143. Winter beach toy

Today the temperature is in the teens and Gus is full of beans.  We have the (still 

well barricaded) arena to ourselves, so I let him go free and I roll a gigantic beachball past him.  He always enjoys bopping it away with the top of his nose, and he immediately chases after it.  Now he gets downright silly: he gallops at it, lowers and shakes his head like a bull, pins his ears, and bops the very bejeepers out of it. 

When I roll it back past him, he spins away, then kicks out to one side with his two hind feet, farts abruptly, and gallops off in pursuit, throwing a little buck or two as he goes.  He barges it with chest, grunts in a menacing and satisfied manner, knees it, and then bops it.  (Donkeys fend off predators by kneeling on them and pinning them and biting them, but this ball is waist-high to a human, so it’s too big for Gus to squash the way he’d clearly like to.)  He’s so revved by this aggression-displacement game that he even pins his ears as he runs back to me for a treat.  And he gets a bit grabby, nearly nipping my hand.  Since the chase and attack is highly self-rewarding for him right now, and since I prefer to keep all ten fingers, I leave off clicking for each good bop.  He'd just as soon skip the interruptions anyway, the better to terrorize and trounce that ball.

Again and again, we gallop all over the arena, kick and fart and buck (mostly Gus, not me), and bop the ball so it damn well knows it’s been bopped.  Finally, Gus begins only trotting after it, and when he gets distracted enough to stop and stand on a mat, I figure the game is over. 

Well warmed up, we’re both ready to settle down for some slower tricks, like pedestal and pompom and, of course, music.  The cymbals, the bass drum, the horn, the keyboard — he’s refining his technique and developing his own style on all his instruments.  Stay tuned (rimshot) . . .

142. Gotta dance

With Gus feeling so good and the weather feeling so wintry, he’s still amped up each time we enter the arena and I remove his blanket.  By trial and error, though, I’ve landed on a routine that mostly obviates obstreperous, obnoxious obloquy and opprobrium (see above).

The reason Gus was yawing off in all directions and flinging his head and being a general ass is that he’s brimming with energy:  boy’s just gotta boogie and warm up.  

And the reason he refused to do so on the lunge line is that he hates the lunge whip that I brandish to get him going forward:  I must’ve used it too agressively with him in the past, and now he won’t tolerate it.  Luckily, Sandy shows me that he’s a perfectly good lunger with no whip at all.  Just by twirling the end of the long lunge rope, or even just raising my arm, I can send him around in a nice, bouncy donkeytrot.

If I lay a pole on the ground and include it in our circle, Gus happily trots over it; sometimes, he’s so up that he bounds over it as if it were two feet high.  If I want to give him a wider circle, I can just walk a circle myself — or even better, I can trot my inner circle in pace with him, which makes him practically grin.

Full disclosure:  what helps us succeed with our new lungeing protocol is a major barricade at the arena gate.  First, I not only sling the tarp over the gate, but I also line up four plastic chairs in front of it, and I post friend Barbara there.  When Gus yanks the lunge line out of my hand and rushes at the gate, she meets him with her fiercest glare and a big X of raised arms.  Seeing the tangle of chairs and the shooing of Barbara, he veers and comes back to me.  After that, I get him lungeing again (pausing for a click-and-treat the first time he passes near the gate and doesn’t consider charging it), and we end up trotting many circles in both directions with nary another glance at the exit.  The next time, I line up the chairs but do not employ a border guard, and again Gus pulls away and barges toward the door, again realizes the chairs look too troublesome to breach, and again soon forgets all about trying to break out.

At last, we have a sane and safe method for warming up and getting some good exercise when cold weather makes Gus hot to trot.