58. Botanical update

Ragweed — yum?

Oak leaves — just fine?

As summer starts to edge towared autumn, Gus’s browsing preferences seem to be changing a bit with the season.  Whereas clover never gave him a thrill in spring, now that it’s blossoming it’s a huge favorite, worth strolling around in search of.  The bedstraw is acceptable, but not the special treat it seemed to be when it was young.  To my surprise, the carrot-cousin Queen Anne’s lace is still shunned; same for chicory and burdock and ragweed — until suddenly today he yanks up a big, multistalked, green-flowering ragweed plant and systematically chews and swallows the whole thing.  Wha-a-a-a??

Gus’s first choice is always grasses, especially if the blades are long and wide and rank, as they are under the fences where the mower spares them, and in the fenny and thickety areas where they’re overfertilized by proximity to old manure piles.  He also enjoys the mower-spewed cuttings when they lie on top of the recently cut lawns.  This fodder, though, is neither fresh like live plants nor cured like hay, so I worry that it could be mouldy or fermenting or otherwise unhealthy.  But this is the animal who blithely eats oak leaves with no apparent ill effects, so I guess he can digeset old grass clippings too.

57. Pigeons, plugs, and pie pans

Gus’s barn is now a pigeon exclusion zone.  Pigeons have long been numerous and ubiquitous above the stalls and arena in that barn, but we finally reached our limit of tolerance.  The makeshift ceiling over the little tack room has helped protect the saddles and bridles, but everywhere else the pigeon poop has been prodigious bordering on the epic.  The audience chairs in the arena have been covered in it, and ditto for the light switch, the entry gate, the stack of miniature traffic cones, the fetching toys, etc., etc.  In the stabling half of the barn, the residents have been shat upon, their water buckets fouled, their feed buckets caked, and their neatly folded blankets and flymasks besmirched.  Sandy was draping old towels over everybody’s feed buckets between meals, but the towels became stiff with dried excrement every couple of days.  

The cooing of easily 30 or 40 pigeons has rarely bothered me, but their frequent and  sudden flights in and out of the barn can be unnerving to horses and riders.  I think the final straw for Sandy was seeing how much grain the pigeons were  stealing from the coop of her very nice chickens while they were outside dutifully eating up bugs all over the property.  Which includes two disused barns that would make Perfectly Fine alternative homes for the pigeons to make their very own.

So, after extensive online and word-of-mouth research, Sandy has compiled an arsenal of pigeon assault weapons:  a SuperSoaker pump-action squirt gun, a toy rifle that fires plastic-foam Nerf bullets, and a big, long-handled net.  All humans who see a pigeon are deputized to grab a water or Nerf gun and let fly (and enjoined to gather up the spent Nerf bullets and return them to their ammo box for reloading).  To support her artillery and fusilier power, she became a corps of engineers, climbing up and hanging an aluminum-foil pie pan on a string to dangle in the center of each and every little window between the arena and the stable.  She tightly closes the big arena doors every night.  She has plastic owls posted around the building full-time.
 

In the face of this relentless onslaught, the pigeon population has plummeted.  There’s still a nest over Gus’s stall and a few others way high in the arena rafters, beyond the range of water hose or foam bullets.  But the barn is appreciably less shitted up these days.  Rows of pigeons now bide their time on the power lines outside, watching for a chance to retake their territory.  But our warrior spirits are steeled to keep up the good fight, never let down our guard, and beat back the invaders.  We hope the onset of winter will dampen their resolve and drive them at last to seek shelter elsewhere.

Victory won’t be declared until there are no more than a couple of pigeons resident in our barn.  And we fully expect to re-up and resume hostilities in the spring.

56. VIDEO: Dressage donkey

Another clinic day with clicker-dressage expert Alex Kurland, and while lots of lessons are learned and progress made by six humans and seven equines, for me the banner headline of the day is that Gus is declared a bona fide dressage donkey.

After auditing last month’s clinic, I’ve been working with Gus on the main lesson of that day, shoulder yielding — at least in a rudimentary, ballpark sort of way.  And he’s catching on quickly and enjoying it.  But I know my cueing needs a lot of refining, so that’s what Alex offers us.  She confirms my fear of shoving him into a stiff or unbalanced shoulder-yield, and she steps us back to a preparatory exercise focused on the tiniest, subtlest little gives of the neck.

The cue is the same — sliding down the inside rein and taking it up just a little, while using my “minuet hand” to touch or brace his shoulder if it starts to fall into the circle — but the goal is only a teensy softening of jaw and neck, a hint of releasing, a soupçon of acknowledgment.  All without any loss of energy or ground-speed as he continues walking along.  I peer intently at the faint vertical wrinkle behind his jaw, and the instant I see a little increase of crease, I drop the rein and click, following up with a treat.

And doesn’t Gus turn out to be a champ?  Alex praises the quality of his walk, his responsiveness, and the lightness with which he carries himself.  She notes how much those are improved since she saw him a couple of months ago.  And she reassures me that I'm clicking at the correct moments.

I mention my distant hope that I could joshingly call him a dressage donkey one day, and she replies that he already is one.  She figures he’s executing elementary dressage movement as adroitly as any equine classmate.  I am one proud auntie, trainer, and partner.

We practice this detailed exercise around and around in circles, and Gus only loses focus once or twice, upon which I walk him off the circle briefly and then return.  After close to an hour I end the lesson (with internal fanfares and confetti), but Gus refuses to exit the arena.  No wonder, given the quantity of clicks and treats he was earning, plus the limelight shed by his human spectators, plus his knowledge that some other equine will soon take his place and get all the fun.  I haul and cajole, but he plants his feet and leans back.  Finally, Sandy shoos him from the rear, and I wrestle him out the door.  He cooperates nicely once we leave the arena behind, and I strew imaginary palm leaves in his path on the way back to his stall.

55. How we doin' here?

Myriad and sublime are the blessings of retirement, not the least of which is the absence of annual “performance” evaluations.  If you’re on good terms with your boss, you both communicate well and often, making a yearly questionnaire just an empty ritual, a sham with the sole purpose of satisfying some CYA policy in the human resources department.  If you’re on bad terms with your boss, it’s still just HR balloon juice, plus it’s fraught with festering mistrust or veiled disrespect or baleful innuendo or uncomfortable pressures or all of the above.  Either way, it’s not a useful stock-taking or planning exercise.


By contrast, when it comes to animal training, I do find it edifying to look over the past year or so and meditate on our progress together.  It was early last September when I first took Gus’s lead rope in hand and we began sizing each other up.  While he’s still a little Caesar, mercurial and inscrutable, I can hazard a few then-and-now generalizations:


*  manners indoors and out:  steady improvement, to the point of near-angelic sweetness, except when paddock flies are most torturous 


*  refusing or pulling away during a session:  waned pretty steadily, returned a bit as the grass greened, and waning again lately


*  refusing or pulling away around the farm property:  waned in the winter, returned with knobs on [<—video] as the grass greened, and waning again lately, except when flies are most torturous  


*  busting out of paddock:  great improvement through the winter and spring, but backsliding lately when flies are most torturous 


*  personal hygiene:  quite tolerant of sponge-bathing [<—video]; much more cooperative for hoof-picking (especially if I remember to start with the right-front foot, proceed counter-clockwise, and finish with a treat); minimally more tolerant, or at least less explosive, about spray bottles 


*  distractability and sniff-wandering during a session:  gradual, steady improvement


* staying in his lane in hand:  still tends to veer wide, but good improvement since I adopted Sharon Wilsie’s matching steps and Alex Kurland’s coaching in [video—>] shoulder-yield and rope-handling


*  welcoming when I arrive:  started early and still going strong


*  complaining when I leave:  none early, then frequent in winter, but rarely now
 
*  tricks learned:  added pirouetting to pedestal standing; invented tilt-a-chair; added mat and pedestal as destinations for fetching, and added pompoms and other fetchable objects; extrapolated barrel rolling from beachball bopping



*  movement quality:  better energy and impulsion at the walk, especially as I match steps; easier backup (with my improved cueing — duhhh!); stiffer when moving to his left than his right, but overall limberness and fitness may be improving


Not too shabby, eh?  Most gratifying for me has been the slow but steady blossoming of our relationship, particularly the trust and comfort that’s now plain to see in his (almost always) soft eye and relaxed jaw and floppy ears.


Happy anniversary, Gus.