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 . . .

92. We’ll never know for sure . . .

. . . whether Gus’s relief from foot pain is due to the iodine soaks or just drier paddock footing and his own immune system.  But neither he nor Sandy nor I could give a rat's patoot: we’re just glad he’s feeling comfortable again.  

His biggest problem lately is hoovering up the lush, new grass blades as piggishly as possible whenever he gets a chance to apply his muscular muzzle to the greensward.  Tough life.

91. Iodized

Soaking Gus’s feet turns out to be suprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult.  We heat water in an electric kettle and mix it with cold water from the spigot, and we add a big squirt of iodine.  We start with a small, shallow, rubber feed tub and do one hoof at a time.  Sandy hunkers down in the shavings of the stall floor, slides the bucket into position near his feet, asks him to pick up his foot as if she were going to pick the hoof, and then sets the foot down in the bucket.  Slowly.  Gently.  Sneakily.  All the while, I’m clicking and treating for his cooperation.

While he stands there foot-bucketed, Sandy massages his legs and I play “the grownups are talking.”  I give the hands-clasped cue, and the moment he turns his face away a bit, I click and treat.  We start by repeating this at a rate of one treat per second for at least half a minute.  Then we slow down only slightly for the next 15 minutes or so.  Gus stands like a rock the whole time, as long as I keep playing the game with frequent clicks and treats.  Then we soak the other foot, for almost as long. Can you say “teeeedious”?

Today we use a much wider tub that can accommodate both front feet together.  I try to save Sandy’s time by handling the job myself, and soon I wish I hadn’t.  Kneeling in the stall and maneuvering the wide, floppy bucket, I accidentally slop some of the solution onto Gus’s fresh bed of shavings.  Then I struggle to maneuver one foot into the bucket, while handing treats up to his mouth from my position at his feet.  When I place his right foot in, he stands like a good soldier, but as soon as I touch his left foot to the water, he pops backward, catching the lip of the bucket with his heel and spilling most of the remaining contents.  Annoyed and wet-ankled, he retreats to the far corner of his stall.  I retreat to the electric kettle to start the hell over. 

More cajoling and gentling, more sudden hoof withdrawals, and I throw in the (sodden, orange-stained) towel.  I ask Sandy to help.  She explains that Gus is unaccountably fussy about his left foot, so that’s the one to put into the tub first.  Sure enough, once the left settles in, adding the right is no problem (for her, anyway), and she leaves me to finish the treatment.  After approximately 6,287 iterations of “grownups,” Gus lowers his head and holds it down for a beat.  It’s an old trick that Sandy taught him years ago and I’ve almost never used, but once I tumble to what he’s doing, I click and treat for it.  Now we play “head down” another 793 times.  Hey, whatever keeps him stationary and soaking . . .

Because Sandy and I think it’s working, killing the white-line microbes.  We agree that Gus is now walking normally (without any doses of bute) and acting like his usual ornery self.  I think I notice something a bit stiff or ginger when he plants his front feet on a wooden mat or on the pedestal.  And I’m pretty sure he’s still slightly ouchy when he weights his front end to execute a turn with his hind feet.  But in general, I’d rate his ambulatory comfort as 80 to 90 percent improved.

That’s a big yay for him.  And a relief for us too, as we hope just a couple more scramble-and-soak sessions might effect a full cure.

90. Pain and pleasure redux

Gus’s front feet are still ouchy.  He stumps along with his head lowered, and totters a bit on uneven ground.  He doesn’t want to walk much, let alone trot.  Making a turn is clearly uncomfortable:  he stutter-steps and staggers until he’s walking straight ahead again.

He makes a miraculous recovery when he gets a dose of the anti-inflamatory phenylbutazone, or bute.  He marches right into the arena, ears up and eager for fun.  He instigates round after round of trotting.  At one point, as we’re trotting in a big loop, he hauls me off the circle and veers off to the pedestal, upon which he pops his front feet with a joyous toss of his head.  Before I even cue him, he begins pirouetting around it with verve and panache; and he does it in the other direction too.  I'm afraid to let him do too much fancy footwork, but it’s gladdening to see him so frisky.

When Sandy skips the bute, to see how he feels without it, he limps pitiably as we walk to the arena.  He’s willing to come when I pat my belly, and he’s willing to walk alongside me, so he gets clicks and treats for that.  The more he walks, it seems, the better he feels.  At one point, he noses the big beachball, which we haven’t played with in a long time.  I roll it slowly and he chases it, at the walk, and bops it nicely with his nose.  Click and treat for that too.  He wants to keep chasing and bopping the beachball several times around the arena, so I indulge him.  It’s a tad depressing — like watching a frail old man who’s determined to totter around a playing field that used to be the scene of his youthful glories.  But I stick with it as long as Gus wants to.

When we pause at the opened door at one end of the arena — from here, he can spy on the big geldings out in their paddock — he remembers that the chain-link gate across the doorway can sometimes be nosed open.  He presses his whole forehead and face against it a few times, but opposable thumbs have foiled him: we’ve attached a bungee cord to keep it latched.  Since he’s clearly interested in egress, and since I’m happy to end our session without stressing his feet any further, I bring him to the proper arena gate and we go out for some grazing.

A  classic white-line-disease
groove around the toe

Back in his stall, I pick out his hooves and squirt iodine on the soles of the front hooves, near the toes where white-line disease strikes.  I can’t see any line or groove there, but I do see a small round dent in the toe of his right hoof, which I had written off as nothing more than a shallow chip.  Sandy and I confer.  She recalls Gus having white line once before (it seems donkeys are more susceptible than horses), and she knows that it can indeed cause holes, not just grooves or cracks.  Apparently it can cause all manner of disintegration in the hoof wall.  Yuck.

Sandy crouches and rests the hoof on her knee so that she can closely examine the dent.  Suspecting that it’s deeper than it looks, she digs at it carefully, trying to open it up so that iodine can get into it.  Gus tolerates this with little fuss — it’s hard to tell if his foot is sensitive to her pokes and prods.

An advanced case —we won’t let Gus’s
get anywhere near this severe

We discuss calling a vet.  Most refuse to deal with Gus because he’s so violently obstreperous with them, and Sandy figures that any new vet would get the same evil welcome, because Gus perceives their medicinal or previous-horse-stress aromas from afar and instantly panics.  Anyway, we’re 95 percent sure this isn’t orthopedic or organic, so it’s more in the wheelhouse of a farrier.  We decide to start soaking his hoof twice a day in warm water and iodine, in hopes that will seep into the infection better and finally clear it out.  If need be, Sandy will call her doughty and savvy farrier, whose patience over the years has wormed him into Gus’s good graces.  

And for now she’ll keep dosing Gus with bute.  That gives him such relief that he’ll be, almost literally, dancing for joy.