip to keep it under control.  I’m stunned to realize that this donkey isn’t learning what specific movements to make, but what the goal is.  He understands that the chair should end by being upright, and that his task is to manipulate it in whatever ways he finds necessary to place it there.  He’s exercising deliberation and creativity.  That’s a scary intelligence to be playing with. Thank God he lacks opposable thumbs.