155. Steamed

Today I lead Gus out of his paddock with good faith that we’ll play in the arena, including some running around to drain the excess energy that’s helping to make him an obnoxious punk rampant lately.  Not halfway to the arena, my faith is shattered.  Gus is an unreconstructed evildoer: again he drags me onto his grazing patch and won't budge.

The first couple of times this happened, I granted him his grazing rights.  I rolled with his moods and acceded to his desires.  I retained my patience, aplomb, and bonhomie.  Well, not today.  Today his snotty behavior instantly forces steam from my ears.  Even though he’s wearing a tough nylon blanket, I wallop him over the back with the tail end of the lead rope.  And I holler very bad names at him.  All of which, of course, only fuel-injects my anger and his defiance.

Before heading off to find the lunge whip, I remember to unclip his lead line for safety.  Not that he deserves any safety, I grumble to myself.  As I stalk back toward him, whip in hand, I’m grasping for any shred of positivity in this galling predicament, and I determine that I’ll still accomplish my goal of getting Gus to cover some ground and burn up energy — I’ll just do it outside rather than inside the arena.

And so the whip-waving game begins again.  Even his goat-on-a-pogo-stick canter is faster than my run, so once he leaves me in the dust, he takes a moment to stop and chomp grass, giving me a sassy side-eye as I stonily close the distance between us.  He really doesn’t care if the whip slaps his hind end, so he grabs one last mouthful before he picks up and flees just an inch before the lash might reach him.  

In a useless bid for intimidation, I smack the whip against inanimate objects that might make a loud crack.  My eye glints as I trundle past a bare picnic table, and I snap the whip down on it hard.  It gives a gratifying bang, but then I’m instantly jerked up short as the lash, caught in a knothole of the tabletop, suddenly drags me back around.  By the time I extricate the freakin’ thing, Gus is way down the path and chowing leisurely.  Dammit!  Let me tell you, it’s not easy to laugh and fume and run all at the same time.

After 20 minutes of racewalking and jogging, and dropping the whip once when I turn my ankle, and other Keystone Koppery on both our parts, I finally manage to approach Gus, hold the whip behind him as just an ushering tool, and direct his head toward his own paddock gate — which I had cunningly set ajar during one of the several times we’d racketed past it.  Clang!  Whew!  He’s corralled again, and I can go home.  Indeed you could say that my huff arrived and I left in it.

Thanks, dear reader, for allowing me to vent here.  My fury has now ebbed, all the cut-up carrot and apple bits that I never got to treat Gus with are now in a baggie, and the prospect of using them on my next visit seems almost . . . promising.  Still, just in case he frustrates me again with flaming assholery, maybe I’ll also bring a large gun. 

154. Good news, bad news

He may be cute and winsome on video, but lately Gus is a major asshole.  These past few weeks, the grass is delicious, the weather is brisk, and the biting flies are much reduced.  Also, his paddock is muddy, so he’s mostly just standing and dozing on its small dry hill.  Evidently those factors add up to a gluttonous, spirited, bored, and therefore outrageously disobedient donkey.

Sandy says he’s been pulling away from her quite often when she leads him between stall and paddock; with me too, he’s being a complete and utter shitheel.  All he wants, all the time, is to graze.  And when he’s indulging in his heart’s desire, he’s sweet as pie.  But any alternative activity suggested by any human transforms him into a wicked, obstinate, sassy, vicious little monster.  I hope he sits on a tack.

Today, as we walk from his  paddock to the arena, he sets his neck, trots hard, pulls the lead rope from my hand, and runs into his favorite grazing area.  Nothing new here.  I allow him to eat for a good half-hour, but then I can’t get him to come off the lawn.  I wait.  I cajole.  I lure.  He tugs.  He wrestles.  He rams.  

I know from painful experience that my psoas and other core muscles cannot survive being yanked and torqued by an 800-pound bundle of pure insistence.  So I drop the rope, go fetch a long lungeing whip, and return, whapping it on the ground behind him to send him scurrying.  If he’s going to disobey, at least he won't get to keep gorging on grass.  So say I . . .  But he outmaneuvers me, and before I can run over and stop him, he crouches and crawls under a fence board to escape into the adjoining pasture.  There the three resident horses — very big, very athletic geldings — greet him joyously and commence galloping around with him.

Gus still has his long rope trailing from his halter, and that’s a safety hazard for all parties.  So now I climb through the fence, into the melee of flying heels and thundering hooves, to try to unsnap the damn lead-line.  I secure my own personal space by blocking the horses with the lunge whip, but that keeps Gus out of reach too.  Finally I make my way through the hullabaloo, speak quietly to Gus and approach him, and remove the rope.

Now the youngest and silliest gelding is herding Gus in a small circle at high speed, while Gus tries to get himself onto the far side of the older horse, whom he’s more familiar with.  When you see him right next to these big ex-racehorses, Gus is a shrimp, a peanut, a bug.  He’s gamely galloping about, grunting and squeaking as he kicks vigorously at the horses, but to them he’s just a big toy.  At this point he's wishing he hadn't busted into this paddock after all, and he begins eyeing the fence.  He rams his chest against a board, breaking it like a ballbat, but it’s too high for him to jump.  Harrassed by hijinks, he doesn’t have time to drop low and scoot under again.  I run to the pasture gate and invite him out that way, but he’s still fooling around with the three big boys.  

Anyway, now the hilarity is waning, and I figure he’s just fine.  (He used to be turned out here with the geldings regularly, but he kept busting out when he got bored.  That’s why he’s in a different turnout now:  it’s small enough to encircle with electrified wire, which is the only way to keep Gus in.)  I leave them to their own devices and help a friend who’s training Gus’s pasturemate -- a very nice, very polite gelding, thank you very much.  A few minutes later, when I glance out to the big paddock, I see Gus and his merry band just grazing placidly.

When Sandy arrives, she helps me lead/shoo Gus into the arena.  She picks up a lunge whip and stations me at the arena gate with another whip.  And she chases him around that arena, turning on a dime and switching the whip to her other hand in order to cut him off and turn him if he tries to run past her.  When he does head toward the gate, I’m there brandishing my whip, sending him back into the ambit of Sandy’s whip.  After just five minutes, he’s slowing down, so Sandy slows and relaxes her energy.  They both stop moving, and the former fiend turns and faces her quietly and submissively, just as if he’s memorized the horse-whisperer’s handbook.  He goes up to her, she gives him nice scritches, and they turn and walk slowly toward the gate.  When she stops, he stops next to her.  When she walks again, he comes along with her.  It’s magic, only it’s real.

At the gate, I clip the lead onto him and we stroll ever so nicely into his stall, where I dump his dinner into his feed bucket for him.  

113. VIDEO: Circle game

After our successful free-lungeing exercise, I’m emboldened to retry regular lungeing, on a long line in a circle.  I’d given it up last year, when Gus and I just couldn’t get on the same wavelength:  he was objecting and/or I was screwing up my cues.  But again today in the very chilly arena Gus seems eager for some high-energy work, so I hook the lunge line to his halter and send him out away from me.  He trots in a perfect circle around me, several laps, with no problem.  The instant I click, he leaves the circle by executing a crisp 90-degree turn and trots directly to me for his treat.  Then I send him around in the other direction, and he’s a veritable trotting machine.  (Sorry about the video quality:  the arena's chemical-vapor lighting is both insufficient and sickly green.)

If I accidentally walk a bit too far forward as Gus moves around me, seemingly blocking his forward path, he stops or veers farther out.  If I forget to point the whip at his shoulder at the right moments, and only keep it swinging behind him to drive him forward, he leans into the circle and gets too close to me.  But mostly I must be doing it right, because mostly he keeps up a rhythmic trot on a consistent circle.  I’m not sure if I’ve somehow improved at lungeing or if he’s just more willing and eager to do it.  But I ain’t looking that gift-donkey in the mouth — I’m delighted we’re sympatico.  Warming him up on the lunge line is much easier for me than having to run alongside him until my lungs burn. And watching a donkey trip the light fantastic — a pudgy performer on tiptoes, like Jackie Gleason dancing for joy — is worth the price of admission.

112. Behavior mod

I’m not sure if it’s the constant blanket-wearing that makes him itchy, or the lack of grass to nibble that makes him twitchy, but Gus has been a big, hairy pill of late.  He’s happy to come out of his paddock and into the arena, and he barely waits for me to remove his blanket before he crumples down and rolls luxuriantly in the nice, scritchy arena dirt.  Then he comes along willingly for a trot.  But within a few steps, I realize the lead line is behind me and Gus is back there tossing his head around, pulling on the line, and hauling me in any direction other than where we’d been heading.  What the . . . ?

I figure he wants to roll again, so I let him sniff and wander and scrape the ground with his front hoof.  But instead of collapsing his knees, he stiffens up and flings his head violently straight upward.  Wherefore?   Then he pulls me hither and yon, and when I resist, he surfs the ground for dropped treats.  I give him a minute or two of that, and when I lift his head and bring him along with me, he insists on going only to a wooden mat that I’ve set on the ground.  I allow that and dutifully click and treat him for standing on it.  After that, he agrees to trot with me — but yanks really hard and, almost while still trotting, throws himself down to roll again.  Fine.  I wait for him to stand back up.  Again I get him to walk along . . . and again he abruptly refuses and marches off on a hard tangent.  Why, oh, why?  I explain to him just how much I’d like to punch his lights out.

I unclip the lead rope, fetch a lunge whip, wave it and crack it behind him, and send him off at a canter.  Each time Gus comes around toward the arena gate, I take the whip in my other hand, stretch out my arm, and send him back the other way.  This is the I-am-the-boss-of-you exercise that Sandy showed me on an earlier occasion of donkey misbehavior.  After less than five minutes of trotting him around and changing directions, I lower the whip and Gus walks right to me for a treat and patpat.

Now when I rehook the lead line, isn’t he the perfect gentleman?  We walk and trot nicely, practice our tricks, earn our treats . . .  Whether Gus simply needed to engage in a little wilding to warm himself up, or he indeed needed to be reminded that obedience is the price of this game, the lunge-whip exercise gives me a perfect reset switch — another tool for staying, just barely, one step ahead of Superdonkey.

72. Attitude adjustment

Again Gus plays the pill.  I don’t even try any lungeing, but he still resists half of the requests and offers I make.  He pushes his forehead against my chest, using me as a scratching post; I step away and scritch him with my hand instead.  I invite him to walk with me, and after a few steps he pulls in the opposite direction.  I get him to back up, and I click and treat for it. Then when I walk along on his other side, he veers behind me and wraps the lead rope around my back.  He drops to the ground and rolls — for the third time.  Next he hauls me over to a mini-traffic cone and picks it up.  I ignore him and keep us walking along, and he soon spits it out.  A few moments later, I lead him to another cone and chirp “Pick it up!” and he tramples it under foot.  I offer to trot alongside him, but he just walks slower.  

In exasperation, I unhook his lead rope and walk away, leaving him in the arena.  Sandy asks what the trouble is.  I tell her what a refusenik Gus is being, and she says he’s been like that for the last couple of days.  She blames the rain, which he hates, and also her sheltering him from the rain by keeping him in his stall, which he hates too.  No excuse.  She immediately marches into the arena and commences to fix his wagon.

She posts me at the arena gate to prevent Gus from escaping under it, and she takes up the long lunge whip.  She whaps it on the ground behind him to make him move out, but then she scoots to the side wall and holds out the whip sideways to block him as he comes around.  If he stops, she makes him go again, so he has no choice but to change direction.  When he comes along the other side wall, she scoots over there and turns him back the other way again.  This is a modified round-pen exercise, such as several Western-style “horse whisperers” swear by.  They do it in order to scare or overwhelm the horse, control its every move, and if necessary run it to exhaustion — the result being that a wild or unbroke horse relents and becomes submissive.  The technique is often called natural, inasmuch as a stallion or alpha-mare may exert its dominance by herding and driving a lower-ranking horse.  Humans can’t do it naturally, though; we can only pull it off with the help of a whip, a rope, and a sturdy enclosure.  For busy horsemen, it’s a same-day shortcut to gentling and training and earning a horse’s trust over weeks or months.  In Sandy’s milder, moderate version, it’s just one of many ways to help establish or clarify the horse-human relationship.  

For Gus, who’s seen this before, it takes no more than five minutes to remind him that humans call the shots and equines have to follow their lead.  As soon as Sandy stands still, drops her body energy, and exhales, Gus walks right up to her for some pat-pats.  Now when I re-enter the arena and snap the lead line on his halter, he’s acquiescent and content — whatta good boy!  We can walk and turn and halt, and even trot together with almost no head tossing or line tugging.  He earns lots of clicks and treats and scrubs and nice-nice.  Such a team player.  At least for now . . .

71. Pill

Is it something I said?  I think it’s something I did, and that something is lungeing.  It’s the only change in Gus’s life that coincides with his rescidivism in obstreperous, bratty behavior lately.  I’ve always been concerned about lungeing's compulsory elements, as well as my clumsy skills, and I think Gus finds it annoying and domineering and just plain Not Okay.  In consequence, he’s being a real pill at least 50 percent of the time.

He still hee-haws when my car pulls in.  He still gladly walks with me into the arena.  He still waits semi-patiently as I remove his blanket, before crumpling in place and rolling luxuriantly.  But the cool weather and/or his fitness level seem to fuel his energy and eagerness to get moving, so after his roll I’ve been trying a bit of lungeing to let him trot and warm up.  He clearly feels a need for speed, and he'd run me off my feet if I ran alongside him.  Yet when I bring out the lunge whip and hook the line on his halter, he begins his evasive maneuvers.  He sniffs for dropped treats on the ground, he twirls toward me or away from me so that I can’t position myself at his side, he cranks his neck and pulls in any direction that I don’t desire him to go, or he plants his feet and refuses to budge.

I try tapping his rump.  No dice.  I cluck and cajole and walk alongside to get him started.  Bupkus.  I visibly wave the whip, toss its lash, even let it tickle his heels and hocks.  Fuhgeddaboutit.  Finally I stomp toward his hip and whap the whip fast and hard onto the ground behind him, and that does send him forward.  I click and treat for that, and sometimes he’ll resume nicely and walk or trot a half-circle or so, in which case I click and treat for that too.  Sometimes, though, I can’t get him restarted.  I move to his other side and try sending him in the other direction, often with no luck.  Even when he does move around me, he soon begins spiraling inward, getting too close to me and putting himself on too tight a circle.  To push him out farther, I point the whip at his shoulder, then I wave the whip at his shoulder, and sometimes I poke the whip into, and even bend it against, his shoulder.  He looks me in the eye and just continues to object, evade, and resist.  If donkeys could blow a big, wet raspberry, that’s what he’d be doing.

Today, after a few fitful starts and a lot of resistance, he gets to cantering around — feeling his feisty oats.  So feisty, in fact, that he suddenly veers off, yanks the rope from my hand, gallops across the arena, and dives under the gate to go clattering into the barn aisle.  But instead of committing his usual nuisances — nosing open the tack and treat trunks, invading empty stalls to nosh on their hay — he just stands there.  And when I invite him back into the arena, he comes right along.

I can only conclude that he does want to play in the arena, but he doesn’t want to lunge.  So we don’t.  

In stark contrast to his ball and pedestal and chair tricks, and even unlike his walking alongside me in various patterns, lungeing requires his submission to my control every minute.  I’m armed both with a line on his halter, controlling his front end, and with the whip as a long extension of my other hand, controlling his hind end.  He’s sandwiched between two powerful forces.  And I’m probably mishandling those forces half the time — telling him to go from behind while blocking him in front, wishing he’d stay out at the end of the lunge line while sending signals that draw him closer to me, intending one thing while inadvertently insisting on another.  Add that confusion to Gus’s innate independence, and it’s no wonder he’s such a pig and a pill.

His mood is soured now, so he’s fussy about other activities too.  He chases the beachball at a rousing trot, with a few hind kicks and head tosses thrown in, and he bops it something fierce; but he quickly loses his focus and returns to hoovering the floor for stray tidbits.  He fetches the basketball and misses the dunk.  Hearing Sandy delivering grain, he nips over to the arena gate, where I head him off and somehow convince him to execute a few nice circles with me at liberty.  On our next turn away from the gate, though, he abruptly reverses course, rams his way under, and this time trots directly into his stall and jams his face into his feed bucket.  Swine!

I attach his stall guard, give him a cursory grooming, and head home with half an apronful of treats.  He wants to end our session early, he pays the price.  And next time, half his treats will be two days old.  I can blow raspberries too.

67. The line on lungeing

In the unprecedented cold of this early November, Gus gets mighty frisky when I take his blanket off.  I unclip his lead line and let him roll, but he wants to trot and trot and trot, so I jog alongside him.  About halfway around the arena is enough for my old lungs, so each time I reach the brink of syncope, I click and we stop for a treat (and a gasp).  For self-preservation, I pick up a lunge whip and hold it straight out behind him, like a long extension of my arm, and with the other arm I give a maitre d’ this-way-sir gesture to invite him forward.  Remembering the good lungeing training that Sandy had given him years ago, he trots around me in a circle.  Every half lap or so, I click, causing him to turn on a dime toward the circle’s center and trot right up to me for his treat.

I’m so unused to lungeing that it makes me dizzy to step around in a small circle and watch Gus moving around me.  Again for abject self-preservation, with each click I spin quickly in the opposite direction to unwind my balance.  And as soon as I’ve completed my tight, fast turn, there he is, in my face, eagerly waiting for his treat.  But the counterspin does do the trick, keeping me on my feet and able to resume the circling for another few moments.  If my long-ago experience is any guide, I know that the more I practice, the less the twirling will unseat my otoliths and set me reeling.

In the past when trying to lunge Gus, I failed at keeping him far enough away from me or keeping him moving.  But I’ve studied the “horse speak” book’s excellent chapter on lungeing, and the dressagey walking-alongside exercises of recent months have helped hone my body language.  Now, by carefully keeping myself even with his hip, and by opening my maitre d’ leading arm nice and wide, I’m able to keep sending him around.  When I drift too far ahead — across from his shoulder or neck, say — he feels my body position blocking his forward motion and he immediately slows.   Between the two of us, we manage corporeally to signal and adjust and resignal to each other, and we achieve some good lungeing.

After a particularly steady lap, I click and treat with a peppermint.  Oh, baby, oh, baby!  Then when I step to his other side and send him around in the other direction, we achieve even more good lungeing.  Yay!  This means that this winter he can get warmed up without my running myself ragged.

Next we play some less active games, like basketball and pedestal and standing on the mat.  After half an hour, my feet and fingers are starting to freeze, so I end the session and lead Gus to the arena gate.  But Caesar does not wish to leave.  We debate the options with equal conviction.  I try luring him with an apple, but he backs up.  Since the barn doors are closed, I drape his lead-rope over his back and walk away.  I busy myself in his stall — including a very audible toss of treats into his feed bucket.  When I peek at him from his stall door, he hasn’t budged from standing in the middle of the barn aisle, but he's gazing hard at me.  I repeat the apple lure, to no avail, and again I retreat into his stall.  Finally I hear his little hooves slowly clop-clopping, and he walks into the stall with me.

He gets a nice rub-down, cooperates beautifully with hoof picking and re-blanketing, and just as I head for my car, Sandy arrives to serve dinner.  Da life of Riley.