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!!
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.
If I can resist being driven ‘round the bend by its electronic inanity, I’ll try more “Susannah” again next time. Anything for the donkey . . .
Now many decades later, in a horse barn far away, when it comes to finding the (pretty much unmissable) beat of “Oh! Susannah,” I’m still no better than a braying ass. And this particular ass sets the tone for our musical endeavors quite eloquently when his first gesture is to shove his hi-hat cymbals to the ground. Nevertheless, I’m game to channel my inner tone-deaf child, and I start up up the music.
Slowing the song’s pace seems to help us both. Still, my struggle to give him his cue in advance of the beat, so he has time to lift and drop his hoof on the pedal, looks awkward and sounds worse:
All the songs are electronic-sugarpop affronts to any ear, but we select a couple with simple signatures (“Sur le pont d’Avignon,” “Oh! Suzannah”), and we see how Gus reacts when they start hooting and twittering in his face.
As with the boom of the bass drum, this twangy music leaves Gus utterly unfazed, green-lighting us for step two: set the music going at a slowed-down pace, stash the keyboard out of sight, then present him with his regular instruments and try cuing him to stomp his hi-hat cymbals to accent the music. The experiment begins . . .
I needed a cue that’s distinct from his already extensive vocabulary for other tricks. So I describe the action of his muzzle: “Rub it.” I could probably teach him to manipulate forceps or engineer an electrical switch or program a radio frequency to lift the flag, but at least for now we’ll stick with basic mouth-smooshing.
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It requires no introduction, as Gus is immediately enamored of it and able to swap it in for the previous object without rehearsal:
As I suspected, he’s better and better at negotiating the mailbox, even though he (a) can’t see the box when it’s right in front of him and (b) has to orient the magazine roll lengthwise. A few times he flops it crosswise against the mailbox opening, but even those are worthy efforts that earn him a click and treat. When he aims the magazines endwise and they begin to actually go in, he gets a click and a peppermint. Or two. And a hug. And acclamations on high.
He joyously takes the magazines (“Pick it up”) and desposits the magazines “(Dunk,” from his basketball trick) a few times —
— before he realizes that they’re paper and therefore eminently destructible. Suddenly, instead of lifting the roll from the arena floor, he holds it down with a front hoof and commences shredding the exterior pages and spitting them out, like a hawk plucking a pigeon or a dog disemboweling a plush toy. It seems the hold-it-and-rip-it instinct runs strong in a wide variety of species . . . Well, that little misbehavior needs to be nipped in the bud, and luckily it’s easy enough to reroll the magazines and re-interest Gus in the mailbox game. (Amazon promises the newspaper-shaped plastic dog toy will arrive soon.)
Gus rarely gives it a second thought. He’s so outgoing and confident that he doesn’t hesitate to shove his face into the unfamiliar. And chew it up and spit it out. Manipulating an object into and out of a mailbox? Bring it on. [With apologies for the undersea arena lighting.]
I start him with a cardboard eggcrate because it’s light and grippable, plus nobody cares that it will get destroyed. I’m not sure Gus has ever tasted an eggcrate before, but he seizes on it right away. I click and he relinquishes it, only slightly maimed. When I hand it back to him, he grabs it and waves it toward the mailbox that’s tucked under my arm. In fact, he drops the eggcrate onto the mailbox. As if he's guessing what the game might be? !?!?!!
Next I slip the crate into the mailbox and see if he’ll retrieve it. He noses and nudges, but then I help him out with a familiar verbal cue: “Pick it up!” Before the first ampere could arrive at a lightbulb, he’s got it: he authoritatively extricates the eggcrate from the mailbox. This entails reaching for it, finding it with his lips, getting his teeth around it before it gets bumped backward by those lips, pulling it out, and presenting it like a trophy. Okay, it’s not neurosurgery, but I’m mighty impressed.
One more practice session with object removal, and I bet we can move on to object insertion. The eggcrate is dead — in his zeal, Gus actually chews pieces off it, reducing it by two-thirds and mangling the remainder — but a plastic dog toy shaped like a rolled newspaper should be a handy, and relatively durable, prop from now on.
First he discovers the shoestring that I attached as a pull-tab to help him yank the door open. When I lift the string toward him, his natural instinct is to bite it, so I click and treat that. The Very Next Time I show him the string, he bites it and instantly tugs it. Click and peppermint candy. Now he feels for the string with his muzzle and maneuvers it between his teeth all by himself. Once he’s got it, he yanks promptly — and efficiently, straight out — to whip that door right open every time. Before he spits out the string, he does indulge in assorted, random, semi-violent yankings just for fun, but I think/hope I can train him out of that fairly soon.
Clicker-training protocol requires that the animal repeat the trick many times, to be sure it’s fully understood and mastered, before the human gives any verbal command. In fact, clicker gurus say that when you’d wager $50 that the animal will correctly and immediately execute the trick, that’s when you can start adding a verbal cue. Well, Gus compresses that process into maybe half a dozen repetitions before he seems totally ready for a verbal. For shutting the door, I’m saying “Bop it,” which he already knows from his top-of-nose bopping to roll the beach ball. For opening the door, I’m introducing an all-new cue: “Pull it.” And, contrary to protocol, I’m already asking for shuttings and openings in the same session. Cuz this animal be genius.
Now, I don’t believe Gus has figured out or memorized the new cue yet. Probably he’s taking a more gestalt approach, learning that pull-it is called for when he sees the door is closed and the string is salient, while bopping works when he sees the door is half-shut. But I’d bet $50 that he’ll understand and distinguish between the verbal cues in just one or two more sessions.
First I show him the main prop, a big, metal rural mailbox. He immediately sniffs it and shoves it and bites its edges and pokes his nose inside it . . . I half-open the door, and when he happens to nudge it, I click and treat. It only takes a handful of times before he realizes that pushing the door closed is a trick. In fact, he seems to catch on immediately that a hard nose-bop will slam it shut with a nice bang, so he’s extra-fascinated and doesn’t want me to put it aside.
But that’s all for today. Soon enough we’ll move on to the more technical maneuvers, like tugging the shoelace that I attached to the door-tab for ease of opening. Then there’s poking a letter (or a rolled-up newspaper might be easier?) inside and leaving it there. And smooshing the little red flag upward along the side wall of the mailbox might be the toughest manipulation of all. Never fear: there’s nothing on God’s green earth that Gus won't be able to learn.
Once in the arena, Gus quickly recalls all its joys: the chance to roll in the scritchy, dry dirt; games to play that bring sure and certain treats; occasionally some new learning, to really get those axons and dendrites firing. And I’ve learned how to lunge Gus the way Sandy taught him, so now he actually enjoys running around in circles to warm up and get some exercise. Her method is not to use a whip at all, but instead to twirl the free end of the lunge line toward his rump as the “Go!” signal. I still line up plastic chairs in front of the arena gate, but if I lunge him in his accustomed manner, he rarely even ponders pulling away and busting through the exit. Around and around he trots, his long ears flapping and his teacup hooves twinkling as he bounces over a couple of poles laid on the ground. I can even ask him to canter, though the gait change is hardly noticeable, because his legs and his strides are so short. It’s like watching a dachshund run an agility course.
Without a compulsive grass fetish to distract him, Gus is back to his mostly mannerly, often affectionate, always educable self.
