79. On again

Today, Gus evidently feels fine.  We enjoy a few bursts of sustained trot, then he beelines for a wooden mat and hits the brakes to land on it.  He tosses his head and dances in place.  We run-and-stop between two mats again and again — to his mind, a very exciting game.  I’m tickled by how tickled he is every time, so the first six or eight repetitions don’t drive me insane.  After that, I change the subject:  we pirouette on the pedestal, we dunk the basketball, we walk figure-eights.  

I bring out the 55-gallon drum, to see if he’ll lift it upright as he did so spontaeously and unexpectedly a few days ago.  He doesn’t.  He bops it to roll it all over the arena, and when he does put his nose on the flat end, I click and treat; nevertheless, he makes no effort to push it upright.  Has he utterly forgotten that he did it twice before?  We’ll keep experimenting . . .

At least Gus won't have the weight
of a rider on him

Meanwhile, the clicker-training-for-horses expert Alexandra Kurland has just published a new edition of her book The Click that Teaches, and I bought a copy.  It includes instructions for the Take a Bow trick.  Dogs can bow simply by lowering their front end, putting their elbows on the floor with their rumps in the air — a natural gesture both for stretching after waking up and for inviting playfulness in another dog.  Horses never ever do this, ever.  But it’s a trick they can learn, and I figure it’d be relatively easy for a built-like-a-fireplug donkey.  So we start the first steps, and Gus likes it immediately.

I begin, standing Gus on a mat to help indicate that this is a stationary exercise, by lifting one of his front legs and bending it at the knee.  Because he knows how to lift his foot for hoof-picking, he pretty easily raises his foot when I stroke down his leg.  I just build on that until he picks up the foot at a brief touch and lets me cradle his knee in one hand and his hoof in the other, to bend his leg pretty tightly.  We do this many times with each front foot, going through a pocketful of treats in short order.  We take a break by strolling around, and then we return to the mat for more leg lifts.  Now I also try guiding his bent leg back and down a bit; when his shoulder relaxes and goes with the movement, I click and treat.  

We’ll be doing weeks and weeks more of this leg work.  And once I decide whether he seems more limber or comfortable on his left or right leg, we can pursue the bowing trick on that side.  The other front leg will need to stay on the ground to prop him up as he lowers his head and chest.  But that’s probably months in the future.  One day at a time . . .

78. Pisspot

Today again, Gus is a consummate ass.  He’s contrararian and inscrutable.  He comes in from his paddock just fine, rolls luxuriously, trots along with me around half the arena and gets a click and treat, and then metamorphoses into an impossible brat.  He pulls the lead line over his jaw and across his thick neck and trots hard toward the gate.  I lean back with all my weight, get towed along, and eventually stop him.  I offer to let him roll again.  Phooey, he says.  I bring out his favorite wooden mat.  He turns his back on it.  I unsnap the lead line and set him free.  He stands like an ox.

I stroke and prod him all over, looking for an injury or sore spot, and he seems fine.  When I pat my belly and back away, he comes to me and eats up his treat as avidly as usual.  But he refuses to walk farther away from the arena gate.  When Barbara tells me that her quarterhorse Henry was apathetic and listless today too, and that all the two of them did was wander fecklessly around the stable grounds, I decide to indulge Gus as well.  As I walk out of the arena, he stays behind, standing at the open gate and looking vaguely sheepish, so I hook up the lead line and give him a maitre d’ “this way, sir” gesture, and he comes along.  I let him choose our itinerary.

First he visits his preferred grazing field, only to realize it's snow-covered.  Just under the barn eaves is a strip of bare grass that lures him over.  But the roof is dripping snowmelt, and that’s just too yucky on the back of his head.  We depart for a stroll down the driveway.  Gus stops to greet the big geldings over their paddock fence; he and Lar nuzzle sleepily, then he lets Sky nibble his halter once or twice, before he moves away; and he spends a few minutes eating a desultory mouthful or two from a little hank of hay that got dropped outside the fence.  His every action is carried out in affectless slo-mo.  (Horse-speak trainer Sharon Wilsie’s “swimming underwater while on Valium” comes to mind . . .)  Gus plods on down the driveway, where the snowplow has uncovered some narrow strips of grass.  He picks at these with zero enthusiasm.

To lure Gus back up the driveway toward the barns, I toss bits of apple and carrot from my treat apron.  When he sees them land and bounce ahead of him, he follows them and lips them up.  But as we apporoach his barn, he digs his hooves in and leans baaaaack.  OK, say I, wanna return to your paddock, where your pal Henry is hanging out?  Up yours, he replies.  At this point, I kick him hard and beat him with the lead rope.  Oh, I do not, much as I half-wish to.  Instead I let him explore a nearby paddock, empty of horses now but containing many manure piles and two small hay piles.  Gus inhales data from several poops, and then drops a load himself.  He noses through each hay pile, but barely eats a stalk or two.  Yet when I suggest we move on, he refuses adamantly. 

Now I yell insults and punch him in his stupid face.  No, I don’t; of course not.  I bite my tongue and convince him kindly and patiently to decide to come away with me.  At last he marches nicely into his stall — he knows it’s nearly dinner time — and lets me groom and reblanket him with minimal defiance.  What the . . . ??

There’s no full moon to blame this on now.  Maybe it’s the barometer shifting, as wet weather is in the offing.  Or maybe it’s just a pissy day in the life of a sometimes pissy donkey.

77. Neither snow nor . . .

It’s a bitter 15 degrees Fahrenheit today, but Gus and I barely notice.  Decked out with chemical toe-warmers in my boots, insulated ski pants, a down parka, a nylon and fleece hat, and knitted fingerless mittens over thin gloves, I’m nearly impervious to the elements.  And sporting his shaggy baby-musk-ox winter coat, not to mention his fetching nylon pony blanket, Gus is warm as toast.  And much happier with his paddock footing now that some snow covers the ice that had built up during cycles of thawing and freezing.  He comes to the gate for haltering, but he still tiptoes carefully down the path to the arena.

Two of his favorite fan-club members show up to share some carrots and pat-pats. After a roll and some nice, polite trotting, he entertains his audience by showing off his pompom and dog-toy retrieval tricks.  I roll out the 50-gallon drum, which he hasn’t seen in a couple of months, and I stand it on end.  He walks directly to it and pushes it over: Godzilla Gus rides again.  He remembers how to bop it and gets it rolling all over the arena.  But here’s what:  during a pause for me to blow my nose, doesn’t he set his jaw against one end of the big, heavy barrel and, pressing sideways, lift it upright.  !!!  In a daze, I click and treat.  What made him think of tilt-a-chair — a game we haven’t played for at least a couple of weeks — and then Apply it to a Different Object?  When I topple the barrel, he rights it again.  And gets a peppermint.  As with his previous quantum leaps (like walking while carrying the traffic cone), a couple of repeats is all we get at first.  After that, it’s as if a memory wiper totally erases the idea from his brain.  But I know it’s in there, dormant but ready to re-emerge the next time he encounters the barrel.

For now, we move on to other things, including matching steps backward and forward.  He cha-chas with me pretty readily, for several steps in a row each time.  He schmoozes with this admirers again, and then we repair to his stall for hay, grooming, and — because the forecast says zero degrees tonight — his Bubba Keg full of treat nuggets.

76. Rote and novelty

A circle of miniature traffic cones is set up in the arena today, so Gus and I use it.  We trot around its perimeter, with only a few head-flinging about-turns to pick up a cone in hopes of earning a click.  A few times I resist, hauling him away from the cone by main force on the lead rope.  But mostly I tell him “Leave it” and I wait, folding my hands in the grownups-are-talking signal, and then plastering my hands to my thighs and averting my eyes as he shoves the cone toward me.  When he finally drops it, I click and treat.  “Good leave-it!” I explain.  If he drops it but then dives for it again, the next time he drops it I immediately ask him for a few steps forward or backward, and then I click that.  When he passes near or between cones without yawing off toward one, he gets more clicks.

Now that we’re using the cones for dressage and lungeing, I’ve determined to use them nevermore for pick-it-up tricks.  Instead, we use a plastic dog toy that looks like a big, three-armed star from a set of jacks, or the lattice basketball, or a length of corrugated plastic tubing, or — my personal favorite — a purple-and-white pompom.  

We haven’t played with the pompom in a couple of months, and Gus greets it with great interest.  I nestle it on the ground with the plastic handle uppermost and ask him to pick it up, but he seems to have forgotten the handle; he gathers up a hank of streamers in his mouth and flops the mess into my hand.  In fairness, I have to click and treat for that.  But before I set it on the ground again, I proffer it directly to him and make sure he gets the handle between his teeth — click!  After we re-establish the handiness of the handle a few times, I place the pompom on the ground, and he’s pretty reliable about using the handle.  Still, he’s not as precise as he had been months earlier:  often he bites the handle plus a few strands of streamers, and a couple of times he inadvertently steps on some streamers, making it impossible to lift the pompom off the ground.

He clearly remembers the item and the game, yet he clearly forgets some of the finer points of both.  What’s that about?  To spare him the slapstick of standing on the item he’s trying to pick up, I set the pompom on the top step of the mounting block.  He noses it off into the dirt once or twice, but then he begins grabbing the handle and picking it up cleanly.  He eyes the nearby pedestal, so I invite him to “step up” and wave the pompom.  Such a cute trick that I can’t help chuckling, and Gus seems to eat that up as hungrily as the treat.  We bring pompom to pedestal several more times.  Memory (nearly) fully restored?

Now I swap the pompom for the jack-shaped toy, which he immediately picks up and hands over.  So I add a few new twists — which I’d never do at this point with a dog or horse, but Gus usually relishes being faced with more than one challenge at a time.  I throw the toy farther and farther away and ask him to leave my presence to go fetch it.  This is not his strong suit, but watching the tripod-toy cartwheel through the air and tumble to the ground seems to trigger a hint of predatory urge: he heads right for it, nabs it, and turns back toward me.  Now I back away and back away, and he chases me assiduously to deliver the toy into my hand.   Next I back away toward the wooden mat, and Gus seizes this new opportunity, striding straight to the mat and planting his feet there, toy raised in readiness for the hand-over.

Old toys put away for a few weeks or months and then reintroduced do stir a certain fizz in the minds of many animals.  And for Gus that’s true with the beachball, the basketball hoop, the chair . . . almost anything.  But I’m often suprised by which facets of the object, or of the game, feel particularly welcome, or novel, or confusing to him.  Which parts of these reintroductions should be remedial training?  when should I raise the criteria for clicking?  how fast or far can his learning advance?  The real question is, why don’t tack shops sell halter-mounted fMRI scanners?

75. Werequine?

Gus seems fine again.  He trots and trots and trots.  He walks swoopy figure-eights in the barn corners.  He pirouettes.  He does little shoulder-softenings and neck-gives as we walk in a big circle.  He grabs the ball and flaps it all over the backboard and rim before dunking it into the net.

He grazes eagerly on the half-dead winter lawn, but he leaves it graciously when he sees the horses being brought into their stalls and hears the rattle of grain and feed-buckets.  He tucks into his hay with such focus that he barely notices my arrival with the hoof pick; he hands over his feet (as it were) without even a flinch of resistance.

So . . . what was his problem last week?  The barn was the same, the weather was well within the same parameters, my visits were the same.  All I can recall is that when he was acting down (acting up is what he does when healthy), and several horses were also judged by their owners to be “not quite right,” we had a full moon.  Gus is already so hirsute that I can’t tell by looking, but maybe he’s a real-life were-ass?

74. Lazarus lives

Two days pass, and today Gus seems his old self.  He wants to trot around and seems comfortable doing it.  He pops onto his pedestal and begins pirouetting the instant I barely ask.  We invent a new game — walking figure-eights in the back corners of the barn (where the walls help shape our fairly tight circles) — and he grooves on it.  He doesn’t crank his neck and wrap the lead rope over his snout in order to pull it harder away from me.  He doesn’t plant his feet and pretend to be deaf and blind.  When we leave the arena, he does refuse to return to his stall and insists on taking me outside instead, for some grazing on the frosty, matted, brown lawn.  These all strike me as indicators of peak health in Little Caesar.

I give Sandy this update, and she recounts how, that morning, he barged out the paddock gate before she could get his halter buckled.  Yep, this is the Gus we’ve come to expect.  And curse.  And love.

We’re still keeping an eye on him, trying to judge which of his ornery transgressions might stem from his feeling bad and which simply reflect his feeling fine.  And we’re hoping hard for more fine-ornery in future.

73. Medical mystery

Gus acts the sourpuss again today.  He’s not interested in trotting, or chasing the beachball, or pirouetting, or even walking around in any focused or meaningful way.  Snuffling slowly along the ground for dropped treats:  check.  Cooperating with a human to earn treats:  negatory.

I look and feel him all over for swelling or sore spots, but Gus is famously not a stoic (case in point), so I’m not surprised to find no injury.  He’s eager to gobble up treats, but back in the stall he barely touches his nose to his hay before he stumps away and gazes dully out into the barn aisle.  He looks like he just swallowed a very yucky tarantula.

I mention this to Sandy, who has kinda noticed it too, and she wonders if he might have Lyme disease.  In horses (as in humans, only more so) it can be extremely insidious and variable.  The Lyme titers are getting more accurate and reliable, but they require a blood draw, and Gus has made it clear in the past that no needles of any kind shall ever touch his skin.  Over the phone, the vet suggests maybe giving him 10 days of doxycycline:  if we notice clear improvement, we’d continue for the full month; if not, we’d stop giving it.  Nobody loves this protocol, but if we’re pretty sure he’s sick, it’s about the only workable approach.  We decide to wait and watch.  I give Gus some extra-deep and satisfying ear scritches before heading home.

72. Attitude adjustment

Again Gus plays the pill.  I don’t even try any lungeing, but he still resists half of the requests and offers I make.  He pushes his forehead against my chest, using me as a scratching post; I step away and scritch him with my hand instead.  I invite him to walk with me, and after a few steps he pulls in the opposite direction.  I get him to back up, and I click and treat for it. Then when I walk along on his other side, he veers behind me and wraps the lead rope around my back.  He drops to the ground and rolls — for the third time.  Next he hauls me over to a mini-traffic cone and picks it up.  I ignore him and keep us walking along, and he soon spits it out.  A few moments later, I lead him to another cone and chirp “Pick it up!” and he tramples it under foot.  I offer to trot alongside him, but he just walks slower.  

In exasperation, I unhook his lead rope and walk away, leaving him in the arena.  Sandy asks what the trouble is.  I tell her what a refusenik Gus is being, and she says he’s been like that for the last couple of days.  She blames the rain, which he hates, and also her sheltering him from the rain by keeping him in his stall, which he hates too.  No excuse.  She immediately marches into the arena and commences to fix his wagon.

She posts me at the arena gate to prevent Gus from escaping under it, and she takes up the long lunge whip.  She whaps it on the ground behind him to make him move out, but then she scoots to the side wall and holds out the whip sideways to block him as he comes around.  If he stops, she makes him go again, so he has no choice but to change direction.  When he comes along the other side wall, she scoots over there and turns him back the other way again.  This is a modified round-pen exercise, such as several Western-style “horse whisperers” swear by.  They do it in order to scare or overwhelm the horse, control its every move, and if necessary run it to exhaustion — the result being that a wild or unbroke horse relents and becomes submissive.  The technique is often called natural, inasmuch as a stallion or alpha-mare may exert its dominance by herding and driving a lower-ranking horse.  Humans can’t do it naturally, though; we can only pull it off with the help of a whip, a rope, and a sturdy enclosure.  For busy horsemen, it’s a same-day shortcut to gentling and training and earning a horse’s trust over weeks or months.  In Sandy’s milder, moderate version, it’s just one of many ways to help establish or clarify the horse-human relationship.  

For Gus, who’s seen this before, it takes no more than five minutes to remind him that humans call the shots and equines have to follow their lead.  As soon as Sandy stands still, drops her body energy, and exhales, Gus walks right up to her for some pat-pats.  Now when I re-enter the arena and snap the lead line on his halter, he’s acquiescent and content — whatta good boy!  We can walk and turn and halt, and even trot together with almost no head tossing or line tugging.  He earns lots of clicks and treats and scrubs and nice-nice.  Such a team player.  At least for now . . .

71. Pill

Is it something I said?  I think it’s something I did, and that something is lungeing.  It’s the only change in Gus’s life that coincides with his rescidivism in obstreperous, bratty behavior lately.  I’ve always been concerned about lungeing's compulsory elements, as well as my clumsy skills, and I think Gus finds it annoying and domineering and just plain Not Okay.  In consequence, he’s being a real pill at least 50 percent of the time.

He still hee-haws when my car pulls in.  He still gladly walks with me into the arena.  He still waits semi-patiently as I remove his blanket, before crumpling in place and rolling luxuriantly.  But the cool weather and/or his fitness level seem to fuel his energy and eagerness to get moving, so after his roll I’ve been trying a bit of lungeing to let him trot and warm up.  He clearly feels a need for speed, and he'd run me off my feet if I ran alongside him.  Yet when I bring out the lunge whip and hook the line on his halter, he begins his evasive maneuvers.  He sniffs for dropped treats on the ground, he twirls toward me or away from me so that I can’t position myself at his side, he cranks his neck and pulls in any direction that I don’t desire him to go, or he plants his feet and refuses to budge.

I try tapping his rump.  No dice.  I cluck and cajole and walk alongside to get him started.  Bupkus.  I visibly wave the whip, toss its lash, even let it tickle his heels and hocks.  Fuhgeddaboutit.  Finally I stomp toward his hip and whap the whip fast and hard onto the ground behind him, and that does send him forward.  I click and treat for that, and sometimes he’ll resume nicely and walk or trot a half-circle or so, in which case I click and treat for that too.  Sometimes, though, I can’t get him restarted.  I move to his other side and try sending him in the other direction, often with no luck.  Even when he does move around me, he soon begins spiraling inward, getting too close to me and putting himself on too tight a circle.  To push him out farther, I point the whip at his shoulder, then I wave the whip at his shoulder, and sometimes I poke the whip into, and even bend it against, his shoulder.  He looks me in the eye and just continues to object, evade, and resist.  If donkeys could blow a big, wet raspberry, that’s what he’d be doing.

Today, after a few fitful starts and a lot of resistance, he gets to cantering around — feeling his feisty oats.  So feisty, in fact, that he suddenly veers off, yanks the rope from my hand, gallops across the arena, and dives under the gate to go clattering into the barn aisle.  But instead of committing his usual nuisances — nosing open the tack and treat trunks, invading empty stalls to nosh on their hay — he just stands there.  And when I invite him back into the arena, he comes right along.

I can only conclude that he does want to play in the arena, but he doesn’t want to lunge.  So we don’t.  

In stark contrast to his ball and pedestal and chair tricks, and even unlike his walking alongside me in various patterns, lungeing requires his submission to my control every minute.  I’m armed both with a line on his halter, controlling his front end, and with the whip as a long extension of my other hand, controlling his hind end.  He’s sandwiched between two powerful forces.  And I’m probably mishandling those forces half the time — telling him to go from behind while blocking him in front, wishing he’d stay out at the end of the lunge line while sending signals that draw him closer to me, intending one thing while inadvertently insisting on another.  Add that confusion to Gus’s innate independence, and it’s no wonder he’s such a pig and a pill.

His mood is soured now, so he’s fussy about other activities too.  He chases the beachball at a rousing trot, with a few hind kicks and head tosses thrown in, and he bops it something fierce; but he quickly loses his focus and returns to hoovering the floor for stray tidbits.  He fetches the basketball and misses the dunk.  Hearing Sandy delivering grain, he nips over to the arena gate, where I head him off and somehow convince him to execute a few nice circles with me at liberty.  On our next turn away from the gate, though, he abruptly reverses course, rams his way under, and this time trots directly into his stall and jams his face into his feed bucket.  Swine!

I attach his stall guard, give him a cursory grooming, and head home with half an apronful of treats.  He wants to end our session early, he pays the price.  And next time, half his treats will be two days old.  I can blow raspberries too.