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 . . .