54. Gimme shelter

Gus’s refuge

The dog days of summer are not for donkeys.  As the humidity climbs, so do the biting flies, boiling up from the ground and swarming Gus from hoof to poll.  Ever resourceful, he’s managed to hollow out a donkey-shaped hidey-hole in the thickets in the back corner of his paddock.  It’s shady in there, and the ground is bare dirt, so it’s less buggy than the sun-soaked grassy areas.  He crams himself into it, stands very still, and waits for deliverance. 

When I arrive and whistle, he bolts from it and canters down to the gate to meet me.  His shoulders and legs are thick with flies, and he can’t bear to stand still for me to buckle his halter; once I shove it on and fling open the gate, we hurry straight into the arena.

In his past days of severe ennui, before he was getting enough work and fun, Gus routinely barged anyone who opened the paddock gate.  Barbara, Henry’s owner, often needed Sandy as a fender-offer so that she could safely extract her horse without letting Gus escape.  In recent months, she reports, he’s been much more polite.  As if he’s confident that his person will come and he’ll get his turn, he magnanimously grants Barbara and Henry enough space to leave the paddock unmolested.  But then last week he again became a flight risk:  he was so fly-frantic that he ignored her signals to stay back and tried to bowl her over bodily and plunge out the gate.  She resorted to yelling and swatting with Henry’s lead line to send Gus away, slipping Henry out and slamming the gate behind her just in time.  I'm ever so sure that Gus apologized like a contrite drunk, saying he was not himself and it was just the flies talking.

Sandy treats Gus with dab-on bug repellent that’s supposed to last for two weeks, but the swarms persist.  She’s able to spritz some insecticide on him, but like most brands of fly spray, it’s effective for mere minutes.  (Maybe these chemicals would be as effective as they advertise if we had cooler, breezier weather, or a habitat that’s less infested, or some strain of kinder, gentler bugs?)  His fly mask keeps his eyes and ears protected.  And his dapper new fly socks work well, but from the knees up his legs are scaly with masses of clustered scabs.  He also has spatterings of bug bites on his neck and body.

On the really tropical afternoons, all we can do is park him in his stall.  It’s not just dark and dry and cool; it has a box-fan bungee-corded to the rails, blowing a blessed breeze right where he stands to munch his hay.  As much as he usually hates being confined, he’s visibly relieved to be in there.  He even leaves off grazing after just a few minutes, entirely of his own volition, and practically walks himself into his stall.  After he has his dinner and I offer to take him back outside, he digs in his hooves and leans back; the only allowable destinations, he tells me, are the arena or his stall.  And so it shall be.

Between his shrubby self-made hidey-hole and his plush human-engineered stall, Gus leads quite the charmed and sheltered life.

53. VIDEO: Bath time

With biting flies trying to eat Gus alive, he has several patches of tiny scabs on him.  We rub them with Swat, a wound salve that contains insect repellents (along with hot-pink dye, persumably to show humans which areas they’ve already smeared), but Swat’s soothing properties seem less powerful than its dirt-attractant properties.  Gus could really use a bath.
 

In the past, Sandy says, he’s thrown tantrums to avoid being bathed.  So I embark on a program of desensitizing, starting with a small wad of paper towel and an inch of water in a little tray.  I dip my hand and let him taste the water on my fingers.  Now I dip the paper towel and let him touch that, and I click and treat.  I touch his shoulder with the soaked but wrung-out paper, and he doesn’t react, so I click and treat.   I wipe his flank, and his leg, and his face, and I click and treat each time.  Easy peasy.  The next day I use a small bucket and sponge, and the same slow and clickery approach.

And on the third time I use a large sponge and lots of water.  [Full video here; installments below.  As Gus touches the sponge, I squeeze it, sending water splashing into the bucket.  He points both ears hard forward, fixing the whole setup with a suspicious eye, but he doesn’t budge.  Click!  As I wipe the wet sponge on his shoulder and belly and legs, he freezes but doesn’t flinch, earning more clicks. 

When he gets fed up and contemplates an exit, I walk him around a bit.  And I give him a break (following the advice of “horse speak” author Sharon Wilsie) by lowering my head and heaving a big sigh, and he lowers his head with me.  When I sponge the center of his back, he bends his hind legs to drop and arch his back, but he doesn’t budge his feet, so he gets more clicks.  I sponge his chest and front legs, letting water drip down around his hooves.  I wipe his ears and face, even the insides of his thighs, where the cooling seems especially welcome.

All in all, we spend about 20 minutes suffering the wiping and splashing, and offering the touching and standing quietly.  He never gets 100% comfortable with the wet sponge, but it’s abundantly evident that clicks and treats make the medicine go dow-own in a most delightful way. 

52. Gus gets a booboo

I’m commiserating just a bit with the freaks among us who don’t love summer.  Myself, I loathe winter and adore summer — except for the biting flies.  They’re so vicious and voracious in the paddocks lately that I find myself actually looking forward to colder weather.

While the bugs are equal-opportunity tormenters of the horses, they single out Gus for extra persecution.  Sandy warned me about this:  put him next to any horse in any field, and Gus will always have double or triple the number of flies swarming him.  Sure enough, when I take him out for grazing, he’s covered in flies from the knees down, he never stops swishing his useless little cow-tail, and he shivers his back and belly skin almost continuously.  Sandy also warned me that he won’t tolerate being spritzed with bug repellent.  So nowadays, since he’s mostly shedded down to his sleek summer coat, I occupy myself while he grazes not by scrubbing off his loose hair but by swinging the end of the lead-rope around his ankles to shoo off the flies.  Which sometimes just cling harder (probably flipping me the bird with a spare claw) as the rope swipes over their backs.  And which always reconvene one nanosecond after the rope swings away.

Within in a day of gnats arriving on the farm, Gus’s ears were filled with little scabs.  From that day forward, he has to wear a fly-mask — a donkey-tailored version with risibly long ear pockets — whenever he’s out in his paddock during the day.  He kinda hates the fly-mask.  Its mesh is stiff enough to stand off his face a bit so he can blink freely, but it makes his head hot and itchy.  The minute I remove it, he tries to rub his forehead against me; I’m teaching him to stop barging into my chest and to let me scratch his face with my hand.  At least it keeps the gnats away.

The huge green-headed horse flies wait for really hot weather, but  the leg-biting stable flies have already joined their gnatty accomplices in livestock torture, and Gus’s ankles are as scabby as his ears were.  We apply little mesh fly-socks, but they tend to bunch up and scrunch down as he strolls the pasture.  One heavy, humid day, I whistle to him and he runs back and forth near the gate until I get there. 

He’s swarming with little flies.  He can barely stand for haltering (though treats help, of course), and he trots down the path into the arena. I remove his fly-gear and start leading him around, but he’s reluctant to walk, and I notice that he’s licking his lips nonstop.  He occasionally rubs his face on his front leg or reaches around to his flank to bite at a fly (several followed him from his paddock), but mostly he just stands there dully, licking and licking.  I feed him a treat, but once he’s swallowed it he continues pointlessly licking his chops.  If he were a dog, this would signal nausea or poisoning, but equids can’t vomit, and they’re prone to colic and gastric torsion that can be fatal.  I pull Sandy away from her chores to check on him.  I’d looked him over a bit and noticed nothing, but she quickly finds a chafed sore on his front ankle.  And when she touches it, he lowers his head and licks it.  Aha . . .

I’d have pegged Gus as a tough customer, but this reveals that he’s no stoic.  His Very Bad Booboo is debilitating, shutting down all bodily operations except for licking obsessively in an effort to ease the ouch.  The ever-resourceful Sandy dabs old-fashioned diaper-rash cream on the raw spot, and after he pulls his foot away a couple of times, he’s visibly soothed.  And he stops licking.  And we have a nice session of walking and cone-fetching and pirouetting.  He even pushes over a steel 50-gallon drum, and I ask him to bop it like a (much heavier) beachball. 

To ensure that the barrel rolls straight ahead, I click and treat only for applying his snout to its center section, and he sends it up and down the arena with gusto.

Sandy and I resolve to get  some new and softer fly-socks for Gus, but we can’t use them anyway until his booboo is finished healing.  My, the trials and tribs of a donkey living on Easy Street . . .

51. Life, death, and donkey chi

Gus may be helping me cheat death.

One year ago, I finished a long course of treatment for a very bad and scary kind of cancer.  A cancer with a truly crappy rate of five-year survival.  Ovarian cancer.  When it was finally correctly diagnosed, in January of 2018, it was far advanced, as is typical with ovarian.  But since I was otherwise very healthy and just 60 years old, I agreed to aggressive treatment recommended by Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.  Through a Sloan-collaborating specialist in Albany, I underwent once-a-week chemotherapy in January, February, and March; then I had major abdominal surgery at Sloan-Kettering’s hospital in April; and I followed up with more chemo, ending in July.

The only animal in my life during this time was Reggie, my big, sweet browndog.  As for humans, I had barely shared my diagnosis with a couple of friends, and instantly several more jumped up, teamed up, and wrapped me up in a support network whose proportions and generosity blew my mind.  They eagerly brought meals, chipped in to hire a dog-walker, drove me near and far, took notes during doctor visits, fetched groceries, vacuumed my house, and much more.  One of them was Barbara the horse owner.  I only rarely visited the barn back then, but she regularly regaled me with horse and donkey news.  And somehow she and I conceived a plan to create a fertility goddess to infuse my house with animal energy and healing vibes. 

(I'm an exclusively left-brained realist [dust and tumbleweeds fill the right half of my skull], so I believe in the supernatural and spiritual not one whit. Nevertheless, it’s a gas to play along with Earth Goddess mythology [the only reasonable religion], if merely as a form of art therapy [which I also find bogus] or of just plain positive thinking.)

Using chicken wire and papier-mache, we gradually built the goddess.  I devoted my kitchen table to her, and I worked on her a lot during my few good days between chemo infusions, and while I was convalescing from surgery.  Barbara guided and fashioned several of the goddess’s key features, such as brow ridge, boobs, and gesturing arms.  She provided yards of lovely tea-dyed muslin and helped apply the final muslin-mache outer surface.  And she helped me shop for ridiculous amounts of ridiculous toy flora and fauna to bedeck and festoon the finished goddess.

The construction progress seemed to mirror my medical progress.  I responded remarkably well to the first round of chemo, and our chicken wire was shaping up delightfully well.  I only needed about a quarter as much surgery as expected, while two layers of papier-mache was refining her generative voluptuosity.  After followup chemo, my originally sky-high cancer-antigen markers sank far below the normal, no-cancer threshold, just as the goddess was sprouting flora and fauna galore, from silk roses and grape vines to toy birds and fish and mammals.  Clearly, I couldn’t help but get healthy in her presence.

I was doing so well that I probably didn’t need to add Gus to my animal-energy familiars.  Still, I’m delighted that I did.  Statistically, ovarian cancer insists on recurring, but if anything can keep mine at bay, it’ll be Gus and the goddess.  That double-G cocktail has worked throughout this first year.  In the fall, I decorated the goddess with red and yellow leaves and acorns and gourds while Gus and I came to know and like each other; in winter, Herself sported a Christmas-lighted fake-ivy headdress and fragrant pine boughs while Gus and I played goofy games to stay warm; and now She's hosting real and artificial flowers and ferns as Gus and I relish the green, grassy outdoors together.

50. Quadruped cotillion

Alex teaches us a dressage exercise that relies on what she calls our “minuet hand” — that’s the hand nearest the horse as you walk alongside it.  When you pivot a bit toward the horse to use both hands on the rope or rein, your formerly outside hand reaches forward to become the front, guiding hand nearest the halter or bridle, while your erstwhile inside hand swings behind a bit, to operate at the horse’s withers or shoulder or belly.  That rear hand is like the inviting hand offered by a periwigged courtier to his brocaded consort as they promenade in a Viennese minuet.  It's also like the hand placed behind a dance partner:  assisting the other hand and the feet, it helps to fine-tune the dance movement.

Alex's idea with this exercise is to prepare the horse for lateral movements by encouraging it to yield or lift its shoulder a bit during a turn.  The minuet hand is placed on the horse’s shoulder to help send that shoulder away onto an arc, or at least to keep it from falling inward.  Her method is to slide one's front hand up the rope toward the halter clasp while sliding the back hand down the rope to the shoulder, to create a two-point cue for the horse.  To start, she clicks and treats after just one or two steps, the instant its shoulder even begins to yield.

With an already flexible horse, it takes only the subtlest touch.  With a thickly built young Lipizzaner, Alex postpones the exercise altogether and works instead on simply teaching him to lift one shoulder while stationary.  She’s so minutely observant and her clicks are so well timed that she begins by pressing lightly with one finger on the front of the shoulder and rewarding as the muscle invisibly twitches or flexes.  A minute’s worth of repeating the finger cue, and the horse is consistently lifting his hoof a tiny bit each time.  A minute more, and he’s holding his foot in the air long enough for Alex to move her hand down and cup his knee for an instant before she clicks.  A minute after that, he’s raising his leg reliably so that she can cup his knee in one hand and his hoof in the other.  (This horse is fine with having his hooves picked, but here’s a clear demonstration of how easy it can be for a trainer or farrier to teach foot-lifting if a horse needs it.)  For this Lipizzaner, after he learns that he can unweight his shoulders, he’ll benefit from the yielding and turning lesson.

In our lesson, we each practice the rope-handling, which is harder than Alex makes it look.  She coaches us, and I think I pretty much get it:  the timing of sliding my two hands apart, turning my own body a bit, helping the horse’s shoulder move outward as his head moves inward to form an arc, etc., etc.  When I try it on Gus, though, I have to reduce the distance between my hands, since his neck and body are so short.  I still make a wide slide-apart move so that he sees and feels it, but then I bring my back hand forward again, leaving a droop in the rope, to touch his shoulder.

A few days later, I'm still fumbling a lot, but Gus definitely digs this exercise.  Part of his joy is the wooden mat used as a home base in the center of a circle of miniature traffic cones.  We walk out around a cone or two to execute a shoulder-give, and then arc back in to return to the mat.  He adores the mat.  There we practice what Alex calls “the grownups are talking,” which simply asks the horse to stand patiently and keep his face out of the human’s way, with clicks and treats provided every one second, then every couple of seconds, to build duration.  Sandy had already taught this to Gus, but reminders are always useful.  The classic cue is to fold one’s hands at one’s waist, and when Gus sees me do that he immediately faces straight ahead and stands still.  Soon I invite him (with my empty maitre d’ hand ahead of him) to walk off the mat, and then I ask him (with my rope-holding minuet hand at his shoulder and my formerly-maitre-d'-but-now-clasp-holding hand near his halter) to walk in an arc.  Wait, do I pat my head and rub my belly, or rub my head and pat my belly?

49. Donkey dander

Can it be?  I’m allergic to Gus??

Pollen washed ashore in a rain puddle

Living in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and even the southern tier of New York State, I never had hay fever.  But as soon as I moved up to Saratoga Springs, I joined the ranks of spring sufferers.  After a couple of sneezy, snotty Mays capped by Memorial Day bronchitis attacks, I realized that trees and grasses and other plants all share a very short growing season up here.  In my particular neighborhood some dunderhead had long ago squeezed a huge blue spruce tree between my garage and the next-door house, and every spring the pollen billowed from it by the bushelful.  I had the spruce removed, but plenty of other conifers still yellow the air (and sidewalks and windshields) with their pollen.

It was no surprise this spring that I developed itchy eyes and a drippy nose and a scratchy throat.  But come June, instead of fading, it all got worse.  And what else happened in June?  Gus started to shed his prolific winter coat.  I didn’t notice the coincidence until I went to Maine for a week:  the day before I left I spent extra time brushing Gus, the day we drove to Maine I was sniffling and glurking and achooing more than ever, in Maine my sinuses were surprisingly improved, the day after I got home I resumed my donkey-dehairing duties, and the day after that I couldn’t stop blowing my nose and clearing my throat, plus that night one ear spontaneously clogged up and I got dizzy.

This is my first spring and summer with Gus, and it’s also my first summer with such persistent and severe allergy symptoms.  I never had this problem with horses shedding, but Gus’s dander is probably as different from a horse’s as are his personality and physique.

Well.  Hmmm.  I’m still half-deaf and reeling like a drunken sailor, but I’m certainly not going to drop Gus from my dance card.  So what will I do?  Plan A is to dose up on stinging-nettle extract (a fairly effective natural antihistamine for me) before each trip to the barn and also to wear a dust mask when I groom him.  If his allergens prove too virulent for such home remedies, I’ll reluctantly and cautiously try Plan B: pharmaceuticals.  In another few weeks he should be finished shedding, and I hope that will end the matter.  Until next spring . . .

48. Better than grass

Back from my trip, I eagerly drive to the barn, where Gus commences braying before I even get out of my car.  The sun is merciless, so we immediately go to the indoor arena and do almost nothing but stroll around slowly.  When I get my footfalls into perfect sync with his, his whole body brightens a bit and his pace strengthens.  A few good strides like that, and I click and treat.  After awhile, I offer to play fetch-the-cone, but he wants to keep walking.  So we do.  When the treats are depleted and I take him out for grazing, he doesn’t barge or pull.  And when it’s time to leave the lawn, he doesn’t balk or yaw.  

Two days later, clicker guru Alexandra Kurland is on site to give lessons.  As usual, Gus is indignant at being ignored amid the comings and goings in the arena near his stall.  He bellows, drowning out our conversation.  I step away from the lesson to fill his Bubba-keg treat dispenser with hay pellets, but that doesn’t distract him for long.  Soon we hear a loud thunk and look around the corner toward his stall, in front of which we behold a tiny earthquake aftermath:  his Bubba keg has rolled into the aisle, his halter and flymask are off their hooks on the ground, and his big wooden brush box has been tipped over. 

I take him out, but he refuses to exit the barn and hauls me toward the arena.  I’m thinking, let’s eat some grass; Gus is thinking, let’s join the party.  For the first time since March or April, he’d rather not go grazing. But we can’t disrupt the horse and owner and instructor and audience absorbed in the lesson, so I quietly wrestle and cajole and insist until I finally schlep Mr. Obstreperous out the barn door and onto the grass.  Still, standing amid lush turf and succulent weeds, he leans away longingly.  Going to school with the other kids is better than Anything Else in the World.  It's heart-breaking that his only option right now is grazing and grooming, but eventually he does get into that groove of gratification.  I guide him over near the arena’s main, wide door so he can peer inside.  Just onlooking is almost good enough:  like the youngest sibling sent to bed while the big kids are partying downstairs, he’ll settle for a small saucer of popcorn and a chance to observe from the top step.

But a rain squall starts up and we have to return to the barn, with another struggle to pass the oh so alluring arena and enter his oh so cheerless stall.  As the roar of the rain on the metal roof subsides and is replaced by Gus’s bagpipe solos, Sandy leads him out to his paddock, with the same struggles past the arena entry.  Once he’s behind his gate, the intense allure of the arena as well as the decibels of his braying get slightly attenuated by distance.  Blessed relief, for him and us both.