115. VIDEO: Hot-cha-cha . . .

I used to love watching Barbara and her mare (whom she clicker-trained for years with a Joblike patience only she could sustain) dance-walking side by side in graceful harmony:  human thinks about taking a step forward, horse rocks forward expectantly; human steps backward, horse steps back in unison; human turns head or shoulder just a hair to the left, horse orchestrates all four legs for a left turn.  I always wanted to do that.

By matching paces in walking alongside each other, Gus and I are coming along nicely in our partnering.  Now, to develop even more precision and anticipation and synchrony, I’m introducing him to the cha-cha. (Full disclosure:  I have never danced one step, ever.  Not in any dance class, not on any dance floor, not even alone and furtive in my own home.  When I took “canine musical freestyle” classes and put on little recitals with my standard poodle, she did all the dancing: weaving through my legs, backing up in a circle, spinning and whirling.  Me, I marched around like a cyborg.)

To get us started, I teach Gus to walk “slow-slow” alongside me.  When he forges ahead, I drop my shoulders and head and exhale slowly, which helps slow him down.  When he takes just one slow footstep, I immediately click and treat.  As we go two and three paces at a time, I stay low and exaggeratedly match steps with him . . .  and after a few weeks he’s got it well figured out.  We can do slow-slow for several steps, then pick up a regular pace with “walk on!” and then sink into slow-slow again.  If he’s impatient, though, he plows ahead of me and then turns his head toward me and sidesteps crabwise, half in front and half at my side.  When that happens, I start over — sometimes briefly applying a go-away-face fingertip on his cheekbone, to keep his head from curling in toward me.

Recently, we’ve been mixing in a few backward steps as well: entering the ballpark of side-by-side cha-cha.  The next lesson, as Barbara reminds me (and this video shames me into seeing), is for me to stand up straight and still keep Gus’s pace slow and matched to mine.

Another next step is to refine the face-to-face version of our cha-cha.  Overeagerness on my part puts me too close to Gus, so that my walking forward becomes not so much a cue as an affront.  I’m invading his personal space, plus I’m asking him to cede ground and submit.  This ground-ceding is an issue in dog-training too.  At first, they need a hand on their chests or a human foot nearly trampling their paw before they’ll start to back up.  But at some point, the handlers need to send their dogs backward without crowding into their faces.  Once the animals get the idea and the humans can ease off a bit, the exercise morphs from a forced retreat to a willing performance.  

With Gus and our face-to-face cha-cha, I’ll go back to the drawing board, getting just one step of backup while my feet remain in place.  Then I’ll see if he can continue backing up another step or two before I take any steps forward.  A tiny bit of waiting on my part will give him time to accept the psychological pressure of being sent backward.  And leaving more space between us will ensure that the trick is a genuine partnering move, voluntary and gracious and fun.  I’m already using my arms placed akimbo as a cue, along with my verbal “ba-a-ack,” and he definitely grasps the basic idea of the trick, so we don’t need any bargeing or rushing.  Like any resolution, of course, this is easier said than done . . .

114. VIDEO: Tickling those ivories

Several of the equids at Sandy’s barn get regular piano lessons — on a kids’ portable, electric keyboard.  It has lots of accompaniment settings, but mostly we keep those quiet and just ask our animals to nudge and nose the piano keys.  When I first showed it to Gus and said “Touch,” he readily bopped it with his muzzle.  But when I flipped the on-switch and it played a note under his nose, he stepped emphatically backward and gave it his signature ear-pointing glare.  There’s no volume control and it’s plenty loud, but it only took a few more encounters, with prompt and frequent click-and-treats, for Gus to become a piano aficionado.  Allegro con brio.

As with pushing the baby carriage, playing the keyboard requires an adjustment in Gus’s usual nosing technique.  For bopping the beachball, it’s all about contacting it with the top of his nose, which he then flings upward and forward.  To teach him to to push the pram, I had to focus on clicking him for setting the top of his nose against the handle but not flipping it, lest he topple the pram forward onto its prow.  And now with the piano, he also wants to get his nose under it and push upward; often he flips it in my hands, so that the blank bottom of the keyboard presents itself to him.  He gets no clicks or treats for this, or for bopping the underside, but he still seems to enjoy it. 

It didn’t take long for Gus to learn that the bulb-horn demands two honks for a click and treat, so I’m confident it’ll be no time before he understands that the piano requires not just one or two notes but a riff or phrase involving several keys.

(Thought my purchase of the baby pram was ludicrous and mildly unhinged?Well, lately I’m cruising Craigslist for a pedal-activated hi-hat cymbals set.  How can I resist promoting a one-ass band of keyboard, cymbals, and bicycle horn?)

113. VIDEO: Circle game

After our successful free-lungeing exercise, I’m emboldened to retry regular lungeing, on a long line in a circle.  I’d given it up last year, when Gus and I just couldn’t get on the same wavelength:  he was objecting and/or I was screwing up my cues.  But again today in the very chilly arena Gus seems eager for some high-energy work, so I hook the lunge line to his halter and send him out away from me.  He trots in a perfect circle around me, several laps, with no problem.  The instant I click, he leaves the circle by executing a crisp 90-degree turn and trots directly to me for his treat.  Then I send him around in the other direction, and he’s a veritable trotting machine.  (Sorry about the video quality:  the arena's chemical-vapor lighting is both insufficient and sickly green.)

If I accidentally walk a bit too far forward as Gus moves around me, seemingly blocking his forward path, he stops or veers farther out.  If I forget to point the whip at his shoulder at the right moments, and only keep it swinging behind him to drive him forward, he leans into the circle and gets too close to me.  But mostly I must be doing it right, because mostly he keeps up a rhythmic trot on a consistent circle.  I’m not sure if I’ve somehow improved at lungeing or if he’s just more willing and eager to do it.  But I ain’t looking that gift-donkey in the mouth — I’m delighted we’re sympatico.  Warming him up on the lunge line is much easier for me than having to run alongside him until my lungs burn. And watching a donkey trip the light fantastic — a pudgy performer on tiptoes, like Jackie Gleason dancing for joy — is worth the price of admission.

112. Behavior mod

I’m not sure if it’s the constant blanket-wearing that makes him itchy, or the lack of grass to nibble that makes him twitchy, but Gus has been a big, hairy pill of late.  He’s happy to come out of his paddock and into the arena, and he barely waits for me to remove his blanket before he crumples down and rolls luxuriantly in the nice, scritchy arena dirt.  Then he comes along willingly for a trot.  But within a few steps, I realize the lead line is behind me and Gus is back there tossing his head around, pulling on the line, and hauling me in any direction other than where we’d been heading.  What the . . . ?

I figure he wants to roll again, so I let him sniff and wander and scrape the ground with his front hoof.  But instead of collapsing his knees, he stiffens up and flings his head violently straight upward.  Wherefore?   Then he pulls me hither and yon, and when I resist, he surfs the ground for dropped treats.  I give him a minute or two of that, and when I lift his head and bring him along with me, he insists on going only to a wooden mat that I’ve set on the ground.  I allow that and dutifully click and treat him for standing on it.  After that, he agrees to trot with me — but yanks really hard and, almost while still trotting, throws himself down to roll again.  Fine.  I wait for him to stand back up.  Again I get him to walk along . . . and again he abruptly refuses and marches off on a hard tangent.  Why, oh, why?  I explain to him just how much I’d like to punch his lights out.

I unclip the lead rope, fetch a lunge whip, wave it and crack it behind him, and send him off at a canter.  Each time Gus comes around toward the arena gate, I take the whip in my other hand, stretch out my arm, and send him back the other way.  This is the I-am-the-boss-of-you exercise that Sandy showed me on an earlier occasion of donkey misbehavior.  After less than five minutes of trotting him around and changing directions, I lower the whip and Gus walks right to me for a treat and patpat.

Now when I rehook the lead line, isn’t he the perfect gentleman?  We walk and trot nicely, practice our tricks, earn our treats . . .  Whether Gus simply needed to engage in a little wilding to warm himself up, or he indeed needed to be reminded that obedience is the price of this game, the lunge-whip exercise gives me a perfect reset switch — another tool for staying, just barely, one step ahead of Superdonkey.

111. Hammer and tongs

An interesting aspect of the stall-door fix is Gus’s response as he witnesses the work firsthand.  It’s late afternoon when the repair crew arrives, and while husband evaluates the damage, friend and son come into the arena for a lovely floorshow from Gus, showing off his basketball, pram, and pedestal tricks.  When we finish and he’s greeted his adoring fans, we head toward his stall, where he seems deeply interested in the carpentry procedures.

But once the drill and hammer start up — and perhaps once the human contingent grows to include me and Sandy and the three helper-outers, plus briefly two others who visit their horses in the same aisle — Gus gets fussy.  I lead him outside to soothe his savage breast by grazing on the meager, matted, frozen grass alongside the barn wall.  When we return, he’s clearly of two minds:  he wants to barge into his stall for hay and possibly (it’s that time) his dinner grain, yet he also wants to get away from the noise and commotion.  He pulls back, he pulls ahead.  He yanks the rope from my hand, spins, and trots a few paces out into the driveway.  He lets me bring him back in.  I refill my apron with treats and even bring out the saltine crackers, and we play stationary games like head-down and the-grownups-are-talking and pirouette.  These distract him pretty well, but he’s still antsy and dancy.

When the tools are packed up and the crowd disperses, I wonder how Gus will approach his stall.  No problem:  he strolls right in, shoves his snout into his grain bucket, and chomps his hay without a care in the world.  I can only imagine the scene sometime later, when he idly strolls over to the formerly battered door and tries his luck shoving it.  Curses, he’ll say, in donkeyese; foiled again!

110. Maximum security

In yet another desperate bid for freedom, Gus has pushed several boards right out of his stall door.  These are thick oak boards, screwed into an iron casing at the top.  No more:  the screws are twisted or missing, the top casing and another iron strap are bent, the boards are splattered into the barn aisle . . .  What looks like ground zero of a bomb blast is in fact the result of one medium-sized, middle-aged donkey using his shoulder and chest as a battering ram.  Impressive.

Sandy manages to get the boards pretty much back in place, adds a strip of scrap lumber as a cross-rail, and shores up the bottom of the doorway.  When I tell a horse-owning friend about this latest breakout, she offers up her very handy husband and his vast array of tools and building materials.  He scopes out the damage, realigns the boards so the edges lock tightly again, drills new screwholes into the iron casing, and inserts longer, stronger screws.  After he sleeps on it, he arranges to come back a second time, to add even more reinforcements top, bottom, and middle.  Now we all have a good amount of time, ego, and reputation invested in something that we know Gus will do his best to trample into the dirt.  We wait.  Days pass and the door is still standing.  Can it be?

The latest report from Sandy is that Gus doesn’t even bother to test that door anymore.  After a long losing streak, a small victory:  humans 1, donkey 0.

Heehaw hiatus

See?  Both alive and well.

Just a quick note to acknowledge this blog’s radio silence lately. The health and welfare of both Gus and me are absolutely fine, we’re still working together regularly and mostly successfully, and posting will resume soon, I promise. We just needed a breather for the adoption of a new puppy, the election season, whatev . . .

News to come will feature cha-cha tricks, stall breakouts, and musical ambitions.  For now, I hope you enjoy the past 100-odd posts, in the sure and certain knowledge that more will follow shortly.  Really, I do promise.