141. Disobedience training

Just as Gus gets rejuvenated by antibiotics (had he been harboring some other, subclinical bug for awhile, and the doxy has cured that too?), winter weather puts a nip in the air that perks up all the equids.  After a summer and fall of exemplary cooperation in the training arena, Gus 2.0 is sass on a stick:  refusing to budge, spinning away, barging, and generally blowing a big raspberry at humans one and all.

He happily enters the arena with me but immediately acts up.  I’m hurrying to unbuckle and remove his winter blanket, but he won’t stand for it — he tries to pull away and go roll.  Once he's naked and he does roll, he wants to run, run, run.  And I accommodate him, trotting alongside over ground poles and between mats and around in big circles.  When I get winded, I shove the enormous beachball for him to chase and bop with his nose.  He doesn’t just trot after it; he gallops and kicks out behind and grunts with gleeful ferocity.  He can barely contain himself.  So of course the arena can’t contain him either.  Suddenly he veers away from the beachball chase and makes for the arena gate, diving under it and scooting out of the barn at warp speed.

I follow along and find him trotting silly circles around his favorite grazing field.  The grass (its sugar content rises, I’m told, when it’s stressed by cold nights and sunny days) seems irresistible to all the horses these days.  But Gus is so jazzed that he doesn’t settle right down to grazing.  As I enter the field, just ambling and with no intention of trying to catch him, he bounces away on his short little legs, farts in my general direction, and kicks up his heels.  I join the game, clapping my hands and swirling the lead rope, which sends him cantering off like a goat on a pogo stick.  After a few circuits of the field, he does get down to grazing, and I let him.  No point in fighting that kind of energy.

Two days later, I attempt again to lead Gus in his favorite games, trotting from mat to mat, stomping the pedal of the bass drum, honking the horn, pushing the baby carriage . . .  Except for drumming, he has no patience for any of it.  He trots to one mat, tries to yaw away, consents to be led toward the next mat, and then stops dead and won't budge.  Next he pushes the baby buggy for a few feet, then bops it violently and upends it.  I barely foil an escape attempt, and I get him to cha-cha backward away from the arena gate.  He loves the cha-cha, but after several repetitions when I suggest we move to a mat, he actually rears a bit, two inches in front of me!  Then he cranks his neck and hauls me away.  

Whatever I offer him, he gives it the bum’s rush and pulls toward the exit.  I drape the gate with a tarp so his escape route under it looks blocked, but that only ratchets up his destructiveness:  he rams his chest against the gate like a linebacker, detaching its far end from the wall and knocking over nearby chairs . . .  Might as well try to keep Godzilla behind velvet theater ropes.

It’s at this juncture that, I confess, I punch him hard in the neck and call him a Very Bad Name.  He notices just enough to fling his chin high in defiance; there’s no penetrating that thick ego of his.  I collect my cool, entice him into one more set of cha-cha, and promptly effect our exit, this time with human consent and proper escort.  

As he gobbles the turf like a starveling, I use the time to recall the mayhem and despair of many a puppy kindergarten.  In these “training” classes, hapless dog owners are each orbited by an out-of-control puppy spinning on the end of the leash like a pinwheel.  The humans try to impose some modicum of order on each furry blur by means of voices and hands and treats, until they’re red-faced and casting around for a stout length of two-by-four.  Every time I’ve joined a puppy class, I’ve been convinced my dog is learning nothing and the training is useless.  But by the final session, I notice that the chaos has ebbed to a dull roar; and by the time I enroll us in adult-dog class, I realize that my youngster absorbed a lot of the puppy lessons and is fully able to learn more.

I also reminisce on the first few times I worked with Gus.  He refused to cooperate, he ran away, he broke things — and I came back the next day and simply tried the same training again.  And again.  And again.  Consistent repetition, frequent reinforcement for the right behaviors, steady expectations, unflagging persistence . . . they do eventually succeed.  

At least that’s my mantra for riding out this latest surge of asininity.  The new and improved Gus may bash me with his tidal waves, but I am a rock.  Eventually his seas will calm again.  Either that, or Sandy and I will shoot him dead and bury him in a shallow grave.

140. Under the weather

Even Gus never looked this miserable...

Gus is sick.  And he’d like you to know it.  Never a stoic, he now looks like Eeyore at his most dejected.  His walk is a slog, and his trot and canter are AWOL.  He doesn’t tug on his lead rope, or push his chest against the gate, or grab for handouts.  When I bring him into the arena, he crumples to the ground and starts a desultory roll.  Then he just lies there and naps.  I sit beside him for awhile, scritching his ears and whispering sweet nothings.  After 20 minutes, I try to get him back on his feet by luring him with treats and then brandishing a lunge whip, but all in vain.  So I call for Sandy.

She feels his joints and looks in his eyes, which all seem fine.  She takes his temperature, and even that anal insult arouses no indignation.  He has a moderate fever, a bit over 102 degrees.  We’ve seen this before:  the horse is looking great one day, and the next day it’s feverish and lethargic and off its feed.  It’s anaplasmosis, another tick-borne disease rather like Lyme.  Cool fall weather brings the ticks out in droves from the weedy thickets that edge the paddocks, and Sandy has dealt with vets and doxycycline for at least three horses in the past few months.  

Since her regular vet has essentially refused to examine or treat Gus, thanks to his near-death experience when he did try once, Sandy knows a vet visit would entail violent panic, a heavy tranquilizer administered at great risk, and all kinds of money and misery.  Instead she phones the vet, who provides good advice and an okay to use leftover doxycycline from her meds cabinet.

Sandy manages to squirt some bute — basically, horse aspirin — into Gus’s unwilling mouth, and his fever drops to normal within an hour.  I can tell his eye is brighter, and his energy is rebounding.  Then she starts him on the doxy (a powder stirred into his grain, which he eats up without demur), and within 48 hours he’s morphed into the spawn of Satan.  He now feels so much better that he’s utterly ungovernable.  Every day he yanks the lead rope out of her hands, gallops off with a snotty kick of his heels, and dodges away with a head toss when she approaches.  Sandy quips to me, behind her hand:  “I liked him better when he was a bit sick.”

139. Donkzilla on the loose

Even the massively up-armored foot pedal, which Gus uses to beat the bass drum, already looks scuffed and battered.  Why did I harbor the least hope that the naked pedal for the hi-hat cymbals could survive his attentions?  Of course, it doesn’t.  Perhaps it was gradually weakened by a few weeks of microaggressions; anyway, one particularly emphatic stomp cracks the footplate neatly in two — the exact same break that he inflicted on the other pedal.

My doughty amateur-fabricator friend again saves the day, making a barn call to detach the pedal from the hi-hat stem and taking it home to be reinforced.  I’ll be baking him a Very Nice cake indeed . . .  Meantime, Gus and I play with the still-intact keyboard, bass drum, and bulb horn.  

I screw two rails onto his bandstand so I can slot the keyboard between them, to prevent his shoving it off the back edge and onto the arena floor.  That works fine for a few days.  But Destructo Donkey figures out that the keyboard can still slide sideways, so doesn’t he nose it right out between the rails?  He watches it hit the dirt with interest and satisfaction.  I curse him lustily.

In a pilot project to affix the horn to the bandstand, Barbara lends me a fishing-rod-like cat toy.  I use the clamp that came with the horn for attaching its barrel to a bicycle’s handlebars, though the cat-toy wand is so thin that I need to squash a thick rubber washer inside the clamp as I tighten down the screws.  This works pretty well:  the rod is flexible enough to bend as Gus bites the horn and then, when he spits it out, to bounce back upright, ready for his next grab.  

Again, though, all my ingenuity is dust in the gale-force wind of donkey determination.  The rod is slippery-smooth, and the clamp can’t clamp it hard enough: when Gus tugs at the horn he often pulls it off the rod and spits it onto the floor.  So it’s back to the drawing board for me.  Even once I locate a suitable spring or antenna or dressage whip that I can clamp the horn to, I’m sure it’ll take a few tries to install the bottom end of the wand/whip on the bandstand.  It needs to stand up enough to present the horn at donkey-mouth level, and it needs to bend and bow enough to be bitten, tugged on, and spat out repeatedly during a concert.

Am I flailing and failing?  Nope, I’m not even ankle deep in a slough of despond.  Everybody is still learning and making progress.  Gus’s urge to unseat the keyboard is an excellent opportunity for more Leave-it practice.  And holding the cat-toy wand in my hand is a great way for him to practice finding the horn with his mouth as it bobs and sways.  He’s a bit annoyed at first, but in no time he’s following it and gathering it up with his capacious lips.  He’ll have this skill down pat when we finally get the horn attached to the bandstand.  Provided he doesn’t bash said bandstand to smithereens . . .

138. Maestro in the making

Now that Gus is mastering the keyboard, cymbals, bike horn, and bass drum in a near-simultaneous one-man orchestra, the job of conductor falls to me.  He knows verbal cues such as “play it” for the piano and “honk it” for the horn, but I stupidly adopted “stomp it” for both of his pedal-operated instruments.  Not only does “stomp it” sound very similar to “honk it” — especially amid the din of squawks and clashes — but it leaves me no way to distinguish between the bass drum and the hi-hat cymbals.  What I need is a gestural cue for each instrument.  That’ll help clarify matters for Gus, plus it’ll enhance the overall performative hilarity for any audience.

I begin by combining a well-established verbal with a brand-new gesture:  to ask Gus to run his nose along the keyboard, I say “play it” while I also sweep my arm sideways over the keyboard.  After maybe half a dozen repetitions, I switch to saying nothing as I sweep my arm, and he catches on to the gesture well enough to respond pretty reliably.  For the cymbals, I combine the usual “stomp it” with a new motion that’s a dramatic, whole-arm finger-point at the pedal.  Again, he picks up the new cue in no time.  I figure I can use a big pointing signal for the bass drum too, since that gets placed on the other side of his bandstand; in fact, I’ll use right hand for one and left for the other.

Now, what about the bike horn?  My plan is to try repeating a thumb-and-fingers squeeze motion, if for no better reason than I bet I can remember it easily, as it’s how I naturally play that horn myself.  And I expect to need every possible advantage, if I’m to be accurately pointing and sweeping in real time with Gus’s up-tempo, bebop musicality.

137. VIDEO: Winds and percussion

Gus has taken to all his musical instruments like a duck to water, so he’s ready to tackle some combination exercises.  He’s already had a taste of this, taking turns honking the horn and tickling the ivories.  Now here’s a start with the horn and the bass drum (and that fifth leg you see? that’s him dangling with delight):

 

136. VIDEO: Crabwise

As true twinkletoes, Gus’s little donkey hooves are flittering in all directions.  His chacha alongside me continues to improve, and his back-and-forward chacha facing me is so nimble and quick that he also uses it to locate and repeat-stomp the pedals for the hi-hat cymbals and the bass drum.  Now I’m teaching him how to sidepass, and he’s picking it up with his usual handiness and talent.

In Western and trail riding, a classic way to teach the sidepass is to have the horse straddle a rail laid on the ground: forefeet on one side of it, rear feet on the other.  Along with rein and leg signals from the rider, the ground pole encourages the horse to move only sideways so as to avoid clunking its feet against the obstacle.  

With Gus, since he’s so cued in on matching my steps, I wonder if I can simply stand next to him and model a sidestep.  To help light the path, I plop down three wooden mats right next to each other.  With him standing at one end of the mat row, I stand at his side, say “mat,” and kinda nudge him sideways while taking one big, dramatic lateral step toward his feet.  At first he turns a bit to face the next mat, or he takes a step back or forward, or he stands pat and stares inquiringly at my boots.  

I keep trying slightly different body language to see what might read to him best — not the clarity and consistency you’d want for training a dog or a horse, but I hazard that Gus can handle it.  Through it all, does he object?  Does he lose his cool?  Does he give up and quit the scene?  Not a bit of it.  He keeps lining up again, he keeps trying to decipher what the hell I’m asking for, and he keeps tweezing out the key information.  He also keeps getting treats for good efforts.  He might as well wear a sandwich board: “will work for food.”

After just three or four tries, I say “mat” and he shuffles sideways toward the nextdoor mat.  Big clicks and treats.  Soon he adds another shuffle to move all the way over onto the mat.  And before I know it, he’s actually crossing his feet to perform a genuine sidestep, at least some of the time.

 

As we refine the exercise, I’ll separate the mats farther apart and then do without them altogether.  And very soon, I’ll replace “mat” with “sideways,” so that we can keep our original “go mat” cue and also have an independent and distinct sidepass cue.

What’s it all in aid of?  Not one damn practical thing.  But how fetching will those little hooves look as they cross and recross in a donkey dance?

135. Asstagram

Yep, Gus and I are now cross-platforming: check out gus_donkeytrain on Instagram here.  

 

133. VIDEO: A hop, skip, and a thump

Gus catches sight of the big bass drum and he’s nothing but curious.  At first he hopes it’s a new beach ball that he can bop and roll, but he soon takes to the pedal-stomping that makes it thump. 

With the beater attached to the pedal, and with the pedal parked right up next to the drum, it’s a little awkward for him to find and strike the footplate accurately.  Its action is also springier than the hi-hat’s pedal, so the rebound seems to toss his hoof off-kilter a bit, making it hard to keep his foot in a good place for repeated stomps.  But Gus soldiers on.  In fact, he just won’t quit.  After awhile, I have to tear him away and stash the pedal and the drum out of sight.

We’re ready to advance yet again, so our next lesson will be honking the bicycle horn while beating the drum.

132. VIDEO: Step aside, Buddy

Gus’s musical career is booming.  And jingling.  And shimmering.  Turns out he loves the hi-hat cymbals.  

To the separate, fully donkey-proofed pedal, I’ve attached a pressed-felt drum beater, but Gus doesn’t even notice.  Since I began by blitz-treating him when he stepped on the pedal once, I now need to teach him the toe-tapping technique of pressing it repeatedly.  He’s kinda made a start himself, simply because he loves doing it so much that he eagerly re-stomps after he steps back.  But today I try using our chacha cues in a smaller and quicker way:  I put my arms akimbo and instantly take them back down again, to give a go-back and come-forward signal.  And Gus freakin’ gets it.  !!!  We practice this a few times, and at each tiny gesture of my elbows he gives a slight foot-lift and rapid re-stomp.  Massive clicking and treating assure him that this is as fun and wonderful as it feels.

Next we move to the cymbals themselves, with the as-yet-unreinforced pedal attached.  He likes to nose them and get a shimmery sound, and I still click for that.  But now I ask him to find and use the pedal, even though it’s mounted so close to the central stalk of the hi-hat stand that he has to reach his foot forward and tolerate the cymbals nearly touching his chest.  To show him the idea, I lift and drop my own foot near the pedal; I step on the pedal; I tell him to “stomp it” as I did for the unattached pedal; and I give him time to cogitate.  When he lifts his foot but doesn’t quite reach the pedal, I click and treat for that good effort.  Within seconds, his foot finds the pedal and he stomps.  Now I try the minimal akimbo-chacha gesture, and again Gus freakin’ gets it.  An avid percussionist, he never flinches when I reset the cymbals farther apart for a louder crash.  He’s wailing away like Buddy Rich reincarnated as an ass.  He and I are equally transported by delight.

Gus’s new-found love of the hi-hat convinces me that he might dig the bass drum too.  Before I haul the thing to the barn, I run a little test: I move the beater-equipped pedal next to a wall, so that he can hear it bang when he activates the pedal.  The wall panel isn’t as resonant as the drum will be, but I want just a rough preview of his reaction to the sound.

Before we can try it, though, Gus informs me that this thing is scary and weird and he’s having none of it.  It’s the beater and its boingy up-and-down motion that flummoxes him.  When he’s stomping it in mid-arena, the contraption is underfoot and therefore pretty much invisible; his big head blocks his view, and he’s playing blind.  But now that it’s out in front of him, he doesn’t like what he sees.  So we spend several minutes touching the goblin, watching it move from different angles, etc., etc.  At last he believes that the menacing flapdoodle is actually safe, and he pretty readily transfers his stomping skills into this new location.  And the beater thudding the wall gives him no pause whatever.  

Next up — dare I?  — the bass drum. 

 

131. Harvest salad

Here are a few more botanical observations derived from watching Gus graze. 

The grass is surprisingly lush and tender for this time of year, and I just learned that its sugar content rises when it gets stressed by cold nights and then has warm sunny days to recover.  So autumn grasses can be as delicious as spring growth, I guess. 

 

But lately Gus is widening his selections.  There’s some lance-leaved kind of plantain, still fresh and green, that he seeks out; and the clover is still good, whether it’s the yellow-blooming hop clover that grows low in the sand or the white- and red-flowered varieties that live among the grass in richer soils.  For more roughage, Gus chooses weeds that have gone by, including dried-up Queen Anne’s lace and fading bedstraw.  

He also goes for mulberry-tree leaves and even twigs, chewing them right up as if they were as tender as grass blades (though they’re much louder as his teeth grind them).  The mulberries are long gone, eaten by birds the instant they got ripe, but evidently the leaves are a toothsome treat as well.

As much as he savors his grazing, Gus has almost totally stopped digging in his heels any more when I pick his head up and walk him off the lawn.  He may yaw or lean back, but I circle him and slacken the lead line to avoid any tug-o-war, and after just one or two of these mild objections he accedes and marches obediently all the way back to his stall. I always tell him it’s nearly dinner time, and I think he must understand the word “dinner” by now.  And I never lie:  I time our return to the barn to coincide with Sandy’s feeding schedule.  Sometimes I even wait and let him watch her pull the little wagon of feed buckets across the driveway toward his barn.  I wasn’t born yesterday, and neither was he.

130. VIDEO: Revised flight plan

Now that Gus has conducted a thorough visual inventory of the hi-hat cymbals, it’s time to face the music (ahem) and learn to tolerate the noise they make.  I barely touch the pedal, to make the cymbals tinkle, and he doesn’t love it.  But he keeps coming back, and soon he’s nuzzling and lipping the cymbals himself.  I back away from the pedal and let him make his own music, which he clearly enjoys.  Just ten minutes earlier, he was fighting his fears to touch the goblin while it was silenced; now he’s banging away like a seasoned percussionist:

129. VIDEO: Flight plan

For Gus, music does not soothe the savage breast; it scares the bejeepers out of it.  But only at first.  When he first touched the toy keyboard and a note rang out, he shot backward with an offended look on his face.  And when he first chomped on the bulb of the bike horn, he couldn’t spit it out fast enough.  Only after he recognized that his own actions control the sounds did he come to appreciate the joy of making music.  As a brand-new instrument, the hi-hat cymbals would, I knew, require a similar desensitization process.

Today I bring them in.  Immediately inquisitive, Gus approaches.  Then I gently press the pedal to bang the two cymbals softly, and Gus spooks.  His ears spring forward and he stares.  Still, this isn't his first rodeo; he’s been asked to touch a vast array of suspicious articles, and not one has bitten his face off.   So when I suggest that he touch the cymbals, he’s guardedly optimistic.  I hold them apart to prevent them making any noise.  He lips them gingerly, survives, and now gets curious again. 

As I systematically show him every inch and angle, each new aspect elicits survival-mode apprehension.  But after just one or two touches he’s ready to reclassify that aspect as unthreatening and to evaluate the next aspect:

128. VIDEO: Stompin’ donkey

The hi-hat pedal is now up-armored and virtually bombproof.  My tinkerer friend went above and beyond, adding a wide slab at the bottom, bolting a new footplate onto the broken one and covering it in thick blaze-orange duct tape, installing a padded seat for the footplate to hit when it’s depressed, improving the bicycle chain, and spray-painting the whole thing black.  It’s a marvel of DIY engineering.

As Gus and I resume our pedal-stomping practice, I find he hasn’t lost a step during the repair-work hiatus.  From his prior batting average of about .500 before inflicting the compound fracture to the pedal, within a couple minutes now he’s hitting .750 or so.  And he’s just as obsessed too, immediately striding forward after each step-off.  I can barely get the treat to his mouth before he’s reaching for the pedal again:

Once the pedal connects to a percussion instrument and he feels the gratifying agency of making noise, I fear he’ll be unstoppable . . .

127. Indoor amusements

This summer in upstate New York, with its hot draught in April and May followed by steamy monsoons in July and August, has produced a bumper crop of biting flies.  Even a normal summer’s worth of ankle-sucking stable flies and ear-biting face gnats is enough to drive Gus around the bend, fly mask and fly socks notwithstanding.  This year, faced with thick swarms of bugs (and a massive, mucky rain puddle at his pasture gate), Gus was simply refusing to be led to his paddock almost every day.

At first, Sandy allowed him choose alternative paddocks, as he gets along quite well with all the horses and often enjoys visiting their turnouts.  But no matter which group or which location he’d opt for, after an hour or two he’d get bored or annoyed, and out he would come.  It’s easy for him:  he just pushes his shoulder, or cranks his head, against a board until it breaks and he can squeeze under, over, or through.  Some fences are protected by a string of electrified wire running along their top edges, and if the juice is turned up high enough, electric can deter even a determined donkey.  But because Gus is so short, he scoots under the wire; and because horses’ legs are so fragile, it’s unsafe to run the wire down low.

This leaves Sandy with no choice but to shut Gus in his stall inside the barn all day.  He hates that, but perhaps not as much as he hates being outdoors.  Only a small fraction of the biting flies come into the barn, plus each stall has a big box fan strapped to its front grille.  The breeze helps blow away the heat and the bugs.  It’s uninteresting and solitary, but it’s comfortable.

For me, Gus’s daytime confinement (he still goes out to pasture all night, when the flies are much less obnoxious) means he’s extra-eager for our training sessions.  Before I finish parking my car, I’m greeted by a long, loud bagpipe-bassoon duet, and if I stop to chat or otherwise delay my arrival at his stall door, I hear more braying.  Gus is so happy to get out of the stall and into the arena that he readily performs any and all tricks I suggest; I almost always run out of treats well before his interest wanes.  

And he invents new games too.  When we find two 50-gallon barrels set up in the arena, he develops a particular walking pattern around and between them, which he wants to continue ad nauseam.  Also, he inexplicably turns his erstwhile pirouetting trick around the pedestal into a climb-aboard trick instead.  I’ve named this new trick “all four,” but now I need to reinforce his crowd-pleasing standard “step over” so that he doesn’t utterly abandon that front-feet-up twirl in favor of his new favorite all-four-feet-up trick.  No wonder he’s so keen on learning to step on the drum-set pedal.  To keep up with his newfound avidity, I fear I really will need to bring him a chess set or a trampoline or . . .

126. Destructo donkey strikes again

Today, Gus hits the pedal at a funny angle and flips it over.  He’s unperturbed, but now it’s cockahoop and I have to cram its side rails back into alignment.  The delay of game makes him antsy; he’s shoving his nose into the proceedings and wishing I would hurry the hell up.  I do get it fixed, but a few minutes later he stomps it a little bit off-center again, and the footplate itself snaps in two right across the middle.  It looks like it was cast from cheap pot metal, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it flunked the donkey destruction test. 

My plan was always to attach the hi-hat stand to a pyramid of two-by-fours or some other sturdy structural support, and I figured I might also need to widen the surface of the pedal just for visibility.  Having the pedal broken in half hardly matters:  I can still use four (or six) bolts to attach a thin square of plywood to its surface.  That’ll reinforce it against 700 pounds of donkey and also spread the impact over a wider area.  I show the pedal wreckage to a friend who’s an avid handyman and customizer, and he generously offers to make the repairs for me.  He’s thinking of rivets, and he’s pondering plywood vs. plexiglass, and then he asks about widening the base as well so as to minimize any future flipovers.  Now he’s got a nifty new project and with a spring in his step he takes the thing away to his workshop.

While it’s up on blocks, Gus and I are practicing the keyboard and bicycle horn, getting those instruments down pat in preparation for adding the cymbals.  It’ll be a crazy-ass one-man band, fer sherr . . .

125. VIDEO: Pedal mettle

Shopping success at last:  I score a hi-hat cymbals set at a yard sale.  I have to buy the matching snare, two toms, and bass drum as well, which I’ll give away at some point.  My plan for introducing the hi-hat to Gus was to start with just the detached foot pedal, and by luck the seller separated the bass drum’s pedal when loading it into my car.  That gives me two pedals to work with, which makes me willing to start training before trying to donkey-proof or reinforce the thing.  I was pleased to see how well it seems to be built — thick metal, a bicycle chain, a strong spring . . .   But who knows whether Gus will totally trash it, or what modifications it might need for equine-user-friendliness.

I begin, as I do for all unfamiliar items, with “touch.”  Gus is rarely spooked by any visible object, and sure enough he willingly noses the pedal, even when it moves and clicks.

Now I set it down in front of him.  Equines aren’t very good at seeing directly ahead of themselves — their long faces get in the way.  One of the many terrifying aspects of jumping horses is that, just as they launch themselves into the air, they lose sight of the obstacle they’re jumping. They need to see it in advance and then gauge their blind leap.  Likewise (but much more safely) Gus will need to know where the pedal is so that he can target his foot onto it accurately.  

To show him the basic idea, I pick up his leg and place his hoof on the pedal.  He seems clueless, but just as I reach down for his ankle again, he flops his foot up and over the pedal.  I click and treat him for that approximation.  I don’t want to keep handling his foot, though, because he’ll need to figure out the mechanics and placement for himself.  Since he knows and loves our chacha, I wonder if he might imitate me if I slowly, clearly, dramatically plop my own foot onto the pedal.  Again, clueless.  

 

Next, I play face-to-face chacha with Gus and set the pedal in his path, hoping he’ll accidentally step on it.  When any part of his hoof bumbles against any part of the pedal, I click and treat.  That keeps him playing the game, and in no time at all, he does happen to step smack onto the pedal.  I don’t just click and treat for that; before he can step off, I’m blitz-clicking:  giving him a click and treat just about every half-second.  I want him to know that foot-on-pedal is the best place to be in the world.  After six or eight clicks, I ask him to step back, and I click him for that too.  If stepping on the pedal is ab fab, he also needs to know that stepping off it again is nearly as fab.  After all, in concert (ahem), crashing the cymbals will require him to press and release the pedal repeatedly.

The next day, we play with the pedal again, and Gus blows my mind by landing on the pedal in at least 50% of our tries. He’s really digging this game, and suddenly he depresses the pedal especially deftly, with apparent purpose and confidence.  Click!  Peppermint!  (You can hear him chewing it in the last sequence here:)

 

124. VIDEO: Curtain call

As our final stupid-pet-trick update for today, we present our take-a-bow.  For some reason, the leg lifting and head lowering are taking forever to perfect.  Gus seems to enjoy doing it, often budging his foot before I even ask, yet training him to bend his knee and hold it bent is far more difficult than I expected.  I’m not sure what to do differently, and minimal advances are perceptible as the months wear on, so I’ll just keep slogging away at it.  I think it’ll eventually be pretty dang cute?

123. VIDEO: Donkey dance lessons

Here’s another project that Gus is throwing himself into with, well . . . gusto:  dancing the chacha with me.  Having learned to stop crowding him and get out of his face, I ask him to step backward by giving a cue and waiting, allowing him to respond within his own personal time-space continuum.  Arms akimbo, I tilt my elbows forward and cock my knee to ask him for a backward step with the same-side front leg; when I tilt my elbows backward and lean my body away, he’s to step forward toward me.

We also do a side-by-side chacha, which we began by exaggerated slow-walking and honed into a back-and-forth terpsichorean two-step.  So far, Gus needs the arena wall alongside him to keep him heading straight; the chances that we’ll ever progress to using the whole dance floor seem slim.  But it’s starting to look pretty good along the wall, and when we add a pole on the ground, our audiences have been known to gasp.  

It’s still extremely slow going, but the precision is improving steadily.  And Gus, for reasons passing understanding, absolutely adores this practice, offering to back up at any opportunity and practically dragging me to the ground pole to repeat the game.  So I have faith that we’re developing into a partnering powerhouse, on our way to winning Dancing With the Donkey Stars.