Gus is such a quick study, and his idle hooves are so often the devil’s workshop, that I feel a certain pressure to keep him physically and mentally active. We’ll always practice and fine-tune his current repertoire of games and dressage maneuvers, but he really enjoys novelty and surprise as well. What can I dream up next to engage and entertain him afresh?
Today, I have an answer. I’d like to plead temporary insanity or sudden dementia, but who’m I kidding? I’ve been plotting and shopping for months. Online I find a listing for a classic old baby carriage and I arrange a meet with the seller. I mean, how freakin’ hilarious would it be to see Gus pushing a baby buggy ahead of him? And riding in the buggy could be a stuffed-animal donkey. Or a small, live dog. Or any number of other ludicrous, vaudevillian figures . . .
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| Gus's newest plaything |
Barbara agrees to ride along and help me check it out. Turns out the pram has been in an attic for decades; it’s in quite good condition. And it’s a famous Italian brand that seems both fancy and sturdy. The seller is a beefy, crew-cut soldierly type living in a rather gritty neighborhood of a rather gritty upstate New York town. He’s totally congenial, but I figure he’s got enough of a challenge dealing with two garrulous, grey-haired women in barn coats, so I spare him an explanation of how we plan to use his baby pram. It’s exactly what I had in mind, so I slap $40 in his hand and he helps us load it into my car. (As long as I’m not inside a big, windowless retail outlet full of overpriced, crappily made, off-gassing merchandise, I can be a shopping whiz.)
I deliver the new toy to the barn and park it inside the arena. When I lead Gus in, he immediately notices it. His ears spring forward symmetrically. We stand still, several paces from the contraption, and he simply stares. New objects usually don’t give him such pause; but this one does have many parts and projections, and I suppose he might fear that any one of them could suddenly savage him?
He presses his ears even more forward, so they come down nearly horizontal, to aim directly at the Unknown Object. I touch it lightly, and when he sees that it does me no harm, he slowly steps forward a pace or two. Then he touches it ever so gingerly with the very tip of his upper lip. I click and treat that, and now he noses it more readily. It bounces slightly when nudged hard enough, and that brings his ears to attention again, but he soldiers on. As I take a step backward to give him more access, I throw a wrench into these promising works: I stumble a bit on a stack of wooden mats, causing Gus to shy away and bolt into the middle of the arena. I retrieve him and we walk around a few times, keeping our distance from the pram. We walk over ground-poles, we halt, we circle. Now we return to the pram, and Gus sniffs and nudges and bites it, seeming interested but not alarmed.
We take more breaks from exploring the baby buggy, and each time we return to it, he’s more confident. He’s even fine when I roll it back and forth and jounce it a little. I click when he noses the handle, but he keeps placing his snout under the handle and bumping it upward. That’s his SOP for righting the up-ended chair; however, the technique for pram-pushing will require forward contact, not tilting. I’ll need to click as his nose touches the handle head-on but before it slips under and starts to lift. I’m gearing up for eagle eyes and a quick tongue.
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