160: VIDEO: Printed matter

Gus and I have been practicing the mailbox game with an old sponge-and-handle thingummy because it’s shaped right and easy to pick up, but today we try two New Yorker magazines, rolled together and secured with a rubber band.  I’m thinking this could be our actual stage prop, as it’s recognizable to an audience, relevant to a mailbox, and biteable by a donkey.  

It requires no introduction, as Gus is immediately enamored of it and able to swap it in for the previous object without rehearsal:

As I suspected, he’s better and better at negotiating the mailbox, even though he (a) can’t see the box when it’s right in front of him and (b) has to orient the magazine roll lengthwise.  A few times he flops it crosswise against the mailbox opening, but even those are worthy efforts that earn him a click and treat.  When he aims the magazines endwise and they begin to actually go in, he gets a click and a peppermint.  Or two.  And a hug.  And acclamations on high.

He joyously takes the magazines (“Pick it up”) and desposits the magazines “(Dunk,” from his basketball trick) a few times —

— before he realizes that they’re paper and therefore eminently destructible.  Suddenly, instead of lifting the roll from the arena floor, he holds it down with a front hoof and commences shredding the exterior pages and spitting them out, like a hawk plucking a pigeon or a dog disemboweling a plush toy.  It seems the hold-it-and-rip-it instinct runs strong in a wide variety of species . . .   Well, that little misbehavior needs to be nipped in the bud, and luckily it’s easy enough to reroll the magazines and re-interest Gus in the mailbox game.  (Amazon promises the newspaper-shaped plastic dog toy will arrive soon.)