155. Steamed

Today I lead Gus out of his paddock with good faith that we’ll play in the arena, including some running around to drain the excess energy that’s helping to make him an obnoxious punk rampant lately.  Not halfway to the arena, my faith is shattered.  Gus is an unreconstructed evildoer: again he drags me onto his grazing patch and won't budge.

The first couple of times this happened, I granted him his grazing rights.  I rolled with his moods and acceded to his desires.  I retained my patience, aplomb, and bonhomie.  Well, not today.  Today his snotty behavior instantly forces steam from my ears.  Even though he’s wearing a tough nylon blanket, I wallop him over the back with the tail end of the lead rope.  And I holler very bad names at him.  All of which, of course, only fuel-injects my anger and his defiance.

Before heading off to find the lunge whip, I remember to unclip his lead line for safety.  Not that he deserves any safety, I grumble to myself.  As I stalk back toward him, whip in hand, I’m grasping for any shred of positivity in this galling predicament, and I determine that I’ll still accomplish my goal of getting Gus to cover some ground and burn up energy — I’ll just do it outside rather than inside the arena.

And so the whip-waving game begins again.  Even his goat-on-a-pogo-stick canter is faster than my run, so once he leaves me in the dust, he takes a moment to stop and chomp grass, giving me a sassy side-eye as I stonily close the distance between us.  He really doesn’t care if the whip slaps his hind end, so he grabs one last mouthful before he picks up and flees just an inch before the lash might reach him.  

In a useless bid for intimidation, I smack the whip against inanimate objects that might make a loud crack.  My eye glints as I trundle past a bare picnic table, and I snap the whip down on it hard.  It gives a gratifying bang, but then I’m instantly jerked up short as the lash, caught in a knothole of the tabletop, suddenly drags me back around.  By the time I extricate the freakin’ thing, Gus is way down the path and chowing leisurely.  Dammit!  Let me tell you, it’s not easy to laugh and fume and run all at the same time.

After 20 minutes of racewalking and jogging, and dropping the whip once when I turn my ankle, and other Keystone Koppery on both our parts, I finally manage to approach Gus, hold the whip behind him as just an ushering tool, and direct his head toward his own paddock gate — which I had cunningly set ajar during one of the several times we’d racketed past it.  Clang!  Whew!  He’s corralled again, and I can go home.  Indeed you could say that my huff arrived and I left in it.

Thanks, dear reader, for allowing me to vent here.  My fury has now ebbed, all the cut-up carrot and apple bits that I never got to treat Gus with are now in a baggie, and the prospect of using them on my next visit seems almost . . . promising.  Still, just in case he frustrates me again with flaming assholery, maybe I’ll also bring a large gun. 

154. Good news, bad news

He may be cute and winsome on video, but lately Gus is a major asshole.  These past few weeks, the grass is delicious, the weather is brisk, and the biting flies are much reduced.  Also, his paddock is muddy, so he’s mostly just standing and dozing on its small dry hill.  Evidently those factors add up to a gluttonous, spirited, bored, and therefore outrageously disobedient donkey.

Sandy says he’s been pulling away from her quite often when she leads him between stall and paddock; with me too, he’s being a complete and utter shitheel.  All he wants, all the time, is to graze.  And when he’s indulging in his heart’s desire, he’s sweet as pie.  But any alternative activity suggested by any human transforms him into a wicked, obstinate, sassy, vicious little monster.  I hope he sits on a tack.

Today, as we walk from his  paddock to the arena, he sets his neck, trots hard, pulls the lead rope from my hand, and runs into his favorite grazing area.  Nothing new here.  I allow him to eat for a good half-hour, but then I can’t get him to come off the lawn.  I wait.  I cajole.  I lure.  He tugs.  He wrestles.  He rams.  

I know from painful experience that my psoas and other core muscles cannot survive being yanked and torqued by an 800-pound bundle of pure insistence.  So I drop the rope, go fetch a long lungeing whip, and return, whapping it on the ground behind him to send him scurrying.  If he’s going to disobey, at least he won't get to keep gorging on grass.  So say I . . .  But he outmaneuvers me, and before I can run over and stop him, he crouches and crawls under a fence board to escape into the adjoining pasture.  There the three resident horses — very big, very athletic geldings — greet him joyously and commence galloping around with him.

Gus still has his long rope trailing from his halter, and that’s a safety hazard for all parties.  So now I climb through the fence, into the melee of flying heels and thundering hooves, to try to unsnap the damn lead-line.  I secure my own personal space by blocking the horses with the lunge whip, but that keeps Gus out of reach too.  Finally I make my way through the hullabaloo, speak quietly to Gus and approach him, and remove the rope.

Now the youngest and silliest gelding is herding Gus in a small circle at high speed, while Gus tries to get himself onto the far side of the older horse, whom he’s more familiar with.  When you see him right next to these big ex-racehorses, Gus is a shrimp, a peanut, a bug.  He’s gamely galloping about, grunting and squeaking as he kicks vigorously at the horses, but to them he’s just a big toy.  At this point he's wishing he hadn't busted into this paddock after all, and he begins eyeing the fence.  He rams his chest against a board, breaking it like a ballbat, but it’s too high for him to jump.  Harrassed by hijinks, he doesn’t have time to drop low and scoot under again.  I run to the pasture gate and invite him out that way, but he’s still fooling around with the three big boys.  

Anyway, now the hilarity is waning, and I figure he’s just fine.  (He used to be turned out here with the geldings regularly, but he kept busting out when he got bored.  That’s why he’s in a different turnout now:  it’s small enough to encircle with electrified wire, which is the only way to keep Gus in.)  I leave them to their own devices and help a friend who’s training Gus’s pasturemate -- a very nice, very polite gelding, thank you very much.  A few minutes later, when I glance out to the big paddock, I see Gus and his merry band just grazing placidly.

When Sandy arrives, she helps me lead/shoo Gus into the arena.  She picks up a lunge whip and stations me at the arena gate with another whip.  And she chases him around that arena, turning on a dime and switching the whip to her other hand in order to cut him off and turn him if he tries to run past her.  When he does head toward the gate, I’m there brandishing my whip, sending him back into the ambit of Sandy’s whip.  After just five minutes, he’s slowing down, so Sandy slows and relaxes her energy.  They both stop moving, and the former fiend turns and faces her quietly and submissively, just as if he’s memorized the horse-whisperer’s handbook.  He goes up to her, she gives him nice scritches, and they turn and walk slowly toward the gate.  When she stops, he stops next to her.  When she walks again, he comes along with her.  It’s magic, only it’s real.

At the gate, I clip the lead onto him and we stroll ever so nicely into his stall, where I dump his dinner into his feed bucket for him.