89. VIDEO: Pain and pleasure

The soppy, gloppy springtime is always risky for Gus’s hooves.  Last spring he picked up a touch of thrush — a fungal infection of the frog, the soft V-shaped lump on the underside of the hoof — which cleared up easily with medication.  This spring he’s been a tiny bit sore on and off, and since it seemed to resolve once he got warmed up and moving, I figured it was just arthritis.  But today he’s almost head-bobbing lame when each front foot hits the ground.  I find iodine and a dropper outside his stall, and Sandy explains that he has white-line disease — it’s fungal and bacterial, and it can cause the outer hoof wall to crack and pull away from the core of the hoof.  Ick! and owww!   It needs to be stopped pronto.

I figure some games and treats will help distract Gus from his ouchiness, so we try some slow, easy interactions.  When I offer him the baby carriage, he perks right up — the joy of pushing it clearly trumps the pain of walking.  But I don’t want him stressing his hooves too much; to save him from himself, I put the carriage away early.  Now he indulges in his favorite self-soothing activity: rolling in the dirt.  Weight is off his feet, the dust and wood shavings provide a nice back scratch, and he luxuriates in the whole procedure:

I give him a nice rubdown, and Sandy adds an anti-inflammatory to his dinner.  I squirt iodine onto his hooves, aiming for where the white-line crack might be developing.  Now he’s frankly limping on his way out to the paddock, and Sandy contemplates soaking or packing his feet, to keep more iodine on them longer.  We’ll see how he does tomorrow.  Ever the hedonist and never the stoic, he’ll show us clearly just how he feels.

88. VIDEO: Chain of events

Gus now has the pram-pushing down pat.  And he has the pompom retrieve.  And he has the pedestal.  All three are pretty “hot” in his mind:  he loves doing them (for whatever inscrutable asinine reasons).  Our current project is to chain them into a full-blown stupid pet trick:  push the carriage, stop and reach inside to pull out the pompom, bring the pompom to the pedestal, step up and wave the pompom.  

To teach a multistep behavior, many trick-trainers use “back-chaining” — teaching the final move first, then adding the next-to-last move with the final one, then adding the previous move in front of the last two, etc., etc.  Since Gus has already learned the pedestal and the pompom, we’re essentially back-chaining by putting the newer pram-pushing trick at the front of the sequence.  Anyway, Gus is such an A student that it probably doesn’t matter; he easily handles new and old learning in any permutation.  (I can’t believe I’m discussing this ridiculosity in a serious, expository format, but we’re in semi-lockdown because of the coronavirus, so donkey training is one of my few remaining outlets for work or play.)

For our audience-pleasing Pompom Surprise, the main complications for our intrepid performer are (a) reaching into the pram when you have a short donkey neck and (b) resisting the urge to reach in and reveal the pompom too soon.  Here’s how it’s going so far:

I’ve learned that Gus does not have a reliable “leave it” on a verbal cue after all; that will take more practice, with the pompom and in plenty of other contexts to make sure it’s solid.  And I’ve seen that Gus will have no trouble adding a move-to-the-side maneuver in order to position himself for reaching into the pram comfortably.  Our fine-tuning agenda is clear and achievable.

87. Sprung

Spring has begun just enough that Gus has the fever — grass greed, reefer madness — and, with it, shocking bad manners.  Under the matted, dead, yellow, dry turf he’s found a few quarter-inch shoots of fresh green grass, and he’s adamant that nothing can come between him and them.  

Two days ago, after an excellent session of dressagey work and trick performances, I took him outside to graze, and he mashed his muzzle onto the ground to tweeze up the tiny grasslets, after 15 minutes of which, he consented to be led into his stall.  Today as I bring him out of his paddock, he eyes the ground tentatively before coming along to the arena.  Once inside, he rolls luxuriously, stands up, and immediately drags me back toward the arena gate.  For months, we’ve worked in the arena day in and day out, so it’s high time for a day off; I surprise him by opening the gate and leading him straight out for grazing.  I give him a full 30 minutes of chewy indulgence.

When I lead Gus off the grass and back into his stall, he barely demurs.  But when I latch only the top part of his stall guard and turn away just to grab a brush and hoof pick, he suddenly lowers his head, crouches, and slams under the guard.  He heads for the barn door, but Sandy and Barbara happen to be standing there talking and intercept him.  I rehalter him and suggest a return to his stall.  He’s having none of it.  He surges ahead, Sandy tries to block him head-on, and he offers to plow her down in her tracks.  She sidesteps and grabs his rope, and both of us get towed out to the driveway until, with our four hands and two body weights, we manage to stop him.  Gus at full steam is so powerful that, in his effort to wrestle free of us, he actually rears a bit.  Once I get him turned back toward the barn, I begin leading him semi-forcibly while Sandy shoos him with outstretched arms, and about halfway down the barn aisle he formally surrenders and walks into his stall.

I latch the top and bottom of his stall guard (which he realizes with a thud when he tries to reprise his ducking-under escape) before I reach for his brush.  Once contained, though, he summarily mellows out, chews hay, and welcomes affection and grooming.  You’d never know this was the same madding brute that nearly trampled two strong women just a half-minute earlier.  One deep ear-scrub later, and his bottom lip is dangling in a trance of bliss.

86. VIDEO: Parts per million

With Gus’s tolerance of the spritz bottle getting stronger every day, I now up the ante and switch from water to actual fly spray.  This stuff combines permethrin with a lemony citronella scent.  It’s not a chemical/medicinal smell, but Gus knows it’s fly spray and he says the hell with it.  When I squirt just a teeny bit out into the barn aisle and then offer the butt end of the bottle to him, he backs away with an unmistakeable pee-yew expression on his face.  As I catch a whiff myself, I can hardly blame him:  the citronella is strong and sharp, and it’s a scent commonly used not only in mosquito repellent but in dog and deer repellents too.

We dial back several steps.  First, I mix just a drop of the fly spray into a bottle full of plain water.  I can still smell it, but it’s a lot less noisome.  Gus agrees, and touches the open bottle a few times.  Since the crappy little trigger on the bottle jams and fails, I return to using the actual fly-spray bottle, with its full-strength scent.  This, of course, is a mistake.

Gus tolerates the tiny squirts out in the aisle, but when I spritz in just a nanosecond burst anywhere nearer to him, he departs and refuses to play this smelly game.  I wait.  And wait.  And finally click him just for looking at the spray bottle.  That entices him to return to me and even touch the bottle again.  But I press my luck, spritz again, and lose him.  

I’ll need a working spray bottle, for ve-e-ery gradually increasing the solution strength.  And I’ll need plenty of patience, for even more gradually moving the spritzes nearer to him.

85. VIDEO: Call the nanny

Gus is now pushing the baby pram pretty reliably, with just a few regressions into Godzilla mode.  Much as he enjoys ramming it hard and watching it topple, he'd almost always rather earn treats for pushing it gently and smoothly -- and many paces without my touching the handle at all -- in a consistently forward direction.  While his early pram-pushing would've appalled even the stoniest Child Protective Services veteran, he might soon enter the elite ranks of super-nanny:

84. VIDEO: Kegger

When the equines have to stay in their stalls because of bad weather, Sandy gives all or most of them an executive desk toy to help pass the time.  A Bubba Keg is a cylindrical, screw-top beverage cooler with a spigot near the bottom.  Just pop out the spigot, fill the keg with hay stretchers or other small treats, and let the horse knock it about to make the treats fall out sporadically from the spigot hole. For dogs, I've found the keg more durable (and quieter) than a Bustercube, a plastic toy with a labyrinth inside from which treats are dispensed eratically with motion.

While Reggie the brown dog pushes the keg with his nose, just as the horses do with theirs, he still hasn’t learned the horse-sense technique that gets the highest ratio of treat-release to time spent.  While he just rolls it along in one direction until it hits a wall or a piece of furniture, Gus and his cohorts make sure to orient the Bubba Keg with the hole downward and then rock it, in short strokes, back and forth very quickly.  Here, Gus provides a brief demo: