120. Exit strategy

Despite Gus’s lofty level of education and acculturation and etiquette, mostly he operates on the principle that might makes right.  And when he puts his shoulder to it, he’s mightier than nearly any obstacle he encounters.

Today, for the umpteenth time, he breaks the leash-hook-style snap that secures the barrier across his stall door.  The stall guard is a thick, weighty square of rubbery plastic; at its four corners, it attaches by metal chains and snaps to heavy-duty eyelets screwed into the door jambs of his oak-plank stall.  Only it’s pretty regularly not attached, because if he wants out he has only to lean hard and either break a snap or uproot an eyelet.  His escape plan is not so much a strategy as a tactical nuclear warhead.

The snapped snap . . . and a closeup of the break

Gus’s humans have applied their best barn technology.  His is an especially heavy-duty stall guard; most of the horses are kept in by just a thick plasticized rope, like the crowd-control ropes that usher people into queues at cinemas or airports.  And he has one of those too, which we can add on top of the bigger stall guard, but it serves merely to delay him a bit when he decides to make a break for it.  The only sure way to keep Gus incarcerated is to hook up both stall guards and then shut the full, oaken door and slide home its finger-thick bolt.

Thing is, the vertically challenged Gus can’t hang his head over his door and kibbitz in the barn aisle the way the horses can:  stall doors are chest-high to horses but eye-high to a donkey.  For Gus a closed door is far more isolating than it is for his stablemates.  So we make sure to support his psychosocial well-being by giving him some time with his door open and just a stall guard to contain him.  Which is why barn-manager Sandy is shopping for yet another bulk consignment of those big leash snaps.

111. Hammer and tongs

An interesting aspect of the stall-door fix is Gus’s response as he witnesses the work firsthand.  It’s late afternoon when the repair crew arrives, and while husband evaluates the damage, friend and son come into the arena for a lovely floorshow from Gus, showing off his basketball, pram, and pedestal tricks.  When we finish and he’s greeted his adoring fans, we head toward his stall, where he seems deeply interested in the carpentry procedures.

But once the drill and hammer start up — and perhaps once the human contingent grows to include me and Sandy and the three helper-outers, plus briefly two others who visit their horses in the same aisle — Gus gets fussy.  I lead him outside to soothe his savage breast by grazing on the meager, matted, frozen grass alongside the barn wall.  When we return, he’s clearly of two minds:  he wants to barge into his stall for hay and possibly (it’s that time) his dinner grain, yet he also wants to get away from the noise and commotion.  He pulls back, he pulls ahead.  He yanks the rope from my hand, spins, and trots a few paces out into the driveway.  He lets me bring him back in.  I refill my apron with treats and even bring out the saltine crackers, and we play stationary games like head-down and the-grownups-are-talking and pirouette.  These distract him pretty well, but he’s still antsy and dancy.

When the tools are packed up and the crowd disperses, I wonder how Gus will approach his stall.  No problem:  he strolls right in, shoves his snout into his grain bucket, and chomps his hay without a care in the world.  I can only imagine the scene sometime later, when he idly strolls over to the formerly battered door and tries his luck shoving it.  Curses, he’ll say, in donkeyese; foiled again!

109. Punk rampant

I open the little wooden storage box outside Gus’s stall (to stock my pocket with the regulation three peppermint candies that I allow as extra-special treats in each session) and half-notice its contents in disarray.  The bag of Buckeye-brand mini-cookies has a big hole torn in it; the two new boxes of saltine crackers are now one box and three unboxed plastic sleeves.  Hmmm . . .  

Gus comes in from the paddock eagerly and we play our games as usual.  Some dressagey walking and halting and backing up.  Some leg lifts with head-down, on our way to learning take-a-bow.  Some horn honking and keyboard playing.  Some pedestal standing and pompom waving.  All copacetic.

Also copacetic, when grazing time is up, Gus cranks his neck and resists only briefly before consenting to be led off the lawn and into his stall.  I assure him that it’s dinnertime, and he marches right to his feed bucket, where, sure enough, his token tablespoonful of grain is waiting.

Sandy is waiting too, to explain about the brushbox.  It seems that yesterday, Donkey Demento escaped from his stall (maybe she didn’t fully latch the bottom hook, allowing him to scootch under his stall guard) and launched a daylight raid.  Finding the box’s hasp secured, he resorted to the simple expedient of breaking a hinge off the lid to get at the treasures within.  After spilling everything out, ripping into the treat bag and the cracker boxes, failing to pry open the peppermint tub, and strewing some brushes and ointment tubes here and there, he made a good start on his neighbors’ boxes as well.

When humans discovered the barn aisle looking like a looted supermarket, Sandy says, she wasn’t surprised at the mess, only at the quietness with which it had been perpetrated.  Gus’s style is more raucous vandal than cat burglar, but this time he wreaked his havoc without raising any ruckus at all.

I bring a couple of screws and a screwdriver, fix the box lid, and assess the losses.  I calculate that Gus scored one whole sleeve of saltines and three handfuls of Buckeye treats.  He’s done worse — once, I’m told, he stole several full-size horse dinners — and with no ill effects.  When you have a mischievous mouth, you better have a cast-iron stomach, and he has both.

57. Pigeons, plugs, and pie pans

Gus’s barn is now a pigeon exclusion zone.  Pigeons have long been numerous and ubiquitous above the stalls and arena in that barn, but we finally reached our limit of tolerance.  The makeshift ceiling over the little tack room has helped protect the saddles and bridles, but everywhere else the pigeon poop has been prodigious bordering on the epic.  The audience chairs in the arena have been covered in it, and ditto for the light switch, the entry gate, the stack of miniature traffic cones, the fetching toys, etc., etc.  In the stabling half of the barn, the residents have been shat upon, their water buckets fouled, their feed buckets caked, and their neatly folded blankets and flymasks besmirched.  Sandy was draping old towels over everybody’s feed buckets between meals, but the towels became stiff with dried excrement every couple of days.  

The cooing of easily 30 or 40 pigeons has rarely bothered me, but their frequent and  sudden flights in and out of the barn can be unnerving to horses and riders.  I think the final straw for Sandy was seeing how much grain the pigeons were  stealing from the coop of her very nice chickens while they were outside dutifully eating up bugs all over the property.  Which includes two disused barns that would make Perfectly Fine alternative homes for the pigeons to make their very own.

So, after extensive online and word-of-mouth research, Sandy has compiled an arsenal of pigeon assault weapons:  a SuperSoaker pump-action squirt gun, a toy rifle that fires plastic-foam Nerf bullets, and a big, long-handled net.  All humans who see a pigeon are deputized to grab a water or Nerf gun and let fly (and enjoined to gather up the spent Nerf bullets and return them to their ammo box for reloading).  To support her artillery and fusilier power, she became a corps of engineers, climbing up and hanging an aluminum-foil pie pan on a string to dangle in the center of each and every little window between the arena and the stable.  She tightly closes the big arena doors every night.  She has plastic owls posted around the building full-time.
 

In the face of this relentless onslaught, the pigeon population has plummeted.  There’s still a nest over Gus’s stall and a few others way high in the arena rafters, beyond the range of water hose or foam bullets.  But the barn is appreciably less shitted up these days.  Rows of pigeons now bide their time on the power lines outside, watching for a chance to retake their territory.  But our warrior spirits are steeled to keep up the good fight, never let down our guard, and beat back the invaders.  We hope the onset of winter will dampen their resolve and drive them at last to seek shelter elsewhere.

Victory won’t be declared until there are no more than a couple of pigeons resident in our barn.  And we fully expect to re-up and resume hostilities in the spring.