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 . . .