146. Patience over anger

With an electro-stim TENS device, extra-strength acetaminophen, wintergreen and arnica and other herbal rubs, and a brilliant physical therapist, my spine and guts are recovering from the tug-of-war with Gus, the long-eared Sherman tank.

Today I bring an apple, in hopes that bribery and luring might aid my cause.  This time, I give him a good 30 minutes of gluttonous grazing before asking him to quit and come away.  Lifting his head is a bit of a haul, but when he pushes and curls and objects, I can dance away without stressing my back.  And instead of applying any pressure on the lead rope to ask him to start walking, I stand and wait.  With no fight to engage in, he seems a bit flummoxed.  He presses the top of his head into my side and leaves it there; a thin wisp of smoke curls out of both ears as he tries to rethink.  I mention the magic words “It’s time for your dinner.”  He doesn’t budge.  I use a maitre d’ gesture to usher him forward and I chirrup, “Walk on!”  Nada.  I show him the apple, which he sniffs, but then he bulls forward a few steps and rams his head back down to the turf and grabs a bite of grass.  

I lift his head again and we wait again, both of us cursing under our breaths.  I bite the apple and hold the juicy bitten piece right at his nostril, and now he eyes it and he eyes me — and he begins walking off the pasture.  We walk briskly all the way into his stall, where I toss the apple piece into his bucket and slam the door shut behind us.

Praise the Lord, a strategy may be developing.  Waiting is crucial — Gus hates feeling rushed or pressured.  Letting him make the first move is crucial — he will do nothing that isn’t his own decision to do.  And bribery with sweet treats is crucial — his natural gluttony often trumps his other agendas.

Start your clocks:  how quickly will Gus hatch some new scheme of resistance, devise an alternative escape plan, and outwit me yet again?

145. Taking the spring out of springtime

The early May grass at Gus’s farm is gorgeous.  All the equids are gobbling it up like starvelings.  For me, that presents the perennial problem of getting Gus to leave the pasture when his grazing time is up.  The horses may resist a bit when their owners pick up the lead rope and head them away from the grass, but they reluctantly assent and follow politely along.  Not Gus.  As with all things in his life, Gus does not do what he doesn’t want, and nobody can make him, so there.

Each spring, I have to remind myself how to handle — or avoid handling — this intractable problem.  With the lead rope looped both over and under his muzzle, I can prevail if it cinches tightly, and if I give it a bit of slack before he hits the end of it, and if I pull back with all my weight.  It’s not fun, but it seems preferable to letting him realize that he can pull the rope away and run off and keep grazing.

Today, I need to bring Gus into his stall  after about 20 minutes on the grass.  He shoves his anvil-like head into my ribs and pushes me away.  I dance around and evade.  He dips his head to drape the lead across his neck and starts to pull away hard.  I scurry to his other side, bringing the line off his neck again.  He backs up and backs up and backs up, until I grip the rope, at which instant he barges forward and then curls back against me.  Now I’m getting steamed and tugging on the rope, which irks him so that he resists more . . . and war is declared.  When he turns tail and revs into a fast trot straight away from me, I hang on for dear life, vituperating through gritted teeth.  He tows me across the whole pasture, my arms outstretched, my body leaned back, my knees bent to stay low, and my feet running fast to avoid being pulled down.  Not a dignified picture.

But I freakin’ win, damit!  The rope’s latch-snap digs into Gus’s chin so he finally stops running.  After that, I gather up the rope and he marches alongside me into the barn like a good soldier.  He’s smart enough to know when resistance is futile.  

Me, I’m not that smart.  Or that athletic anymore.  Within two minutes, I realize I’ve strained some crucial core muscles:  I’m not hurting, but I’m feeling jittery and woozy and almost queasy — some major abdominal nerve is panicking . . .  As I groom Gus and put away our musical toys, I begin to feel pain illuminate my lower back and wash down my right leg.  Shit!  When I suffered this same injury years earlier, from hours of digging in clay soil to haul out a buried hunk of heavy iron, the misery lasted for many months.  And here I’ve done it again just because I got mad at a donkey?  Who’s the ass now?

While I nurse my sore back, I ponder what to do when next I visit Gus.  He does need to be grazed — it’s good for his belly and brain.  But he does need to stop grazing at some point, and how can I make that happen?

119. Grazing lessons

Now that snow no longer blankets the grass around Gus’s barn, we end each arena session with some grazing time.  The grass is still 95% brown, but the tiniest filaments of green are just beginning to sprout beneath the matted old turf.  Gus has to pull back his enormous lips in order to press his teeth right down to the ground where he can nip off these earliest threads of fresh grass.  These days he’s getting about two-thirds dead grass to one-third fresh with each bite, but soon it’ll be mostly green, and then it’ll be all pure, sweet, tender, green, fresh yumminess.  For now, when he occasionally pulls up an old blade that’s too tough and tasteless, he separates it with his tongue and ejects it from the side of his mouth while still tweezing and ingesting the next bites.  Equids never forget how to graze with top efficiency.

Gus also remembers how the extra-long, extra-thick lead rope works when I hook it to the far side of his halter and thread it through the near side.  How it works is like a noose, pinching all around his snout if he tries to haul his head away from me.  The first couple of snow-free days, I had to insist on a grazing end time though he wasn’t ready.  As I made to lead him off the grass, he yawed one way, and I leaned back and held on, so he yawed and tried to trot the other way, and I leaned back and ran along and held on.  Then he recalled his lessons from last summer:  there is no escape from the cinch-rope, no matter how obnoxiously he resists it.  And today he doesn’t bother to fight at all (“resistance is futile”) but immediately walks off with me like an obedient gentleman.  In his stall, I feed him the last peppermint from my treat apron.

87. Sprung

Spring has begun just enough that Gus has the fever — grass greed, reefer madness — and, with it, shocking bad manners.  Under the matted, dead, yellow, dry turf he’s found a few quarter-inch shoots of fresh green grass, and he’s adamant that nothing can come between him and them.  

Two days ago, after an excellent session of dressagey work and trick performances, I took him outside to graze, and he mashed his muzzle onto the ground to tweeze up the tiny grasslets, after 15 minutes of which, he consented to be led into his stall.  Today as I bring him out of his paddock, he eyes the ground tentatively before coming along to the arena.  Once inside, he rolls luxuriously, stands up, and immediately drags me back toward the arena gate.  For months, we’ve worked in the arena day in and day out, so it’s high time for a day off; I surprise him by opening the gate and leading him straight out for grazing.  I give him a full 30 minutes of chewy indulgence.

When I lead Gus off the grass and back into his stall, he barely demurs.  But when I latch only the top part of his stall guard and turn away just to grab a brush and hoof pick, he suddenly lowers his head, crouches, and slams under the guard.  He heads for the barn door, but Sandy and Barbara happen to be standing there talking and intercept him.  I rehalter him and suggest a return to his stall.  He’s having none of it.  He surges ahead, Sandy tries to block him head-on, and he offers to plow her down in her tracks.  She sidesteps and grabs his rope, and both of us get towed out to the driveway until, with our four hands and two body weights, we manage to stop him.  Gus at full steam is so powerful that, in his effort to wrestle free of us, he actually rears a bit.  Once I get him turned back toward the barn, I begin leading him semi-forcibly while Sandy shoos him with outstretched arms, and about halfway down the barn aisle he formally surrenders and walks into his stall.

I latch the top and bottom of his stall guard (which he realizes with a thud when he tries to reprise his ducking-under escape) before I reach for his brush.  Once contained, though, he summarily mellows out, chews hay, and welcomes affection and grooming.  You’d never know this was the same madding brute that nearly trampled two strong women just a half-minute earlier.  One deep ear-scrub later, and his bottom lip is dangling in a trance of bliss.

78. Pisspot

Today again, Gus is a consummate ass.  He’s contrararian and inscrutable.  He comes in from his paddock just fine, rolls luxuriously, trots along with me around half the arena and gets a click and treat, and then metamorphoses into an impossible brat.  He pulls the lead line over his jaw and across his thick neck and trots hard toward the gate.  I lean back with all my weight, get towed along, and eventually stop him.  I offer to let him roll again.  Phooey, he says.  I bring out his favorite wooden mat.  He turns his back on it.  I unsnap the lead line and set him free.  He stands like an ox.

I stroke and prod him all over, looking for an injury or sore spot, and he seems fine.  When I pat my belly and back away, he comes to me and eats up his treat as avidly as usual.  But he refuses to walk farther away from the arena gate.  When Barbara tells me that her quarterhorse Henry was apathetic and listless today too, and that all the two of them did was wander fecklessly around the stable grounds, I decide to indulge Gus as well.  As I walk out of the arena, he stays behind, standing at the open gate and looking vaguely sheepish, so I hook up the lead line and give him a maitre d’ “this way, sir” gesture, and he comes along.  I let him choose our itinerary.

First he visits his preferred grazing field, only to realize it's snow-covered.  Just under the barn eaves is a strip of bare grass that lures him over.  But the roof is dripping snowmelt, and that’s just too yucky on the back of his head.  We depart for a stroll down the driveway.  Gus stops to greet the big geldings over their paddock fence; he and Lar nuzzle sleepily, then he lets Sky nibble his halter once or twice, before he moves away; and he spends a few minutes eating a desultory mouthful or two from a little hank of hay that got dropped outside the fence.  His every action is carried out in affectless slo-mo.  (Horse-speak trainer Sharon Wilsie’s “swimming underwater while on Valium” comes to mind . . .)  Gus plods on down the driveway, where the snowplow has uncovered some narrow strips of grass.  He picks at these with zero enthusiasm.

To lure Gus back up the driveway toward the barns, I toss bits of apple and carrot from my treat apron.  When he sees them land and bounce ahead of him, he follows them and lips them up.  But as we apporoach his barn, he digs his hooves in and leans baaaaack.  OK, say I, wanna return to your paddock, where your pal Henry is hanging out?  Up yours, he replies.  At this point, I kick him hard and beat him with the lead rope.  Oh, I do not, much as I half-wish to.  Instead I let him explore a nearby paddock, empty of horses now but containing many manure piles and two small hay piles.  Gus inhales data from several poops, and then drops a load himself.  He noses through each hay pile, but barely eats a stalk or two.  Yet when I suggest we move on, he refuses adamantly. 

Now I yell insults and punch him in his stupid face.  No, I don’t; of course not.  I bite my tongue and convince him kindly and patiently to decide to come away with me.  At last he marches nicely into his stall — he knows it’s nearly dinner time — and lets me groom and reblanket him with minimal defiance.  What the . . . ??

There’s no full moon to blame this on now.  Maybe it’s the barometer shifting, as wet weather is in the offing.  Or maybe it’s just a pissy day in the life of a sometimes pissy donkey.