109. Punk rampant

I open the little wooden storage box outside Gus’s stall (to stock my pocket with the regulation three peppermint candies that I allow as extra-special treats in each session) and half-notice its contents in disarray.  The bag of Buckeye-brand mini-cookies has a big hole torn in it; the two new boxes of saltine crackers are now one box and three unboxed plastic sleeves.  Hmmm . . .  

Gus comes in from the paddock eagerly and we play our games as usual.  Some dressagey walking and halting and backing up.  Some leg lifts with head-down, on our way to learning take-a-bow.  Some horn honking and keyboard playing.  Some pedestal standing and pompom waving.  All copacetic.

Also copacetic, when grazing time is up, Gus cranks his neck and resists only briefly before consenting to be led off the lawn and into his stall.  I assure him that it’s dinnertime, and he marches right to his feed bucket, where, sure enough, his token tablespoonful of grain is waiting.

Sandy is waiting too, to explain about the brushbox.  It seems that yesterday, Donkey Demento escaped from his stall (maybe she didn’t fully latch the bottom hook, allowing him to scootch under his stall guard) and launched a daylight raid.  Finding the box’s hasp secured, he resorted to the simple expedient of breaking a hinge off the lid to get at the treasures within.  After spilling everything out, ripping into the treat bag and the cracker boxes, failing to pry open the peppermint tub, and strewing some brushes and ointment tubes here and there, he made a good start on his neighbors’ boxes as well.

When humans discovered the barn aisle looking like a looted supermarket, Sandy says, she wasn’t surprised at the mess, only at the quietness with which it had been perpetrated.  Gus’s style is more raucous vandal than cat burglar, but this time he wreaked his havoc without raising any ruckus at all.

I bring a couple of screws and a screwdriver, fix the box lid, and assess the losses.  I calculate that Gus scored one whole sleeve of saltines and three handfuls of Buckeye treats.  He’s done worse — once, I’m told, he stole several full-size horse dinners — and with no ill effects.  When you have a mischievous mouth, you better have a cast-iron stomach, and he has both.

108. Smokin’

Standing around while an animal grazes may have its pleasures, but it’s far from intellectually engaging.  So while Gus grazes, I make it my business to shoo away the biting flies by swinging the lead rope against his legs, gently scraping my boot along his shins, and chasing them off his belly and back.  I also make myself useful with brushless pre-grooming:  running my hands all over him to scrub off dead hair and wipe away any clinging mud or shavings or other debris.  

Today the winds are gusty.  That helps keep the flies off him, but I quickly realize it also reveals just how filthy he is.  In the past couple of days, he’s rolled repeatedly in a dust-bath wallow that he and his pasturemate Henry have excavated in their sandy-soiled paddock.   Now each time I rub Gus’s fur or pat his back, a visible puff of superfine dust erupts into the air and blows away.  I rub and pat and rub and pat, and the puffs just keep rising and blowing.  Trapped between his skin and his coat is what must be a wheelbarrowful of powdered dirt.

Absorbed in his grassy feast, Gus is oblivious, but I’m having a high old time watching the billows burst from under my hand.  I begin thumping him in syncopated rhythms, emitting complex smoke signals.  As I pat his back and neck and rump like a beatnik on bongos, he just grazes on, smoldering nonchalantly in the breeze.  Summertime, and the living is hazy.

107. VIDEO: Dressage development

Dressage clicker-trainer Alex Kurland returns to the barn for a lesson day, and with his feet cured and comfy, Gus gets to take part.  We continue our shoulder-giving and neck-softening work, which helps equines step in a more relaxed and powerful way.  It encourages them to lift a little weight off their front ends, rocking them back a tiny bit onto their stronger (but often under-used) hind ends.  Gus is getting to be a pro, especially when we travel in a curve to the left; like many equines, he’s less athletic — stiffer? weaker? — when circling to his right.  After each arc around a cone or two, we return to home base:  a wooden mat in the circle’s center.

Here I’m sliding my front hand up along the lead rope, grasping the snap where it clips onto the halter, and then rotating my wrist just a bit to suggest that he flex his neck.  At the same time, my back hand touches his shoulder to cue him to move it out and away so that he can step under himself.  All we’re after is a centimeter here or there, an almost invisible soupçon of lift and arch.  But watch intently enough, and you’ll witness his entire walk improving, as the lightness in his front-end makes it easier for him engage his hind end and produce a more relaxed, swingy, and athletic stride.  Dressage donkey!

 

106. VIDEO: Fail of the week

As a break during our recent lesson with dressage trainer Alex Kurland, I give Gus the chance to play with the baby carriage.  But we soon learn that when he’s working well, he don’t need no stinkin’ recess.  At least not when he has an adoring, and adored, audience so nearby to distract him: 

After Gus fails to bring his toy donkey to the pedestal as per protocol, his totally abandons his performance as his social instincts draw him inexorably to the humans.  They’re there to view the lesson, but Gus figures their purpose is entirely for the greater glory of his sublime friendliness:

105. VIDEO: Airplane mode

In a tightly wound, aerodynamic creature built for speed, relaxation often allows certain body parts to go flaccid and dangle.  It’s not very dignified, but it’s a useful clue for trainers trying to judge the animal’s moods and interests.  When an ear-scritch or butt-rub is just right, equines may relax their jaws and muzzles so much that their lower lips dangle open.  Males sometimes let it all hang out — that is, their penises, from the sheaths where they’re usually stored up close to their bellies.  Several of us have remarked that slow, steady, clear training with a high rate of clicks and treats often induces a gelding to drop, and sometimes to dangle there for several minutes while continuing the training.  

Gus is unusually reserved and strait-laced as regards his boy bits.  He never peed in my presence until well after a year into our relationship.  And I’ve only seen him dangle once (I was momentarily perplexed to notice an extra hind leg . . .) during a training session.  But he’s a flamboyant and unashamed nudist from the neck up.  When his ears aren’t zooming around manically like antennae on a very busy bee, he lets them flop.  Horses also show airplane ears — horizontal on both sides — when they’re mellowed out.  But on Gus the vigilant-to-vegetative contrast is more striking, since his ears are so long and have so far to fall.

The horn-honking video displays this perfectly.  Watch it once here, for his trick with full semaphore ears, but then look below and watch only his ears.  I’ll pay you money if you don’t laugh out loud.

104. VIDEO: Honk if you love honking

On Gus’s list of reasons to love life, the classic squeeze-bulb bicycle horn ranks almost as high as the pompom.  After just a few bites on it, he was so eager and deft that I immediately raised the click-earning criterion to the signature two-tone honk.  He sometimes gulps the bulb too far into his mouth and sometimes not far enough, but he expertly adjusts his embouchure for the proper teeth to effect the proper squeeze to elicit the proper music:

103. Today’s menu

As this hot, hot summer progresses, Gus’s choice of forage does too.  Along with the grass, he’s delighting in big, shaggy ragweeds lately.  White clovers, even those whose flowers are gone by, are still pretty good; plantains, now most of them gone by, are apparently much less yummy than they were a couple of weeks ago.

What never changes, for Gus as for all the horses, is that bird’s-foot trefoil is universally rejected.  A friend who recently bought a small horse farm has found that one of its pastures is at least half bird’s-foot trefoil, and both her Irish sport-horse gelding and her Morgan mare eat all around it.  I’m surprised, since trefoil is a legume, like alfalfa — horses should love it.  My friend researched it and learned that it’s perfectly edible for horses, but they tend to avoid it unless nothing else is available.

In Gus’s little patch of heaven, there’s always something else available.

102. Happy hooves

As Sandy says, in the psycho-killer singsong of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, “He’s ba-a-a-ack!”  It’s her response to Gus’s recovery from the ouchy white-line disease in his feet.  She and I both notice he’s more obstreperous and obnoxious lately, a sure sign of his feeling in fine fettle.  Rather than stump along lamely as we lead him between paddock and stall, he now throws in the occasional neck-craning or foot-planting in an effort to control the direction of travel or simply to resist forward progress altogether.  

Flashing feet . . .

When Sandy sees us practicing the baby-carriage trick in the arena, she asks me to trot Gus a bit so we can assess his comfort level.  I pick up a dressage whip to send him along, but he pulls his refusenik antics until I smack the ground behind his heels.  Then he trots off, and keeps going voluntarily in a big circle.  Most of his steps look smooth and correct, with just a few strides that look very slightly gimpy.  As Sandy and I start comparing notes and I drop my whip arm, Gus immediately perceives our switch of mental focus, so he veers off and pops his front feet onto the pedestal with a sprightly clip-clop.  Of course, for that, he earns a click and a treat and laudatory huzzahs.

We’ve seen his soreness improve and then worsen before, and this time we’re taking no chances.  We agree on at least another two foot-soakings, just to make sure the fungal/bacterial invaders inside his hooves are well and truly destroyed.  I mix up another cocktail of bleachy White Lightning and distilled vinegar, and Gus is so inured to the treatment by now that when I approach with a Ziploc bag, he starts lifting his feet without being asked.  I pour in a few tablespoons of the noxious solution, tie the bags around his ankles with baling twine, and play a Scrabble game on my smartphone while he soaks.

Compared to keeping his feet in tubs of warm water, this is a (mildly smelly) walk in the park.  Still, I’ll be glad to finished with it.  And even gladder to cope with the behavioral fallout of happy hoof health.

101. Jawbone of an ass

When I watch Gus grazing, I get where Samson was coming from: like a heavy sword or battle axe, the jawbone of an ass really could slay a thousand men.  Gus chews like there’s no tomorrow — constantly, vigorously, powerfully.  I feel a twinge of sympathetic TMJ just thinking about the daily grind on his mandible, masseter, and molars.

As high summer diversifies the plants that are growing and flowering in our main grazing pasture, I’m once again keeping a mental log of what Gus chooses to eat.  Today he rocks my world by grabbing a big mouthful of Queen Anne’s lace, a carrot-related weed that I was surprised to see him avoid entirely last summer.  This one is over two feet tall, growing rank and dense under the fence rails.  Its stems are hard and thick and tough, but Gus’s jawbone doesn’t miss a beat, grinding up stalks, leaves, and flowers.  And going back for more.  

Then, to my even greater astonishment, he goes for a nearby chicory plant.  Last summer he took pains never to touch chicory, with its bitter radicchio flavor, but now he deliberately munches up the wiry stems, tough leaves, and blue flowers.  Wherefore, Gus?

Maybe he needs the minerals or alkaloids or vitamins in certain plants at certain times, and he knows what he smells inside each plant.  His main forage preference is always grass, but the other day included a plantain binge, while today (after the tall-weed appetizers) is all about white clover.  At one point, he stops munching and rubs his muzzle back and forth against the ground: either the flowers tickle his nose, or he’s been stung by one of the many bees working the clover patch.  

But soon he resumes chowing down.  When he wanders to some tall grasses, he tilts his head and maneuvers his very maneuverable lips to gather up a neat, long sheaf, which begins by hanging out one side of his mouth but gets shorter and shorter with each chew, as he efficiently ratchets it into his mouth and down his gullet.  Before the final bit disappears, he’s already mowing up the next serving.  Throughout any grazing session, his incisors pluck and yank a fresh mouthful even while his molars are still masticating the previous plug.  Not a moment’s rest for that awesome jawsome . . .

100. Good as gold

It’s apparently a reliable fact of life: Gus has no objection to having zip-lock bags of caustic liquid tied around his hooves, anytime, anywhere.  Not only does he reprise his perfect-gentleman act when I apply the White Lightning solution, but he walks out to the grazing paddock in perfect deportment.  He wanders all over the field to sample the clover and plantain and grasses, with nary a thought to the squelching baggies on his feet.  

The bags only survive because Sandy pre-layers the bottoms with duct tape, and after another use, they do develop some tears and holes.  But we’re both delighted with the user-friendliness of the system and its high rate of patient compliance.  Now it just needs to work, killing off whatever microbes are eroding Gus’s hooves, so that his foot-soreness goes far, far away.

“No foot, no horse” applies to donkeys too.  And from the ankles up, this donkey is eager to get back to his exercise and fun and playtime.  So am I.

99. Wonderdonkey

With all his performance skills and learning aptitude and winning sociability, Gus can rightly be called Gus the Wonderdonkey.  But he presents a whole ‘nother layer of wonder for his humans: what the hell does he want/hate/fear/love this time?

Having seen his encounters with such personal-care products as fly spray, wet sponges, a hose, and odorous ointments, I predicted that inserting his ouchy feet into baggies of vinegar and bleach would provoke at least some minor calamity. At best, it would probably require one person to hold his halter and reward him for not resisting while a second person dealt with the plastic and liquid.  To my wonderment, not so.

When Sandy demonstrates the bag-soak protocol, he behaves, in her words, like a perfect gentleman.  First, before setting his foot down after picking the hoof, she slips a quart-size zip-lock bag onto it.  He stands in the crinkly bag without batting an eye.  She does the other foot.  Next she decants about a quarter-cup of the White Lightning concoction into each bag.  He still barely notices.  Now she ties a length of baling twine around each ankle to hold the bag closed.  She leaves, and Gus wanders over to his hay pile as if walking in plastic puddles couldn’t interest him less.

While his feet soak, I give him a sponge bath.  He’s nearly shedded out to his thin summer coat, but a small mohawk of thick fur runs down the center of his back, and his throat and underarms are still fluffy.  Today it's nearly 90 Fahrenheit, so even in the shady barn with a big round fan in the aisle, in his shady stall with a box fan strapped to the bars, he’s sweating damply.  After currying and brushing to remove as much loose hair as possible, I begin wiping him down with water.  I know he likes the cooling ends, but he hates the dripping means.

The water from the barn spigot is always very cold, so I let the bucket sit awhile.  I get him to touch the sponge dry, touch it damp, touch it wet, touch it while I squeeze it so it splashes, etc., etc.  He eats up the clicks and treats but never loses his mistrust of the sponge.  I dampen a small bit of him, reward him for tolerating it, give him a break, and then dampen the next part (video from last summer’s bathing here). We spend at least 30 minutes on this refreshing toilette — enough time that I can now remove the smelly, wet bags from his feet.  Which, wonder of wonders, he again doesn’t mind one bit. 

Which only makes me wonder:  what are the odds that he’ll be a gentleman when I redo the soaking tomorrow?

98. Houston, we have liftoff

Gus and Sandy and I are still struggling to finally rid his hooves of white-line disease.  We thought the iodine was working (as it had when Sandy first adopted Gus years ago), but a complete cure is eluding us.  Sandy’s wonderful farrier, Larry, arrives for a scheduled foot trimming, and I attend in order to ask him questions and get his advice.

Normally, Gus is so good with Larry (really, it’s vice versa) that no assistant is needed — Gus stands nicely in his stall and picks up his feet for his manicure.  Today, Sandy and I enter the stall with Larry, and Gus immediately trots to the far wall.  I put his halter on and Larry approaches, and Gus scoots away wildly.  What the . . . ??  

Sandy takes the rope, and Gus jigs and plunges.  Larry takes the rope, and Gus goes bat-shit ballistic.  He bolts, pulling Larry around and scraping against the walls of the stall. Then he hurls himself at the stall door, rears, and leaps; the door is higher than his chin, but he nearly manages to jump it.  After crashing the door in vain, he does another frantic circuit, knocking into his water bucket, before taking a breather.  Amazingly, he neither pulls Larry off his feet nor tramples me or Sandy.  I make a quick, low-key exit, because fewer humans is always better than more humans when an animal is feeling pressured.

Sandy clicks and treats Gus for standing briefly still, and Larry gives him a slow, soothing patpat, and Gus regains his composure.  (Later Larry realizes that he’s wearing a brand-new set of farrier’s chaps today, and he wonders if the fresh leather smell may be the trigger for Gus’s temporary insanity.)

With Gus back on planet Earth now, I sneak back to the stall but stay outside it.  Patiently answering my questions, Larry gives us a mini-seminar on the hoof component called the white line and on the microbial infection called white-line disease.  He finds signs of damage in both of Gus’s front hooves, but his rear ones (which I had begun to fret about too) look clear.  Larry trims the hooves to tip Gus a hair more upright, to reduce the pressure a bit.  After he and Sandy discuss various over-the-counter remedies, they settle on White Lightning.  Its active ingredient is something like household bleach, but it’s to be diluted with vinegar and held on the hoof for 30 minutes with a gauze wrap or a plastic bag.  That way, the liquids — and, says Larry, the fumes they form — can penetrate the hard horn of the hoof and reach the bugs that need to be killed off.

So we have a treatment plan — yay.  All we have to do is stick Gus’s foot in a plastic bag of liquid and tape it closed around his ankle.  Waht coudl goe rwong??

97. VIDEO: Consummation

Two days after our initial toy-donkey meet and greet, when I offer it to Gus again, he grabs it willingly and shoves it back at me; granted, he lets it go immediately, but I get my hand on it, which earns him a click.  Within two minutes,  he’s bringing it to my hand wherever I hold it out.  And in two more minutes, he’s picking it up from the ground and delivering it to me.  Next he adds a few head shakes to get it flapping in his face, which soon seems to tickle his fancy as much as waving the pompom does.

Such good progress that I move right on to the next big step:  putting the toy into the baby carriage.  Off Gus goes, pushing the pram like a pro, then reaches inside for . . . Where’s the pompom?  What’s this toy doing here??  The sky is falling!  Still, despite the shock of the switcheroo, all it takes is a cheerful “Pick it up!” from me and he does pick it up.  All’s right with the world again.  Before we end the session, he’s reliably plucking the toy out of the carriage, bringing it to the pedestal, hopping up, and flapping it into my hand. (Video soon, I promise.)

This particular Stupid Pet Trick now has all its components in place:  pushing the empty-looking buggy, followed by removing the oh-so-adorable babydoll, followed by presenting it for audience admiration.  Only wrinkle is, there's so much violent flapping that perhaps the show needs an epilogue entailing a funeral for the infant with the snapped neck and the arrest of Gus as an abusive father . . . 

Memo to self:  Work on keeping the flapping as part of the pompom trick but removing it from the toy-baby trick.

96. Metadonkey

Amazon the Enabler drove me to it.  Amazon’s range of merchandise being universal (vast and ever-expanding), of course it has several stuffed donkey toys available for prompt delivery.  I settled on a midsized model with a cute face and cute posture, and I bought it for the actual, biological donkey in my life.

Gus is so good at pushing the baby carriage and then reaching inside to extract his beloved pompom, I just knew it would be a small extrapolation for him to extract instead a “baby” of his own species.  After all, we regularly play with a range of junky items with unfamiliar shapes and smells and feels.  Still, when I first show him the toy, he clearly finds it unprepossessing.  He’s mildly curious because I proffer it to him so deliberately, but his first sniff turns him off.  It smells of fake-plush acrylic and chemical sizing and he says the hell with it.

Since he gets clicked and treated for nosing the toy, however, he does keep coming back to it.  He soon reasons quite rightly that the next step would be biting and carrying it, so he gamely takes a taste.  Ptui!  He instantly spits it out.  After several such ejections, he holds it just long enough to toss his head and fling it emphatically.  (Somewhere in his eclectic education, he must’ve absorbed Dorothy Parker’s famous quip in a book review:  “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”)  Once or twice, when Gus hesitates just a half-second before the spit-out, I manage to slip in a quick click; and with that we end our introduction of Gus to his mini-replica.  We cleanse our palates with the pompom and the pedestal, and then adjourn for some grazing.

95. VIDEO: Twinkletoes

The indoor arena’s pedestal — a big tractor tire laid flat with a thick disc of plywood attached on top — remains one of Gus’s favorite go-to destinations.  Whenever he’s in its general vicinity, he gets drawn into its gravity field, and, unless I lead or call him away from it, his default is to pop his front feet on it and perch there, tall and proud and waiting for a click and treat.

Recently, the pedestal has been moved inside the little seating area that’s demarcated by PVC pipes on the arena floor.  It’s just as easy for equines to hop onto the platform, but it’s trickier to step off it backward, as a descending hoof can land on a pipe and roll or skid.  The trick is to take long backward paces in order to clear the pipes.  Or, in Gus’s case, simply to shift forward instead of back, and to clamber up with all four feet and then descend from the pedestal frontways.  In his limberer youth he could be persuaded to stand up there with all four feet; nowadays he already begins stepping down in front as he brings his back feet up.

I’d dearly love to train him to stand all four feet on it again — solely for the purpose of adding a pirouette or other circusy flourish — but he’s no longer a spring chicken, and it's not a very big surface.  Anyway, does a donkey d’un certain age really need to sacrifice his dignity just for a silly trick?  Ohhh, the answer is a resounding Mais oui!

94. Junky

Today I bring a totebag of random objects and junk to the barn.  I’m following Alex’s suggestion for accustoming Gus to pretty much everything under the sun, including his nemesis, flyspray.  Rummaging in my closets netted a foldable auto-open umbrella, a 5-foot-long strip of brass that was a threshold between a carpeted and a tiled floor and is now folded and floppy, and a plastic pistol-grip grab-stick whose pincer is the jaws of a dinosaur.  

Given the persistent April showers, Gus is wearing a rainsheet in his paddock, leaving his uncovered head and neck sopping wet.  When I remove the sheet and he rolls in the arena, he becomes Tempura Donkey, coated in a thick crust of mud from nose to ears to shoulders.  He doesn’t care, and he’s eager for entertainment.  After we walk around a bit and stand on the pedestal, I scatter the doohickeys and thingamajigs on the arena floor, and he’s immediately curious.

First he approaches the furled and folded umbrella.  I hold it up for him to touch, and he doesn’t hesitate. Click and treat.  I extend its handle, and it’s still fine.  I slowly open it into its wide bell shape, and it’s still fine.  I can twirl it and wave it in front of him, and I can hold it over his head, no problem; these are all just easy ways to get clicks and treats.  If I try to bring it near his flank or rump, however, it’s decidedly not okay: he keeps circling his hind end away from it.  He insists on facing it head-on so it can’t pounce on him from behind.  I keep it in front of him, and now I let it whoof open — not in a big burst, but it's sudden enough to make him throw his head back and his ears foward.  His eyes are bugging out a bit, but he reaches his neck out to it, and stretches out his upper lip, and taps it quickly.  Big click and treat for that.  When I walk forward with it, he comes along and touches it again.  I half-close it and let it half-pop open again, sparking the same startle response, followed by a gingerly touch.  Every time it goes “Whoof!” he goes “Yikes!”  So now I close it up for an easy touch, and we set it aside.

We make one circuit of the arena by way of palate cleansing, and then we check out the empty totebag.  He gets rewarded for putting his nose down to it, and then he tries picking it up in his teeth.  Big reward!  But next he only looks at it, so I cue him with “Pick it up” (as for fetching the dog toy or pompom) and he promptly does and hands it to me.  Peppermint!  Next I spread the bag flat (tucking the handles inside to avoid any trip hazard) and tell him “Mat!” and he readily puts one hoof on it.  I have him hand it to me again, and I rub it on his flanks and belly and head — all good.

After another little stroll and breather, we approach the long, zigzag-folded metal strip.  This piques his suspicious attention from a distance.  When I pick it up, and he sees it woogle and waggle in my hand, he takes one step back.  When I drop it and he hears its springy, zhingy sound as it lands, he takes two steps back.  This is something very much not of his world.  Judging from his expression, I doubt that he’ll get anywhere near it.  But I pick it up and hold it still and wait.  In less than 10 seconds, he walks forward and gives it a hasty flick of his lip.  Big treat!  Soon he’s able to touch it more solidly and to touch various angles and arms of it.  He tries touching my hand that’s holding it, but he gets no click for that dodge, so he screws his courage to the sticking-place and touches the actual thing again.  I can hold it up high over his head, but I can’t bring it around to his side or hind end.  No surprise there.  I drop it on the ground again, and I lead him in a circle, and he steps right over it without quailing.  Peppermint redux.

Finally, we try the toy-dinosaur grabber stick.  Gus has no problem touching it and taking it into his mouth to deliver to me.  Also no problem when I touch it to his head and neck and legs and back; ditto when I use the trigger to clack its hard-plastic jaws together near and around his head.  He stays cool and calm even when I make it lightly pinch his withers and comb his tail and nibble his belly.  This biting dinosaur is a creampuff, especially after he’s conquered the whangy, flappy metal strip.

Sandy has a toy piano keyboard, pool noodles, and other oddments that I’ll add to our repertoire for future junkyard experiments.  And at some point, I’ll sneak the flyspray squirt-bottle into the mix  -- shhh . . .

93. Virtual lesson day

If it weren’t for Covid-19, we’d be celebrating the end of winter by resuming the barn’s regular lesson days with dressage and clicker guru Alexandra Kurland.  Instead, we resort to info tech, which sucks but is better than nothing: we gather on Zoom for a video chat.

In spite of my low-rent wi-fi service and its sporadic momentary freeze-ups of audio or video or both, I glean several good tidbits of advice and inspiration for donkey training.  (And I’m eager to share them also with my friend  who has an Irish Sport Horse gelding and a Morgan mare.)  Here are just three:

1.  In response to Gay, who owns a magnificent jet-black Frisian and a magnificent pearl-grey Lippizaner — big boys who can get jealous when one of them is clicked and treated in the presence of the other — Alex suggests some ways to train them together.  They both like to stand on a mat, so one turn-taking game involves scattering six or eight mats, starting each horse on a mat, and then asking one horse to stay while sending or leading the other horse to an empty mat.  Upon arrival, the traveler gets clicked for stepping on the new mat and the waiter gets clicked for staying put.  A simultaneous cooperation game begins with two parallel lines of three or four mats each.  The handler(s) should lead or send each horses, both at the same time, to the next mat in his line.  If one horse barges ahead to his mat first, it doesn’t matter, because the click isn’t delivered until both horses land on the mats — that is, neither performer wins unless both performers work together.  Because making a bitey face at your little brother delays the reward, sibling rivalry diminishes, and therefore fearfulness of your big brother's bitey face diminishes too. This is fun for horses, dogs, cats, giraffes . . .

2.  For Julie, who is teaching her new Holsteiner the basics, like head-down, mat-standing, target-touching, etc., Alex gives a refresher course in front-leg flexion exercises.  It’s good for strength and limberness and balance, of course, but if done right it’s also good for the core-muscle development.  And done right means getting the horse to really unweight his front end and take more weight on his hind.  To start, Alex recomends placing both hands around the very top of the leg — almost in the horse’s armpit, as it were — and waiting to feel a slight lift, perhaps when the horse inhales.  Whenever and however it happens, click and treat that tiny lift.  Once the horse is lifting that shoulder a bit each time, move one hand to touch his leg just above the knee; reward when the knee bends up and forward to meet the hand.  Unlike a human’s lifting of the horse's foot, as for hoof-picking, this method ensures that the horse does all the work, and in the right way to help develop lovely and powerful dressagey self-carriage.  I can’t wait to re-teach the leg lift to Gus like this, for his orthopedic health and for the first step in our take-a-bow trick.

3. For desensitizing Gus to the spritz and smell of fly spray, Alex suggests dabbing myself (well, my clothing) each day with a different smell — not just fly-spray but perhaps citrus, spice, medicine, perfume . . .  I’ll be the same old me, still with ear-scrubs and games and an apronful of treats, but with various odors that he can learn to ignore.  Also she suggests goofing around with (e.g., touching, wearing, straddling, fetching) many different items only one of which is the fly-spray bottle.  By noodling with, say, a dog toy and an umbrella and a jar lid and a scarf and a sponge and a squirt-bottle (maybe one or two each day), Gus can get familiar with all of them pretty equally.  That way, the spray bottle won’t be presented only when we’re about to assail him with its startling noise and freaky stink.  I fear he might be too savvy an analytic thinker to fall for this ploy, but it does sound promising.  Anyway, the more objects he can interact with, the happier he is.  So I aim to gift him with a vast and motley embarras de richesses.

And we humans agree to connect again via Zoom in future, until such time as we dare to gather in person for hands-on lessons.  I’m drumming my fingers ve-e-ery patiently . . .