40. Caged

It’s another daylong seminar with clicker-training expert Alex Kurland, and Gus is not happy waiting his turn.  He’s stuck in his stall, right around the corner from the arena where others are having fun without him.  And he's obsessing about his durance vile.

Along with hay, we’ve given him a treat-dispensing toy similar to a Bustercube for dogs. His is actually a keg-style beverage cooler from which the spigot has been removed; we fill it with hay-stretcher pellets, and he uses his nose to roll it around, making the treats fall out sporadically from the small hole where the spigot was.  He rolls it fast, backandforth-backandforth-backandforth, and eats a few treats, but then he abandons it, the better to scold us by blasting his bagpipes in a tantrum of braying.  Listen here:

After a few of these concerts, we decide to work with him next.  He gladly shoves his face into the halter and is pleased to see the little audience waiting for him.  He only gets a brief session of lead-line walking and mat-standing, with me and then with Alex, but it’s enough.  As I take him out to his paddock, I apologize to him for having no time to allow for grazing, and he only tries a few evasive maneuvers before succumbing and walking into his outdoor jailyard.

The next day, I return to give him a lot more arena fun and plenty of grazing time.

39. VIDEO: Identity crisis?

A hot, humid day and the still-furry Gus has been braising in his pasture, where the trees aren’t yet leafed out enough to cast much shade.  He’s happy to accompany me into the dim, cool arena.

We practice our walking in unison, and he gets into the groove nicely.  I use my maitre d' gestures (I still feel a tad ridiculous making them, but I can’t argue with the results) to cue our turns, and soon we're a pair.  The more our footfalls sync up, the more his neck relaxes and his head sways (and his lower lip dangles) as he plods along rhythmically.  

Next he gamely fetches the traffic cone and brings it the whole width of the arena to place it in my hand; he also carries it onto the pedestal with brio.  We walk from wooden mat to wooden mat, where he practices standing, square and firm and patient, until I invite him to move on.  When the treats are gone, he comes compliantly into his stall for grooming and hoof-picking.  He’s as sweet as sugar.

Now I rig up his over-and-under lead rope and take him out for some grazing around the paths and paddock edges.  He bulls his way forward more than I appreciate, but I manage to insist that he graze only where I want him to.  For 20 minutes, he tears up and sucks in grass like a high-powered Electrolux.  

When I ask him to come away, of course he refuses, and we engage in the customary tugs of war and sumo matches.  But as it did last time, the cinching action of the lead rope around his halter now gives me a fighting chance.  When I let out too much rope and he pulls to run away, that seems to give me more leverage, rather than less: his muzzle gets squeezed harder as the distance between us widens.  When I keep the rope short — for frog-marching him forward — and he counters by plowing into me bodily, a yank or two pinches his nose enough to make him stop.  He can drag and barge and twist and shove, but as long as I struggle back, he can’t wrest the rope out of my hand

Today, for the first time ever, he tries repeatedly but doesn’t escape even once.  His whole world-view may be shaken and reeling.  He might lose his marbles.  He might spiral into donkey depression.  He might need relationship counseling.

Or probably not.  He’s almost theatrically indignant as we make our ugly way back to his paddock.  But he seems unbowed as I remove his halter and scratch his face where the straps were.  He even deigns to play a little I-step-you-step with me, and I give him a final treat and pat-pat as I leave.

38. Ass(assin)

My sister, a dog person with a fondness for donkeys, sent me a link to a very revealing video [<--click link] (big thanks go to the shooter and poster).  The Internet has tales and visuals of donkeys and mules going postal on various predators, none of which I care to witness, thanks anyway.  But this video sublimates the same sort of brutality by showing it on a doll — in this case, a jolly-ball. In his playing, the donkey displays all of his species’ combat techniques, from kneeling and crushing, to biting and shaking, to kicking and boxing.  The only reason his aggression is also adorable is because his victim is a toy and no actual animals were harmed in the making of this video.

Sandy, who owns Gus, wonders if this donkey is unneutered and therefore fueled by an abundance of testosterone.  In his gelded middle age, Gus still enjoys a bit of hooliganism with a jolly-ball, even bopping his pasturemates with it in order to egg them into retaliatory play, but I don't think he’s got the killer instinct of the donkey in this video.  Maybe in his studly youth, Gus would have addressed a jolly-ball with equal ferocity?  If so, I think I’m glad those days are behind him.

37. Push-me-pull-you

Four blog-following friends come to the barn for a donkey-trick demo.  Grateful for the company, Gus eats up their pat-pats and greetings with a spoon, and in return he gives them spoonfuls of cuteness and charm.  We walk around the arena, retrieve a traffic cone, tilt a chair upright, bop the beachball . . .  At one point, during his pirouettes on the pedestal, he pointedly looks over at the guests to make sure his adoring fans are sufficiently adoring him.

After this love fest, I can tell that Gus is distracted, gazing out the arena doors at horses in the pastures.  Eating grass.  Must.  Eat.  Grass.  So I cut our session short and we adjourn to the driveway edges for some grazing.  Before we leave the arena, though, I rig his lead rope for extra control, threading it through both sides of his halter, so that a pull on the rope will tighten it around his whole muzzle, exerting pressure over his nose and under his chin.  Heh, heh, I chortle to myself: look at me, outsmarting this ornery ass. 

And the plan works when he tries to trundle on down the driveway and I’m able to haul him back in the other direction.  Now I can convince him to graze where I want him to graze.  I let him loiter around the geldings’ paddock; they oblige by congregating at the fence to touch noses with him, and then everybody grazes, sharing a mood of sunshiny togetherness.  For awhile, Gus leaves off grazing and just stands and watches the geldings — more togetherness.  After 20 minutes of his alternately chowing down and casually communing with his posse, I propose that we move along.
 
Now the muzzle-snare rope system gets a thorough field-testing.  Gus cranks his neck and tries to march away, but I resist, and he grudgingly relents.  By way of thanks, I exhale and whisper sweet nothings and scratch his withers.  He ducks his head and tries to squeeze under (or simply break) a fence board in order to enter the geldings’ paddock.  I’m able to pull him off, delivering a sharp yank with the rope to indicate my displeasure.  When I try to walk on again, he drags me right back and half under the fence, but again I manage to haul him away.  Clearly the wraparound lead line is leveling the playing field for us. 

Right about here is where a headstrong horse would surrender.  But Gus ain’t no horse.  Gus escalates.  I can almost see his brain make the decision to grit his teeth and suffer the discomfort, and a half-second later he barges into me, pulls past, and overpowers my grip on the rope.  Once again, sheer will and weight simply trump all modes of human opposition.

He canters away, but just as he tries again to scoot under the fence, I wave my spare lead line and yell, chasing him away.  I begin plotting ways of herding him into a barn, any barn, in hopes of shutting him into a stall, any stall.  (Fifty years ago, we might let Gus have the run of the farm, which is really all he desires.  But these days the road is full of cars and trucks, and the humans have day jobs off site.  It’s not a safe world for independent donkeys.)  Recognizing the yells and curses that Gus so universally inspires, Sandy comes to my aid.  I lead him, with grim determination and the rope held short, while she shoos him from behind.  Outnumbered and outflanked, he walks up the path and into his paddock.

There I thank him with a handful of apple cubes, and I talk to him nicely as I remove his halter.  But he’s holding a grudge: in no uncertain terms, he turns his back on me and stalks away.

36. Head ’em up!

For grass, Gus even misbehaves with Sandy.  The other day, he pulled away from her a few times, but she didn’t just curse and walk after him.  She cursed and chased him.  She yelled and waved her arms and ran at him, so that he couldn’t stop to graze — he got no yummy reward for his escapes.  Eventually, he galloped right into his paddock and up to the back fence, watching and panting as the gate was slammed shut.  I like the sound of that.

Today we work in the outdoor arena — walking over the bridge and through the tarp strips, standing on the wooden mat, walking in zigzags as I indicate each direction change with my arms in maitre d’ pose — but even during this work, Gus tries to pull away a couple of times, drawn by the grass beckoning just outside the arena fence.  I get him to comply nicely, if lazily, with a few exercises, and then I take him grazing. But first I snap on his heavy, long lead rope and tuck his smaller, lighter one into my pocket.

After 30 minutes of blissful grazing (his busy mouth doesn't miss a beat as I lift his feet to pick his hooves), I decide it’s time to quit.  He’s pretty sated, so he accedes until we near his paddock gate.  He tries to pull away, but I yank back in time to dissuade him.  He curls his neck and barges into me, trying to knock me over backward, but I dance and dodge.  And now he resorts to sheer force, trotting away too hard and too fast for me to resist.  I whap his shoulder with a handful of looped rope, I curse him loudly, and he departs.  (By the way, now, for the first time ever, Gus poops in my presence.  Is he so revved up that his sphincters loosen?  Has all that fresh grass stimulated peristalsis?  Is it a more deliberate strategy to jettison extra ballast while making a run for it?)

But before he can stop and lower his head to graze, I unfurl the smaller lead line, wave it around my head, and run toward him, bellowing imprecations like a sailor.

He startles and scoots down a lane between two paddocks, behind which he runs into deep, soft mud.  Mired to his knees, he makes a U-turn.  I step aside to let him by (and to see if he’ll surrender as he draws near me), but he gallops faster past me and zooms down the driveway.  I stop chasing, and Gus stops running in order to greet the geldings through their fence.  I tuck the whippy lead line behind my back and jog in a big arc to approach him from the side so that I can chase him back up the driveway and away from the street.

But he lets me take up his lead rope, and he walks with me toward the barns. (He's stuffed with so many carrot and apple cubes from our training, topped by so much rich grass, that he's practically waddling.)  He offers a couple of desultory tugs to veer away from me, but I keep inviting him forward with one arm and, with the other arm, swinging the extra rope behind me to tickle his hindquarters.  Knowing his paddock gate is latched, since his pasturemate Henry is inside, and knowing I can't trust Gus to stay put while I unlatch the gate, I suggest we walk to his stall instead.  He knows a few things too, and one of them is that dinnertime is nigh, so he marches into his stall without demur.  (Gus is such an easy keeper that his dinner is a very scant fistful of grain; Sandy throws it into his bucket hard so it’ll sound like a larger amount.  As all his bigger neighbors get grain at the same time, Gus seems to anticipate and relish his token crumbs as much as they do their bucketsful.)

Lesson learned by Gus:  running away will no longer yield extra grazing, just extra running. Lesson learned by me:  when Gus gives me hell, I can give him some hell of my own.  

35. VIDEO: Why, you . . . I oughta . . .

As the weather has warmed, Gus’s agreeability has cooled.  These days his only interest is in cropping the fresh green grass, all the time, no matter what.  Games and treats and walking together and ear scrubs?  Meh, he says; outta my way, I’m going grazing.

Today in the indoor arena, he pretty much blows me off whenever possible.  As he lowers his head to pick up a cone or a ball, he catches a whiff of something far more interesting and runs his nose over every millimeter of arena dirt in the general vicinity.  

Even when we walk along together, with lots of direction changes to keep his interest, I lose his interest.  He plods slowly, rubbernecking and air-scenting rather than focusing on me.  We walk from wooden mat to wooden mat, and at least he willingly keeps his nose off the ground.  But he also willingly quits when it’s time to end our session.

I bring him out of the arena, and he peremptorily cranks his neck and barges away from me, to the very patch of grass I’d thought of leading him to.  Little Caesar.  I brush the mud off his neck and legs while he grazes, but he’s so greedily ripping into the grass that he can’t be bothered to lift a foot for me to pick out his hooves.  Ingrate.  I soothe my savage breast by watching how the breeze riffles his long fur like a Nebraska wheat field.

After 20 gluttonous minutes, I suggest we repair to his paddock, but he pulls away again and trots off, taking his pissy attitude with him.  Over the next 20 minutes, he gets away from me five (5) more times.  Each time I regain his lead rope, he walks along with me for a brief distance, but then YANK! and he saunters onto the barn owner’s forbidden lawn, or runs along the geldings’ paddock fence to lure them over to graze alongside him, or trots down the driveway closer and closer to the gate at the busy, 45-mph road.  I don’t want Gus hit by a truck, but I want very much to kick his sassy ass.  Trip to the moon: Pow! Zoom!! 

Truth is, I know from disappointing experience that resistance is futile.  I can punish him with a really hard, two-handed jerk on his lead line, and he’ll act chastised and demure for about 30 seconds.  But after that, I’ve got no bigger guns in my arsenal, and I haven’t disarmed his own battery of weight, muscle, and cussedness.  I’ve shot my wad, and he knows it.

I sit crosslegged in the driveway, hoping his curiosity will draw him toward me.  But Barbara reminds me that I need to follow and stay near him in case a car arrives and opens the gate.  Fine, I’ll stand there impotently, while he stands there imperiously and fills his idiot belly.  A car does enter, and I nudge him off to the edge of the driveway.  He’s so grass-crazed that he barely notices.

Eventually, I manage to redirect his escapades closer to the barns.  I get him to walk into the barn that isn’t where his stall is, and I bung him into an available stall, which happens to belong to a spectacular, 17-hand thoroughbred who’s out in the pasture for now.  Sated and exercised and triumphant, Gus now dozes contentedly, as if dreaming sweet delusions of thoroughbred grandeur.  The incongruity of that majestic thoroughbred’s nametag next to Gus’s lowly donkey-snout does make me laugh.

I still want to punch his lights out.  Which would only fracture my knuckles.  Damn donkey wins every time.