168. Bed head? Try bed body

Gus looks just frightful.  It’s a perfect storm of circumstances that have brought him to this sorry pass:

• his habit of never shedding his yaklike winter coat until June

• early hot weather and biting flies, which he hates, preferring to stay in his stall

• on and off rainstorms, which may catch him before he’s brought inside to escape the steamy sun that follows

• his habit of peeing almost always in just one spot in his stall

• his habit of napping in that same spot, no matter how urine-soaked

• a recent truckload of dried-out, stiff-stalked hay, which all the equids found more useful as bedding than as fodder

The result is that I arrive for playtime to find him well dredged in bits of soggy hay and wood shavings, all clinging on and burrowing into his dense, sleep-ruffled, three-inch-long coat.  

As soon as we enter the arena, Gus’s urgent desire is to rid himself of this clammy, tangly, itchy coating with a nice roll in the sandy dust.  First I use the back of my hand to brush off the loosest and largest hangers-on from his back and flanks and belly.  Then, as he dithers around, pawing and snorting the dirt to determine the very best rolling spot, I encourage him to get down to business by pawing with my own foot and cooing “Go roll!”  By the time he stands back up (and never shakes himself off as horses and dogs do), he’s somewhere between lightly floured and tempura-battered.  I reward him more with treats than with scritches.

After 20 minutes of tricks, followed by 20 minutes of grazing on the breezy lawns, Gus is dry enough to brush.  I flick and pick all the detritus out of his fur and mane and tail, dig the stinking mud out of his hooves, and ta-dah!  He’s a handsome hunk of donkeyflesh.  Until next time . . .

167. VIDEO: Chromatics

Gus is learning his colors.  That is, he’s learning the English words for two of the colors that equids are known to see clearly:  blue and yellow.  (Dissecting a horse eyeball, so I gather, is all it takes to see what kinds of rods and cones are inside, and the cones for blue and yellow far outnumber those for green and red.  If you stand in a bright-green field wearing a bright-red sweater, your horse will think you disappeared in a vast, undifferentiated grey fog.)

The colors lesson is dead simple, but it requires approximately 7,342,694 repetitions.  I make a start by holding up a cardboard square that I painted blue, and Gus naturally touches it.  I click and treat, and I do it again.  Eventually I say “blue” when I offer it to him.  I do this again.  And again.  After a couple of five-minute sessions over a couple of days, I bring out a yellow-painted square and get him to touch it as I say “yellow.”  Again and again.  My eyes are crossing, but Gus never gets bored — this is the easiest way to earn treats, ever!

Now we start the actual learning:  I have a yellow square in one hand and a blue in the other, and I hold them both up while saying either “blue” or “yellow.”   Now he has a choice, and one touch will earn him a treat but the next might get him bupkus.  “What is the meaning of this?” he demands.  I randomly switch the colors I say, and I randomly switch which hand holds which color.  I randomly raise the cards higher and lower.  Next I do the same with blue and yellow cardboard circles.  Lately I'm doing it with little plastic cones; next I'll use washcloths or cups . . .  He’s got to figure out what one criterion I require for granting him a click:  is it about my left or right hand?  is it about the item’s shape?  is it about where we are in the arena?  Once he can rule out the circumstantial variables, he’ll discover that the key, the only key, is the color.  And that the human-voice sound “bloo” or “yell-oh” signifies the color.  And so, more repeats.  We must be at several hundred by now; only a few million still to go.

Gus gets that two is an easy number:  after a wrong choice, if I hold the same cards in the same hands next time, the only right possibility is the choice he didn’t make last time.  What stumps me is why he occasionally rejects this logic and keeps choosing the wrong card three or four times in a row.  Is he suffering an epileptic or Tourette’s spasm that fixates him on the same wrong color?  Does he think it’s fun to insist on a mistake just to switch up the game?  Once or twice, after denying him a click for several errors, I take pity and hold the correct card closer to his nose, to make sure he’ll finally get it right.  Often, though, I can change hands and verbal cues all over the place, and he’s unfazed, getting it right every time.  Until, for some reason, he just blows it.  No matter — he’s inching his way to maybe 75% correct, and he loves, loves, loves the game.

165. VIDEO: Please, mister postman

The mailbox trick is still developing nicely.  Pulling open the door, shutting the door, and lifting the red flag are all easy-peasy, down pat.  The really challenging part is placing the rolled-up magazine into the mailbox, especially since, thanks to his horsey head and big nose and wide-set eyes, he loses sight of the mailbox as he nears it.  I’ve found that his success closely correlates to how far away I place the mailbox after I’ve given him the magazine — he needs at least a few paces to sight the box, try to lock his radar onto its location, and stay on target as he approaches and loses his view of it.  When he takes a firm and straight hold in his teeth, and when I hold the box in a good position, he can shove that magazine straight in, nothin’ but net.  

Still, for every clean, smooth insertion (eww…), he still mixes in three or four slightly off-target deliveries, or flappy deliveries to my stomach, or fumbles onto the floor.  A failure gives him nothing but a do-over, a near-miss earns a click and treat, and a success brings a click and peppermints and huzzahs.

Gus never seems to tire of this game, even postponing a grazing session on the lush spring turf in order to try and try and try again.  Little does he know that soon I’ll be mounting the mailbox against the barn wall, and he’ll have to learn how to put the magazine in without me standing right there behind it.  Betcha $50 he’ll figure it out in short order.

 

166. VIDEO: Kickball

An all-new game for Gus is kicking, rather than nose-bopping, a ball.  He rolls the huge beachball along using the top of his nose.  He perfected this trick long ago, and it’s so second nature to him that learning to steadily push the baby carriage — rather than bop the underside of the handle and crash it onto its front — took a few weeks.  Now he’s learning a ball game without any use of his nose, but it’s only taken a few days.

I bring him a cheapo kids’ ball from the grocery store, and he’s immediately intrigued by it.  But when he rolls it with his nose, he gets no click and treat.  What the . . . ?  With nose-bopping apparently off the table, he’s now at a loss; he just stands near the ball and ignores it.  I could wait until he bumbles against it by accident and click that, but I move the process along:  I roll the ball gently against his shin as he stands there.  Click! and treat.  On day one, I do that a few times in maybe five minutes.  On day two, he still tries a few nose-bops, which I ignore.  Again I roll the ball at his feet a few times and click the moment it makes contact.  Again his only reaction is What the . . . ?  But he’s starting to take an interest, sometimes turning toward the ball when I roll it past him.

Day three dawns, and doesn’t he freakin’ flap his foot at the ball All By Himself?!   He instantly gets a click and peppermint for that.  In the next five minutes, he kicks it, albeit feebly and awkwardly, several more times.  When he puts his nose on the ball and then remembers it’s about kicking, he whumps it abortively into his chin, which seems to surprise and annoy him.  Still, good little physics lesson there.

For horses and donkeys, tossing a foot forward is not a very natural movement: their ankles bend mostly backward, and that’s how they kick.  Gus is getting the hang of kicking his foot forward, but often it’s more of a stomping or pawing motion, which can bring his foot down on top of the ball.  At one point, as he’s chasing it rather avidly to kick it, he accidentally steps onto the ball, which makes him trip over it as it rolls under his foot, and he nearly faceplants, landing on both knees with a peeved little grunt.  He quickly jumps back onto his feet, and I apologize and soothe him, and he seems just fine.  Soon he’s chasing and kicking the ball again.

Next — there always has to be a next with a hairy little genius like Gus — I’m shopping for a portable kid’s soccer goal.  Learning to aim the ball and dribble it along in one direction won’t be easy.  Which is precisely why Gus will relish the whole process.