Now that we’re expert at picking up and carrying the toy traffic cones, I bring out a rubber latticework dog ball. Like the cones, it lifts a little burst of dust when it lands after I toss it, which is enough to pique the interest of any red-blooded donkey. Almost immediately, Gus is reliably picking it up and handing it to me.
I put the ball away and drag in the kids’ basketball hoop. It’s bright-colored plastic with a cloth-string net maybe eight inches wide, and it’s set about four feet high. Gus, again reliably, begins nudging and mouthing it all over. Under this assault, it rocks and teeters, it makes ratcheting noises; nothing fazes his blithe curiosity. When his nose passes over the open part of the hoop, I click and treat. He startles and shoots me a quick look to ask “What was that for?” before resuming his explorations. Nose momentarily over hoop, click again, and this time I reach under and hand him the treat from inside the rim of the hoop. I do that just one more time, and his next move is to put his head very deliberately over the middle of that hoop and look down for that treat, which he gets promptly. And his next move is to cram his whole head deep into the hoop and wait there in sure and certain hope.
Uh-oh. That’s not the behavior I want (although even if his head got stuck, I’m sure he’d manage to extricate it, with force but without concern), but I reward his enthusiasm with a click and treat. From now on, however, no more clicks for burying his face; only hovering above the hoop gets the click. And within a minute or two, he figures it out.
Over the next few days, we keep practicing fetching and hoop-hovering separately. And now when he fetches the ball, I’m placing my hands near the hoop, so he has to deliver the ball there. Soon I’ll have my hands in the hoop, and then — no doubt much sooner than I expect — I’ll remove my hands and let him dunk the ball directly into the hoop.
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The more we play interactive games, the more Gus shows me the indefatigability of his interactive drive. One day, he cranes his neck around behind my waist and plucks at the strings of my treat apron. Another day, he suddenly brushes by me and trots off, but quickly stops and turns his head back, showing me what’s sticking out of his mouth: a mini-kleenex packet, which he’d just plucked from my chest pocket without my realizing.
With Barbara and others at the barn, I’m trying to dream up new games for him. One person thinks we should build a cage puzzle where we’d shut him in and let him shift and disengage various bars to open it. Me, I’m scouting thrift shops for an old-fashioned baby pram: he could push it around and then extract a toy donkey from inside. Probably the only game that would really challenge him is chess, but I’m too dim to teach it, and anyway he’d beat me every time, so the hell with that noise.
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