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.
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