105. VIDEO: Airplane mode

In a tightly wound, aerodynamic creature built for speed, relaxation often allows certain body parts to go flaccid and dangle.  It’s not very dignified, but it’s a useful clue for trainers trying to judge the animal’s moods and interests.  When an ear-scritch or butt-rub is just right, equines may relax their jaws and muzzles so much that their lower lips dangle open.  Males sometimes let it all hang out — that is, their penises, from the sheaths where they’re usually stored up close to their bellies.  Several of us have remarked that slow, steady, clear training with a high rate of clicks and treats often induces a gelding to drop, and sometimes to dangle there for several minutes while continuing the training.  

Gus is unusually reserved and strait-laced as regards his boy bits.  He never peed in my presence until well after a year into our relationship.  And I’ve only seen him dangle once (I was momentarily perplexed to notice an extra hind leg . . .) during a training session.  But he’s a flamboyant and unashamed nudist from the neck up.  When his ears aren’t zooming around manically like antennae on a very busy bee, he lets them flop.  Horses also show airplane ears — horizontal on both sides — when they’re mellowed out.  But on Gus the vigilant-to-vegetative contrast is more striking, since his ears are so long and have so far to fall.

The horn-honking video displays this perfectly.  Watch it once here, for his trick with full semaphore ears, but then look below and watch only his ears.  I’ll pay you money if you don’t laugh out loud.

103. Today’s menu

As this hot, hot summer progresses, Gus’s choice of forage does too.  Along with the grass, he’s delighting in big, shaggy ragweeds lately.  White clovers, even those whose flowers are gone by, are still pretty good; plantains, now most of them gone by, are apparently much less yummy than they were a couple of weeks ago.

What never changes, for Gus as for all the horses, is that bird’s-foot trefoil is universally rejected.  A friend who recently bought a small horse farm has found that one of its pastures is at least half bird’s-foot trefoil, and both her Irish sport-horse gelding and her Morgan mare eat all around it.  I’m surprised, since trefoil is a legume, like alfalfa — horses should love it.  My friend researched it and learned that it’s perfectly edible for horses, but they tend to avoid it unless nothing else is available.

In Gus’s little patch of heaven, there’s always something else available.

37. Push-me-pull-you

Four blog-following friends come to the barn for a donkey-trick demo.  Grateful for the company, Gus eats up their pat-pats and greetings with a spoon, and in return he gives them spoonfuls of cuteness and charm.  We walk around the arena, retrieve a traffic cone, tilt a chair upright, bop the beachball . . .  At one point, during his pirouettes on the pedestal, he pointedly looks over at the guests to make sure his adoring fans are sufficiently adoring him.

After this love fest, I can tell that Gus is distracted, gazing out the arena doors at horses in the pastures.  Eating grass.  Must.  Eat.  Grass.  So I cut our session short and we adjourn to the driveway edges for some grazing.  Before we leave the arena, though, I rig his lead rope for extra control, threading it through both sides of his halter, so that a pull on the rope will tighten it around his whole muzzle, exerting pressure over his nose and under his chin.  Heh, heh, I chortle to myself: look at me, outsmarting this ornery ass. 

And the plan works when he tries to trundle on down the driveway and I’m able to haul him back in the other direction.  Now I can convince him to graze where I want him to graze.  I let him loiter around the geldings’ paddock; they oblige by congregating at the fence to touch noses with him, and then everybody grazes, sharing a mood of sunshiny togetherness.  For awhile, Gus leaves off grazing and just stands and watches the geldings — more togetherness.  After 20 minutes of his alternately chowing down and casually communing with his posse, I propose that we move along.
 
Now the muzzle-snare rope system gets a thorough field-testing.  Gus cranks his neck and tries to march away, but I resist, and he grudgingly relents.  By way of thanks, I exhale and whisper sweet nothings and scratch his withers.  He ducks his head and tries to squeeze under (or simply break) a fence board in order to enter the geldings’ paddock.  I’m able to pull him off, delivering a sharp yank with the rope to indicate my displeasure.  When I try to walk on again, he drags me right back and half under the fence, but again I manage to haul him away.  Clearly the wraparound lead line is leveling the playing field for us. 

Right about here is where a headstrong horse would surrender.  But Gus ain’t no horse.  Gus escalates.  I can almost see his brain make the decision to grit his teeth and suffer the discomfort, and a half-second later he barges into me, pulls past, and overpowers my grip on the rope.  Once again, sheer will and weight simply trump all modes of human opposition.

He canters away, but just as he tries again to scoot under the fence, I wave my spare lead line and yell, chasing him away.  I begin plotting ways of herding him into a barn, any barn, in hopes of shutting him into a stall, any stall.  (Fifty years ago, we might let Gus have the run of the farm, which is really all he desires.  But these days the road is full of cars and trucks, and the humans have day jobs off site.  It’s not a safe world for independent donkeys.)  Recognizing the yells and curses that Gus so universally inspires, Sandy comes to my aid.  I lead him, with grim determination and the rope held short, while she shoos him from behind.  Outnumbered and outflanked, he walks up the path and into his paddock.

There I thank him with a handful of apple cubes, and I talk to him nicely as I remove his halter.  But he’s holding a grudge: in no uncertain terms, he turns his back on me and stalks away.

32. Steeds and palfreys

Toying with the fantasy of riding Gus, I’ve been thinking how lucky I was to ride horses over the years.

A Nutmeg lookalike

I still fondly remember Nutmeg, the pudgy roan mare assigned to me during a weeklong New Forest horse camp (only affordable thanks to my dad’s American salary in the somewhat penurious England of the late 1960s).  And I still remember when we all switched horses for one lesson, and the lot I drew was General, a crotchety old bay who bucked me off so hard that my eventual return to Earth knocked (a) the wind out of me, (b) my glasses entirely off my face, and (c) my riding crop deep into the woods where it was never found again.  Being 10 years old, I bounced right back unhurt.  But I was grateful to reunite with sweet little Nutmeg for the rest of the week.  

In my late twenties, I took a liking to Junior, a quarterhorse that I rode for a busy friend.  Junior was nice but prone to youthful indiscretions.  Once, on a suddenly frosty morning in the autumn, he got, as they say, the wind under his tail, and he bolted with me.  The plan was a moderate canter, but he tore off at a dead gallop.  It was easy enough to ride, but the footing was rutted and tussocky, so I feared for our lives and limbs.  All my rein-pulling (and involuntary bellowing of “whoa!” into the roaring wind) was in vain; he never set a foot wrong, and he stopped only after some 100 yards, where a big hedge blocked his way.  


One summer day, as we were schooling in a sandy arena, I felt Junior’s knees wobble and bend under me, and before I knew it he was lying down, preparatory to a nice roll.  I guess the saddle was hot and itchy, so a back-scratch seemed in order.  Somehow I jumped off and hauled him to his feet.

A few weeks later, riding along a rural road, we passed a cow pasture.  Now, the very job and vocation of quarterhorses is to work cows, but Junior, we hereby learned, suffered from a phobia of cows, even behind fences.  When several cows lumbered toward the fence, his reaction was panicky whirling, which skidded his hind feet into a steep, slippery roadside ditch, which made him stand upright so suddenly that he was falling over backward.  With me on him.  Wearing, for impact protection, a cloth baseball cap. 

As my consciousness glided into emergency slow-motion, I realized that his rearing up was tipping me backward, and I knew that my pulling on his head would only worsen his tipping.  So I made a distinct effort to drop the reins and grab onto his mane — all for nought, because he fell anyway.  I was deposited smack on the tarmac, where, waiting for him to follow, I improved the time by hoping that I would escape being crushed or kicked to death and also by accepting that I had no say in the matter.  In a half-second, Junior crashed onto the tarmac too, landing mere inches to the side of me.  Like all horses down, he found the destination more disconcerting than the trip, so he instantly jumped to his feet.  It was in his scramble to stand up that I sustained my only real injury:  one thrashing hoof struck me just under the collar-bone.

Junior and I were both providentially OK.  My back and butt were bruised but unbroken.  To check on my hoofbeat injury, I looked inside my T-shirt and noticed that its interior surface had a circle of whitish powder adhering to it.  What the . . . ?  I climbed back into the (scratched and scuffed, and borrowed) saddle, and we rode home to lie down with a few ice packs.  Unshirted and inspecting my shoulder-front more closely in a mirror, I could almost read the brand name of the horse-shoe impressed pinkly into my flesh.  And then I tumbled (ahem!) to the T-shirt mystery’s answer:  a crescent of my skin cells had been ground into the inside of the fabric by the clomp and twist of Junior’s hoof.

After that little brush with death, I never, ever, ever rode a horse again without a proper helmet.

Lacey

When I moved to Saratoga, I put an ad in a local dressage newsletter, offering exercise for a horse whose owner was too busy to provide enough.  That’s how I met Lacey, a red-chestnut mare with a sprinkling of white polka-dots evenly distributed over her body.  (These, it turns out, were not signs of Appaloosa heritage but the leftover follicle damage from a bad case of hives or other skin allergy years earlier.)  Sociable, vigilant, and savvy, Lacey was the alpha mare in any herd.  More than once, geldings broke or jumped fences to get to her when she was in heat.  And she welcomed them.

When feeling her oats and needing to blow off steam, Lacey would snort and trumpet like an elephant.  On those days, we knew not to ride until after longeing her, and she always took the opportunity to rocket around at top speed, bucking and farting like a bronco.  Lacey had a taste for donuts and danishes, and she was cushy enough to ride bareback.  She was game for anything, and games were what her owner and I loved to play with her, especially after she was retired from riding.  Using her strong cow-herding instincts, she especially enjoyed chasing us: she would pin her ears and snake out her neck toward our escaping derrieres — just as Gus chases the beachball with a predatory twinkle in his eye.

As a noble mount, Gus is plenty strong enough to carry me on his back, but he’s so short that, as Barbara suggests, I might need to strap roller-skates to my feet.  Which reminds me of another horse tale, again from England.  Among the lesson horses for hire at my muddy, neighborhood stables was a minuscule Shetland pony.  Marybell was no taller than a very tall dog, but she was very much fatter, probably because she loved to be hand-fed fruit-flavored ice lollies and we kids loved to indulge her.  After business hours, when the staff rode and ponied the horses in small groups out to their turnout field for the night, one particularly lanky stablehand would always straddle Marybell, fold his legs up in front of him, and ride her off to pasture.

My guess about Gus is that he’d freak the hell out if I sat on him, and before I could dismount he’d eject me with extreme prejudice.  I’m too old for that nonsense.