97. VIDEO: Consummation

Two days after our initial toy-donkey meet and greet, when I offer it to Gus again, he grabs it willingly and shoves it back at me; granted, he lets it go immediately, but I get my hand on it, which earns him a click.  Within two minutes,  he’s bringing it to my hand wherever I hold it out.  And in two more minutes, he’s picking it up from the ground and delivering it to me.  Next he adds a few head shakes to get it flapping in his face, which soon seems to tickle his fancy as much as waving the pompom does.

Such good progress that I move right on to the next big step:  putting the toy into the baby carriage.  Off Gus goes, pushing the pram like a pro, then reaches inside for . . . Where’s the pompom?  What’s this toy doing here??  The sky is falling!  Still, despite the shock of the switcheroo, all it takes is a cheerful “Pick it up!” from me and he does pick it up.  All’s right with the world again.  Before we end the session, he’s reliably plucking the toy out of the carriage, bringing it to the pedestal, hopping up, and flapping it into my hand. (Video soon, I promise.)

This particular Stupid Pet Trick now has all its components in place:  pushing the empty-looking buggy, followed by removing the oh-so-adorable babydoll, followed by presenting it for audience admiration.  Only wrinkle is, there's so much violent flapping that perhaps the show needs an epilogue entailing a funeral for the infant with the snapped neck and the arrest of Gus as an abusive father . . . 

Memo to self:  Work on keeping the flapping as part of the pompom trick but removing it from the toy-baby trick.

96. Metadonkey

Amazon the Enabler drove me to it.  Amazon’s range of merchandise being universal (vast and ever-expanding), of course it has several stuffed donkey toys available for prompt delivery.  I settled on a midsized model with a cute face and cute posture, and I bought it for the actual, biological donkey in my life.

Gus is so good at pushing the baby carriage and then reaching inside to extract his beloved pompom, I just knew it would be a small extrapolation for him to extract instead a “baby” of his own species.  After all, we regularly play with a range of junky items with unfamiliar shapes and smells and feels.  Still, when I first show him the toy, he clearly finds it unprepossessing.  He’s mildly curious because I proffer it to him so deliberately, but his first sniff turns him off.  It smells of fake-plush acrylic and chemical sizing and he says the hell with it.

Since he gets clicked and treated for nosing the toy, however, he does keep coming back to it.  He soon reasons quite rightly that the next step would be biting and carrying it, so he gamely takes a taste.  Ptui!  He instantly spits it out.  After several such ejections, he holds it just long enough to toss his head and fling it emphatically.  (Somewhere in his eclectic education, he must’ve absorbed Dorothy Parker’s famous quip in a book review:  “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”)  Once or twice, when Gus hesitates just a half-second before the spit-out, I manage to slip in a quick click; and with that we end our introduction of Gus to his mini-replica.  We cleanse our palates with the pompom and the pedestal, and then adjourn for some grazing.