148. Sideways

Along with our back-and-forth cha-cha steps, I’d like to teach Gus some grapeviney side-winding.  I made a basic, ballpark start by placing three mats in a row and asking him to step onto the next mat over.  But as I feared, it’s not easy to keep his body straight; he tends to bend his spine or swing his hips so that he comes at the mats on a diagonal.  (Years ago, I taught my doggie-dancing partner Dinah the wonderpoodle to keep her body facing straight ahead while sidepassing [check it out here, starting at 1:05], but it’s easier with a 50-pound, hip-high animal than with an 800-pound, shoulder-high one.  To keep Dinah’s back straight, I just had to keep her head in place, and I did that by holding a treat right where I wanted her nose to be.  I can’t similarly maneuver my little arm and Gus’s big neck . . .)

Can't wait for the human
to join the dance...

Today, I try a device often used by Western trail riders to teach the sidepass:  a ground pole.  From our cha-cha practice, Gus already knows how to step halfway across a pole, stopping with his front feet ahead of it and his rear feet  behind it.  Now I place two mats side by side and just in front of the pole.  This setup immediately helps Gus get the idea.   If he wants to avoid bumbling and tripping over the ground pole with his rear feet, he can’t veer or turn his body.  To keep his hind end clear as he straddles the pole, he can only make a purely sideways step to get his front feet onto the next-door mat.

Also I prevent him from rushing in hopes of getting treats faster (see photo; harrumph).  Between each sidestep, I signal the-grownups-are-talking with clasped hands, and he stands still, waiting for my “sideways” cue.  

Moving to his right, he usually executes the one-and-a-half or two sidesteps to the mat quite nicely and gets a click and treat.  Moving to the left, he takes one good step and then loses his posture, swings either his shoulders or his hips out of sync, and shuffles sloppily onto the mat.  No problem:  next time, I click and treat after the very first step — which pause allows him to stay in correct alignment — and then he takes the next step and gets another click as he reaches the mat.  Soon he’ll figure out the leftward movement without as much help.  Then we’ll be able to space the mats farther apart, and then remove them altogether, and voilà:  electric-slide donkey boogie.

147. Chowhound

I hardly dare say this out loud, but Gus is still agreeing to end his grazing sessions pretty politely.  One reason might be that he’s discovered a swath of very lush, very tall grasses in a corner that never gets mowed, so a few minutes of gorging on that bounty seems to fill up his belly.  Once sated, he can accept the announcement of quitting time.

Today he avoids the spent dandelions, although his grazing buddy Henry the quarterhorse focuses intently on harvesting only dandelions, bundling a big sheaf of them, complete with their fluffy seedheads, into his capacious mouth.  Gus does scarf up some white-flowering chickweed that’s inextricable among the grass blades.  He and Henry both eat daintily around each neon-yellow buttercup, nudging its leaves aside as they pluck its neighbors.  

Over in the tall grass, there’s a weedy little mulberry tree with fresh new leaves and tight green flowerbuds.  Taking a momentary break from the grass, Gus reaches up and pulls a few tree leaves into his mouth.  If they cling to the branch and he can’t jerk them free, he adjusts his grip to bite down hard on the woody twig and detach it wholesale.  It gets noisily chewed up together with the leaves.  After Gus swallows maybe three mouthfuls of mulberry this way, he drops his head into the shoulder-deep grass again.

All the while, I’m improving my idle time by scrubbing my fingers over his back and sides, loosening great tufts of fur, in hopes of hurrying along his epic summertime shedding process.  As usual, he’s itchy and his skin is getting scurfy, and he’s losing fur in ugly patches.  Whether from scratching against a fencepost or tree or from clawing with a hind hoof, he’s now got a huge, raggedy-ass patch of bare skin on one side of his neck.  Rubbing his back today, I suddenly feel a mildly sickening release and come up with a dense hair-wad the size of a kaiser roll; parting the fur around the area, I find a matching expanse of pinkish skin.  

Every spring Sandy ponders how to respond to this asinine alopecia.  Topical remedies include CBD salve, diaper-rash cream, or cortisone ointment; systemic meds range from Benedryl pills to de-stung stinging-nettle leaves in his feed.  Every summer Gus finally ends up with a nice, smooth coat.  But in between, it’s an ugly and uncomfortable ordeal.  In paddock and stall, he suffers the tortures of the damned, don’t you know; out grazing, somehow he enjoys miraculous relief.

146. Patience over anger

With an electro-stim TENS device, extra-strength acetaminophen, wintergreen and arnica and other herbal rubs, and a brilliant physical therapist, my spine and guts are recovering from the tug-of-war with Gus, the long-eared Sherman tank.

Today I bring an apple, in hopes that bribery and luring might aid my cause.  This time, I give him a good 30 minutes of gluttonous grazing before asking him to quit and come away.  Lifting his head is a bit of a haul, but when he pushes and curls and objects, I can dance away without stressing my back.  And instead of applying any pressure on the lead rope to ask him to start walking, I stand and wait.  With no fight to engage in, he seems a bit flummoxed.  He presses the top of his head into my side and leaves it there; a thin wisp of smoke curls out of both ears as he tries to rethink.  I mention the magic words “It’s time for your dinner.”  He doesn’t budge.  I use a maitre d’ gesture to usher him forward and I chirrup, “Walk on!”  Nada.  I show him the apple, which he sniffs, but then he bulls forward a few steps and rams his head back down to the turf and grabs a bite of grass.  

I lift his head again and we wait again, both of us cursing under our breaths.  I bite the apple and hold the juicy bitten piece right at his nostril, and now he eyes it and he eyes me — and he begins walking off the pasture.  We walk briskly all the way into his stall, where I toss the apple piece into his bucket and slam the door shut behind us.

Praise the Lord, a strategy may be developing.  Waiting is crucial — Gus hates feeling rushed or pressured.  Letting him make the first move is crucial — he will do nothing that isn’t his own decision to do.  And bribery with sweet treats is crucial — his natural gluttony often trumps his other agendas.

Start your clocks:  how quickly will Gus hatch some new scheme of resistance, devise an alternative escape plan, and outwit me yet again?

145. Taking the spring out of springtime

The early May grass at Gus’s farm is gorgeous.  All the equids are gobbling it up like starvelings.  For me, that presents the perennial problem of getting Gus to leave the pasture when his grazing time is up.  The horses may resist a bit when their owners pick up the lead rope and head them away from the grass, but they reluctantly assent and follow politely along.  Not Gus.  As with all things in his life, Gus does not do what he doesn’t want, and nobody can make him, so there.

Each spring, I have to remind myself how to handle — or avoid handling — this intractable problem.  With the lead rope looped both over and under his muzzle, I can prevail if it cinches tightly, and if I give it a bit of slack before he hits the end of it, and if I pull back with all my weight.  It’s not fun, but it seems preferable to letting him realize that he can pull the rope away and run off and keep grazing.

Today, I need to bring Gus into his stall  after about 20 minutes on the grass.  He shoves his anvil-like head into my ribs and pushes me away.  I dance around and evade.  He dips his head to drape the lead across his neck and starts to pull away hard.  I scurry to his other side, bringing the line off his neck again.  He backs up and backs up and backs up, until I grip the rope, at which instant he barges forward and then curls back against me.  Now I’m getting steamed and tugging on the rope, which irks him so that he resists more . . . and war is declared.  When he turns tail and revs into a fast trot straight away from me, I hang on for dear life, vituperating through gritted teeth.  He tows me across the whole pasture, my arms outstretched, my body leaned back, my knees bent to stay low, and my feet running fast to avoid being pulled down.  Not a dignified picture.

But I freakin’ win, damit!  The rope’s latch-snap digs into Gus’s chin so he finally stops running.  After that, I gather up the rope and he marches alongside me into the barn like a good soldier.  He’s smart enough to know when resistance is futile.  

Me, I’m not that smart.  Or that athletic anymore.  Within two minutes, I realize I’ve strained some crucial core muscles:  I’m not hurting, but I’m feeling jittery and woozy and almost queasy — some major abdominal nerve is panicking . . .  As I groom Gus and put away our musical toys, I begin to feel pain illuminate my lower back and wash down my right leg.  Shit!  When I suffered this same injury years earlier, from hours of digging in clay soil to haul out a buried hunk of heavy iron, the misery lasted for many months.  And here I’ve done it again just because I got mad at a donkey?  Who’s the ass now?

While I nurse my sore back, I ponder what to do when next I visit Gus.  He does need to be grazed — it’s good for his belly and brain.  But he does need to stop grazing at some point, and how can I make that happen?

144. VIDEO: Orchestrations

My friend Paul — he who so sturdily up-armored the drum and cymbals foot pedals — has furthered Gus’s musical career yet again.  I told him my aspirations for a bicycle-horn holder that could attach to the Sweet-Ass bandstand, and he devised the perfect solution. 

Onto a piece of two-by-four, he seated a firm but flexible rubber housing for the base of a CB radio antenna; into that he vertically inserted a thin fiberglas-plastic rod (such as homeowners use to mark the edges of their driveways for the winter snowplows); and at its top end, he attached a stub of PVC pipe and clamped on a new, plastic, hot-pink bulb horn that squeaks like the loudest and most obnoxious dog toy imaginable.  He even drilled a small hole through each end of the rod and used little cotter-pin devices to prevent the rod and the horn from twisting or spinning.  It’s a MacGyver of beauty.

And Gus loves it very much.  I wondered if he might at first be alarmed by the horn’s squawk being so much louder and more sudden than the old horn’s, but I shoulda known:  when he’s the one causing the noise, the brasher the better.  I still like the classic lower pitch of the old horn too, so I’m dreaming up ways to mount that one next to the new one.  And to teach Gus yet another conductor’s hand-signal to differentiate between the two . . .

[Here's one 90-second video, if you

prefer that to these staccato snippets...]

At this point in our studies, we’re pretty clear and reliable with the downward-pointing arm for stepping on the cymbals pedal and with the slow horizontal arm for playing the keyboard.  He’s still keener on stomping the pedal, so usually we start our “mi-mi-mi” warmups with him ignoring my keyboard signal and instead just pounding away on the cymbals.  But soon we get into sync, and the concerto begins to take shape.

Of course, any orchestration requires not just notes but also rests (unless it’s by Philip Glass, whose music beats any psy-ops torture at inducing abject, driveling insanity).  And no artiste can segue between “Flight of the Bumblebee” and “Sabre Dance” without risk of seizure or syncope.  Therefore, especially given Gus’s near-obsession with his music, I feel it important for his health and welfare to ensure that he take a breather now and then.  Since he’s an expert at backing up for the cha-cha and he’s an old hand at “the grownups are talking (so just stand still and be patient),” I can ask him to step away from the bandstand and then invite him back to it with a modicum of calm and control.

For directing Gus to the horn, my thumb-and-fingers squeeze gesture is still a work in progress:  I need to learn where to place my hand so that Gus can see it beyond his enormous snout, and Gus needs to learn that it’s not an invitation to nuzzle my hand for a treat.  He also needs to firm up his understanding that the bulb is the part of the horn to bite, rather than its flared bell.  The shriek of this new horn seems so gratifying to him that I’m confident he’ll learn these finer points in no time at all.

Next, watch for video of our newest instrument:  the jingle bells.