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 . . .