He still works hard to kick the ball straight, and he still obsesses when he gets it wrong, and he still tries changing the subject by using his mouth; but his success percentage has flipped from maybe 25-75 to more like 60-40. And he does love putting the ball into the goal— just notice how he grows a fifth leg (ahem!) when I add the net to our game:
More and more practice, less and less frustration — a perfect challenge for this Einstein of asses.
I was looking for something with a bit more weight than Gus’s almost balloonlike playball, which blows and floats over the arena floor. I dug up one of my old basketballs, but it was too heavy, and also too flat. So when I was offered this flashy patriotic relic, I jumped. While it’s a bit smaller than a regulation adult basketball, it’s got the right heft and just enough age-related deflation to slow its roll.
Gus welcomes the new toy with his usual magnanimity but immediately has trouble: its petite profile seems much, much harder for him to locate and kick. He does a lot of pawing and dirt-kicking, behind the ball and on either side of it, like a duffer tearing up divots all around the tee. Even when he puts his nose way down onto the ball, he can’t seem to connect with his hoof. I reward every near miss and feeble forward movement, but this thing has him pretty discombobulated. I can see he’s getting a little frustrated, yet he won’t quit — he digs at the ball again and again. He knows this trick, dammit, but he can’t quite execute. At length, he does give up and resorts to biting the ball and handing it to me in exasperation.
I take pity on him, bring out the big old ball, and let him boot it good. I’m figuring to give up myself and reserve the small ball for our basketball dunking game only. But Gus’s sticktoitiveness convinces me to let him practice with the new ball a few more times in the next few days. The old, easy ball is on the shelf and ready if he needs it . . .
It might be my fault too: anticipating the difficulty of both precision kicking as a skill and goal-scoring as a concept, I started right out with buttermints as rewards. What was I thinking? Gus loves the ball enough just for itself; focusing and targeting its actions are simply new ways to love it, no extra incentive needed. I’m going back to carrot coins, with only occasional candies.
Already the mints and the mere presence of an intriguing new contraption — the kids’ soccer net — have created a football fiend. If he isn’t chasing and kicking the ball, he's biting the top of the goal and slinging it around. Wading through this irrational exuberance, I pursue my system doggedly. I start by placing the ball at the very front of the goal net and inviting Gus to kick it. He and it are so close that his kick usually succeeds in scoring a goal, accompanied by clicks and treats and celebrations. After a couple days, I place the ball a little farther from the goal, and now a kick that’s off-kilter will be a miss. He gets no treat for that, but I do hurry to replace the ball so he can try again.
Basic physics make it very difficult for a hoof to kick a ball straight. Think of a bat and a baseball, whose oppositely curved surfaces rarely meet at the sweet spot that creates a line-drive home run; instead most at-bats produce foul balls and popups and squigglers in front of the plate. Likewise Gus’s rounded hoof rarely contacts his playball straight on, so his kicks veer and squirt in all directions. At least he’s not being thrown curveballs and sliders to spin the physics even worse. Still, he’s gonna need a whole lot of practice.
Even if he were to break that code tomorrow, soccer skills involve more than feet. For Gus, his body orientation is a major issue. Since his fetlock joint pretty much only bends forward and back, he needs to stand head-on to the goal if he’s to have any chance of kicking it straight in. That means swinging his hips around square behind his shoulders, and that takes time that he’d rather spend heedlessly bashing the ball with his foot. I’m not sure how to teach that, but I’m hoping I won’t need to explicitly. With only a ittle coaching from me, he learned to step around as needed when rolling the chair over and tipping it upright, so maybe he’ll figure out the same for scoring a soccer goal. For now, I’m just luring him around as I hold the ball, not setting it down until he’s facing it pretty straight.
We’re in no rush to develop all these athletic nuances. Right now, and doubtless for weeks to come, we’re either kicking randomly all over the arena or we’re doing stationary place-kicks very near the mouth of the goal. And . . . he . . . scores!!
• 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 that may catch him out 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 past 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 onto 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 . . .
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday marked the third day and night that Gus and the horses have had to stay in their stalls beause of bad weather: when we didn’t have single-digit temperatures with dangerous winds, we had major snowstorms and/or freezing rain. Gus has a nice double-sized stall, but being stuck within those four walls without any paddock time in the open air seems to have caused a sudden and severe case of donkey insanity.
• several upturned chairs
• the jumbo trashbag of empty bottles
and cans (destined for donation
to charity) eviscerated and scattered
• several flipped and broken-open
brush boxes
• the contents of those brush boxes
removed, trampled, strewn, and
flung, including but not limited to:
> 16 fly socks, large and small,
old and new, belonging to
at least three different equid
residents, whose owners still
aren’t sure whose is whose
> 3 little sachets of fly repellent,
a bottle of Farrier’s Fix, and
a bottle of antifungal goop for hooves,
all still sealed
> 4 hoofpicks and 1 hoof knife, again of unknown ownership
> 1 thick-metal, bright-red McVitie’s cookie tube filled with
saltines, still sealed but crushed nearly flat in the middle
> 2 notebooks, 0 pens
> 1 measuring cup and 2 measuring spoons
> 4 needle-less syringes, assorted
> 9 brushes and combs, spewed from several different brush boxes
> 1 pound of after-dinner pastel buttermints in a large glass
canning jar with hinge-and-lock lid (miraculously intact)
> 1 plastic tub of horse treats with its carry-handle ripped off but
its lid still sealed
> 4 sponges, assorted
> 3 towels and rags, assorted
> 3 neoprene bellboots, with the 4th presumably MIA
> 6 Ziploc bags, tattered, none of them containing whatever they
used to contain
> 1 empty 4-cubic-foot brown-paper bag that shavings had arrived in
> 3 small plastic-mesh totes of unknown provenance
• the insulating-foam cover from the water spigot
• Gus, standing outside his stall, the picture of nonchalance
But with the big barn doors shut against the blustery winds, he couldn’t go across the yard to the other barn, so he just focused his attentions on his own residence. For an active, determined person to create that much mess, it’d take hours; for Gus, it was probably less.
And when he got tired, he couldn’t go back into his stall for a nice lie-down. Because his stall door was latched and intact. Yet he was outside of it.
That’s the most demonic aspect of the whole incident: how could he have gotten out of his stall? One theory is that he clambered out the corner of the stall that has no jail bars above the wall. He’s already bent his feed bucket, which hangs in that corner, from all his chest-ramming and head-craning in that corner, and perhaps he got a foot in that bucket and climbed over. But surely the bucket can’t hold the weight of a donkey, and the wall is almost chin-high for him, and the unbarred portion isn’t much wider than he is. And if he did escape that way, how did he crash-land out in the aisle without breaking a leg?
Another idea is that he sailed over the other small length of wall that is free of jail bars. That’s at the other end of his stall, where he could perhaps get a little bit of a running start (I’ve seen horses size up a fence, walk away several paces, then turn and run at it in order to gain the necessary air speed to clear it). But even then, that stall wall comes up to his chin, and he’s built like a fireplug, not a show-jumper.
The only plausible answer, of course, is that he’s so genuinely satanic that he turned himself into smoke, insinuated himself under the stall door, and then resubstantiated into the devil-donkey that he is.
