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!