150. Free to flee

With temperatures in the low 90s, Sandy keeps the horses inside the barn during the day.  When their humans visit, they often get a nice hose-down while they graze.  The water is always quite cold when it hits the horses, but as it drips off it’s warm and even hot.  No wonder they feel so much better after a hosing.

Gus being Gus, a hose is out of the question.  It was the “fsssht!” of a hose being turned on 20 feet away from him that made Gus panic so hard that he bowled me down like a ninepin. Noisy or not, squirting water gives him the willies. But I’ve managed to ply him with sponge baths  — punctuated by frequent clicks and treats for standing still — which cool him down pretty well.  I squeeze big gluts of water onto the insides of his upper legs, with their thin hair and big surface veins; and I damp-sponge the outsides and insides of his ludicrous ears.

For today’s bath, I practice an aspect of “natural horsemanship” on Gus.  Using a small circular corral and no lead-rope, so-called horse whisperers will allow a wild or spooky horse to indulge its urge to run when afraid; in fact, they wave a scary little flag at it, so that being scared gets scarier; then, when the horse slows or looks at them, they drop the flag and relax, to ease the pressure; eventually the horse runs itself out and decides that the trainers are a refuge from the fear.  It’s not super-kindly, but its lack of reliance on rope restraint does give the horse some agency.  And agency is all-important to Gus.  

So rather than holding Gus with one hand and squeezing the sponge with the other, I leave him at liberty.  When he submits to a sploosh of the sponge, he gets a click and treat.  But after three or four splooshes, the ickiness of being wet or the tickliness of being drippy is suddenly too much to bear and he stalks away to stand in the middle of the arena.  I wait.  He knows I have an apron full of treats.  Maybe I smooch to him and pat my belly invitingly, but I stay put.  In 20 seconds or so, he walks toward me, and I reward him for deciding to return.  A few more spongeings, and he takes his leave again.   Soon his exits just become circles as he loops right back to me.  I don’t want to keep rewarding the walk-away behavior, so upon arrival now I welcome him verbally, but he gets no click-and-treat.  What he does get is a chance for more spongeing, which is a chance for more rewards.

We both like this method:  it’s fully voluntary for both parties, and I’m sure not to stress him too much, because he’ll walk away before that happens.  The result is successful too:  I rinse down not only his legs and ears, but also his back and chest and neck.  When we retire to his stall for his dinner, he’s plenty soaked and happily parks himself in front of his box fan.  Cool as a cucumber in the pits of summer.

149. Bubblewrap

It’s full-on fly season now.  Solitary horseflies as big as your thumb hover and harrass, and when they bite it feels like a bee sting and then itches for days.  Stable flies home in on the lower legs of any livestock they can find; in Gus’s case, they jockey for position wing to wing, each trying to access just enough skin to reach the superficial capillaries on his shins.  Face flies and ear gnats swarm and bite, leaving swaths of little scabs.  They all compete with deer flies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums of various stripes, and the various truly evil tormentors who specialize in attacking eyes, or genitalia, or wounds . . .

Nevertheless, it’s good for Gus’s brain and body to be turned out with his pasturemate Bobby, and with a little hillside of grass to nibble, and with the smells and sights and sounds of the farm to monitor.  Since spring, when the little ear-biters hatch, we’ve turned him out with a flymask that covers his head in a stiff nylon mesh to allow vision for him but no entry for flies.  Around the summer solstice, when the stable flies arrived, we added fly socks, also made of stiff mesh that protects his lower legs.  And now the variety and numbers of pests are so high that he goes out wrapped in full-body armor.  

As warm weather approached, Sandy — a seamstress as well as horsewoman and infinitely catholic factotum — carefully tucked and tailored a horse-sized fly sheet to fit Gus’s donkey torso.  The sides hang low, almost down to his socks, so he looks like a stumpy medieval charger in armor and colors, ready for a miniature joust.  So far, we think it’s helping:  I haven’t yet found him screwed tight into his shrubby hidey-hole where he spent a lot of last summer.

During trick-training in the arena, Gus still gets naked.  It’s a chance for me to wipe his eyes and scratch his face, and empty his socks of the shavings that get in there when he lies down in his stall.  And after our session, we still go out grazing, since he finds the flies magically less annoying when he’s chewing.  The grass and clover are mangier these days, but the up-side is that Gus is actually willing to quit grazing before the flies eat him down to a skeleton.  On the sultriest days, when the bugs are always at their worst, Sandy leaves him inside, or brings him back in early, so he can shelter in the shady barn with his big electric box-fan blowing on him.

It’s a little sad that he’s a boy in a bubble, but it beats being bug bait.