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.

127. Indoor amusements

This summer in upstate New York, with its hot draught in April and May followed by steamy monsoons in July and August, has produced a bumper crop of biting flies.  Even a normal summer’s worth of ankle-sucking stable flies and ear-biting face gnats is enough to drive Gus around the bend, fly mask and fly socks notwithstanding.  This year, faced with thick swarms of bugs (and a massive, mucky rain puddle at his pasture gate), Gus was simply refusing to be led to his paddock almost every day.

At first, Sandy allowed him choose alternative paddocks, as he gets along quite well with all the horses and often enjoys visiting their turnouts.  But no matter which group or which location he’d opt for, after an hour or two he’d get bored or annoyed, and out he would come.  It’s easy for him:  he just pushes his shoulder, or cranks his head, against a board until it breaks and he can squeeze under, over, or through.  Some fences are protected by a string of electrified wire running along their top edges, and if the juice is turned up high enough, electric can deter even a determined donkey.  But because Gus is so short, he scoots under the wire; and because horses’ legs are so fragile, it’s unsafe to run the wire down low.

This leaves Sandy with no choice but to shut Gus in his stall inside the barn all day.  He hates that, but perhaps not as much as he hates being outdoors.  Only a small fraction of the biting flies come into the barn, plus each stall has a big box fan strapped to its front grille.  The breeze helps blow away the heat and the bugs.  It’s uninteresting and solitary, but it’s comfortable.

For me, Gus’s daytime confinement (he still goes out to pasture all night, when the flies are much less obnoxious) means he’s extra-eager for our training sessions.  Before I finish parking my car, I’m greeted by a long, loud bagpipe-bassoon duet, and if I stop to chat or otherwise delay my arrival at his stall door, I hear more braying.  Gus is so happy to get out of the stall and into the arena that he readily performs any and all tricks I suggest; I almost always run out of treats well before his interest wanes.  

And he invents new games too.  When we find two 50-gallon barrels set up in the arena, he develops a particular walking pattern around and between them, which he wants to continue ad nauseam.  Also, he inexplicably turns his erstwhile pirouetting trick around the pedestal into a climb-aboard trick instead.  I’ve named this new trick “all four,” but now I need to reinforce his crowd-pleasing standard “step over” so that he doesn’t utterly abandon that front-feet-up twirl in favor of his new favorite all-four-feet-up trick.  No wonder he’s so keen on learning to step on the drum-set pedal.  To keep up with his newfound avidity, I fear I really will need to bring him a chess set or a trampoline or . . .

108. Smokin’

Standing around while an animal grazes may have its pleasures, but it’s far from intellectually engaging.  So while Gus grazes, I make it my business to shoo away the biting flies by swinging the lead rope against his legs, gently scraping my boot along his shins, and chasing them off his belly and back.  I also make myself useful with brushless pre-grooming:  running my hands all over him to scrub off dead hair and wipe away any clinging mud or shavings or other debris.  

Today the winds are gusty.  That helps keep the flies off him, but I quickly realize it also reveals just how filthy he is.  In the past couple of days, he’s rolled repeatedly in a dust-bath wallow that he and his pasturemate Henry have excavated in their sandy-soiled paddock.   Now each time I rub Gus’s fur or pat his back, a visible puff of superfine dust erupts into the air and blows away.  I rub and pat and rub and pat, and the puffs just keep rising and blowing.  Trapped between his skin and his coat is what must be a wheelbarrowful of powdered dirt.

Absorbed in his grassy feast, Gus is oblivious, but I’m having a high old time watching the billows burst from under my hand.  I begin thumping him in syncopated rhythms, emitting complex smoke signals.  As I pat his back and neck and rump like a beatnik on bongos, he just grazes on, smoldering nonchalantly in the breeze.  Summertime, and the living is hazy.

54. Gimme shelter

Gus’s refuge

The dog days of summer are not for donkeys.  As the humidity climbs, so do the biting flies, boiling up from the ground and swarming Gus from hoof to poll.  Ever resourceful, he’s managed to hollow out a donkey-shaped hidey-hole in the thickets in the back corner of his paddock.  It’s shady in there, and the ground is bare dirt, so it’s less buggy than the sun-soaked grassy areas.  He crams himself into it, stands very still, and waits for deliverance. 

When I arrive and whistle, he bolts from it and canters down to the gate to meet me.  His shoulders and legs are thick with flies, and he can’t bear to stand still for me to buckle his halter; once I shove it on and fling open the gate, we hurry straight into the arena.

In his past days of severe ennui, before he was getting enough work and fun, Gus routinely barged anyone who opened the paddock gate.  Barbara, Henry’s owner, often needed Sandy as a fender-offer so that she could safely extract her horse without letting Gus escape.  In recent months, she reports, he’s been much more polite.  As if he’s confident that his person will come and he’ll get his turn, he magnanimously grants Barbara and Henry enough space to leave the paddock unmolested.  But then last week he again became a flight risk:  he was so fly-frantic that he ignored her signals to stay back and tried to bowl her over bodily and plunge out the gate.  She resorted to yelling and swatting with Henry’s lead line to send Gus away, slipping Henry out and slamming the gate behind her just in time.  I'm ever so sure that Gus apologized like a contrite drunk, saying he was not himself and it was just the flies talking.

Sandy treats Gus with dab-on bug repellent that’s supposed to last for two weeks, but the swarms persist.  She’s able to spritz some insecticide on him, but like most brands of fly spray, it’s effective for mere minutes.  (Maybe these chemicals would be as effective as they advertise if we had cooler, breezier weather, or a habitat that’s less infested, or some strain of kinder, gentler bugs?)  His fly mask keeps his eyes and ears protected.  And his dapper new fly socks work well, but from the knees up his legs are scaly with masses of clustered scabs.  He also has spatterings of bug bites on his neck and body.

On the really tropical afternoons, all we can do is park him in his stall.  It’s not just dark and dry and cool; it has a box-fan bungee-corded to the rails, blowing a blessed breeze right where he stands to munch his hay.  As much as he usually hates being confined, he’s visibly relieved to be in there.  He even leaves off grazing after just a few minutes, entirely of his own volition, and practically walks himself into his stall.  After he has his dinner and I offer to take him back outside, he digs in his hooves and leans back; the only allowable destinations, he tells me, are the arena or his stall.  And so it shall be.

Between his shrubby self-made hidey-hole and his plush human-engineered stall, Gus leads quite the charmed and sheltered life.

52. Gus gets a booboo

I’m commiserating just a bit with the freaks among us who don’t love summer.  Myself, I loathe winter and adore summer — except for the biting flies.  They’re so vicious and voracious in the paddocks lately that I find myself actually looking forward to colder weather.

While the bugs are equal-opportunity tormenters of the horses, they single out Gus for extra persecution.  Sandy warned me about this:  put him next to any horse in any field, and Gus will always have double or triple the number of flies swarming him.  Sure enough, when I take him out for grazing, he’s covered in flies from the knees down, he never stops swishing his useless little cow-tail, and he shivers his back and belly skin almost continuously.  Sandy also warned me that he won’t tolerate being spritzed with bug repellent.  So nowadays, since he’s mostly shedded down to his sleek summer coat, I occupy myself while he grazes not by scrubbing off his loose hair but by swinging the end of the lead-rope around his ankles to shoo off the flies.  Which sometimes just cling harder (probably flipping me the bird with a spare claw) as the rope swipes over their backs.  And which always reconvene one nanosecond after the rope swings away.

Within in a day of gnats arriving on the farm, Gus’s ears were filled with little scabs.  From that day forward, he has to wear a fly-mask — a donkey-tailored version with risibly long ear pockets — whenever he’s out in his paddock during the day.  He kinda hates the fly-mask.  Its mesh is stiff enough to stand off his face a bit so he can blink freely, but it makes his head hot and itchy.  The minute I remove it, he tries to rub his forehead against me; I’m teaching him to stop barging into my chest and to let me scratch his face with my hand.  At least it keeps the gnats away.

The huge green-headed horse flies wait for really hot weather, but  the leg-biting stable flies have already joined their gnatty accomplices in livestock torture, and Gus’s ankles are as scabby as his ears were.  We apply little mesh fly-socks, but they tend to bunch up and scrunch down as he strolls the pasture.  One heavy, humid day, I whistle to him and he runs back and forth near the gate until I get there. 

He’s swarming with little flies.  He can barely stand for haltering (though treats help, of course), and he trots down the path into the arena. I remove his fly-gear and start leading him around, but he’s reluctant to walk, and I notice that he’s licking his lips nonstop.  He occasionally rubs his face on his front leg or reaches around to his flank to bite at a fly (several followed him from his paddock), but mostly he just stands there dully, licking and licking.  I feed him a treat, but once he’s swallowed it he continues pointlessly licking his chops.  If he were a dog, this would signal nausea or poisoning, but equids can’t vomit, and they’re prone to colic and gastric torsion that can be fatal.  I pull Sandy away from her chores to check on him.  I’d looked him over a bit and noticed nothing, but she quickly finds a chafed sore on his front ankle.  And when she touches it, he lowers his head and licks it.  Aha . . .

I’d have pegged Gus as a tough customer, but this reveals that he’s no stoic.  His Very Bad Booboo is debilitating, shutting down all bodily operations except for licking obsessively in an effort to ease the ouch.  The ever-resourceful Sandy dabs old-fashioned diaper-rash cream on the raw spot, and after he pulls his foot away a couple of times, he’s visibly soothed.  And he stops licking.  And we have a nice session of walking and cone-fetching and pirouetting.  He even pushes over a steel 50-gallon drum, and I ask him to bop it like a (much heavier) beachball. 

To ensure that the barrel rolls straight ahead, I click and treat only for applying his snout to its center section, and he sends it up and down the arena with gusto.

Sandy and I resolve to get  some new and softer fly-socks for Gus, but we can’t use them anyway until his booboo is finished healing.  My, the trials and tribs of a donkey living on Easy Street . . .