30. Change of venue

The day after the clinic, the weather is suddenly warm again, and the general vibe around the farm is lazy and noodling.  One or two people are hand-grazing their horses, and other horses are dozing in their paddocks.  

Now that the snow is gone, I can lead Gus around behind a big derelict barn where two horse-trailers are parked.  His experiences with trailering are limited to the two or three times that Sandy has switched barns, and, like his trip from his previous owners’ place, they were ugly ordeals requiring tranquilizers.  My hope is that we can walk by these trailers a jillion times, then look inside them a half-jillion times, then get his front feet into one of them another quadrillion times, and maybe even stand inside it a few elephantillion times, so that perhaps eventually he’d find it less horrible to ride in one.  Anyway, it’s a pleasant perusal of the premises and good lead-line practice for us both.

At one point we find a fallen pine branch and he veers over to chew on its long, dark-green needles.  ??!?  Donkeys don’t eat turpentine, I tell him, and we move along.


Later, after I give him a few minutes of nibbling teensy green sprigs under the dead turf, I ask him to walk again and he accedes.  Until.  Suddenly he cranks his head and pulls to run away from me.  I dig in my feet and shout “Nope!” in exactly the same tone that his neck tends to use when he resists me.  Exerting equal and opposite force, we’re statues at an impasse for a few seconds (which feel like minutes), before he relents and moves toward me, and we walk along as if nothing had happened.  These stationary tantrums are becoming rarer and these surrenders commoner, both of which I'm glad of.

Next I bring Gus to an outdoor ring that has at one end a short piece of wooden bridge (fetchingly, if inexplicably, painted lavender) and a tall PVC-pipe arch with strips of plastic tarp hanging from its cross-beam and blowing in the wind.  He hasn’t been in this area for months, and some horses have used it as an overnight paddock, so every inch is deeply fascinating.

I use his explorations for more lead-line practice.  I have to stop frequently to let him sniff the ground and ogle the surroundings, but a “This way, sir, your table is waiting” gesture almost always gets him started walking again.  We give the flapping tarp strips a wide berth — too much sensory stimulation already without adding that weirdness.  But the first time we approach the bridge, he eagerly addresses it.  He pops his front feet onto it and then rocks back down; he gets a click and treat.  Next time around, we stop next to the car-wash-like strips and I hold the end of one out toward him; he touches it gamely and gets a click and treat.  He walks the length of the bridge with all four feet and gets another click and treat.  This jazzes his brain and legs enough that he wants to trot, so we do that along one side of the ring.

We piddle around like this for awhile longer, walking and stopping and turning, and he’s a champ.  It’s a welcome change for us to be doing nothing — which, after all, is sometimes the very best kind of teamwork.