100. Good as gold

It’s apparently a reliable fact of life: Gus has no objection to having zip-lock bags of caustic liquid tied around his hooves, anytime, anywhere.  Not only does he reprise his perfect-gentleman act when I apply the White Lightning solution, but he walks out to the grazing paddock in perfect deportment.  He wanders all over the field to sample the clover and plantain and grasses, with nary a thought to the squelching baggies on his feet.  

The bags only survive because Sandy pre-layers the bottoms with duct tape, and after another use, they do develop some tears and holes.  But we’re both delighted with the user-friendliness of the system and its high rate of patient compliance.  Now it just needs to work, killing off whatever microbes are eroding Gus’s hooves, so that his foot-soreness goes far, far away.

“No foot, no horse” applies to donkeys too.  And from the ankles up, this donkey is eager to get back to his exercise and fun and playtime.  So am I.

99. Wonderdonkey

With all his performance skills and learning aptitude and winning sociability, Gus can rightly be called Gus the Wonderdonkey.  But he presents a whole ‘nother layer of wonder for his humans: what the hell does he want/hate/fear/love this time?

Having seen his encounters with such personal-care products as fly spray, wet sponges, a hose, and odorous ointments, I predicted that inserting his ouchy feet into baggies of vinegar and bleach would provoke at least some minor calamity. At best, it would probably require one person to hold his halter and reward him for not resisting while a second person dealt with the plastic and liquid.  To my wonderment, not so.

When Sandy demonstrates the bag-soak protocol, he behaves, in her words, like a perfect gentleman.  First, before setting his foot down after picking the hoof, she slips a quart-size zip-lock bag onto it.  He stands in the crinkly bag without batting an eye.  She does the other foot.  Next she decants about a quarter-cup of the White Lightning concoction into each bag.  He still barely notices.  Now she ties a length of baling twine around each ankle to hold the bag closed.  She leaves, and Gus wanders over to his hay pile as if walking in plastic puddles couldn’t interest him less.

While his feet soak, I give him a sponge bath.  He’s nearly shedded out to his thin summer coat, but a small mohawk of thick fur runs down the center of his back, and his throat and underarms are still fluffy.  Today it's nearly 90 Fahrenheit, so even in the shady barn with a big round fan in the aisle, in his shady stall with a box fan strapped to the bars, he’s sweating damply.  After currying and brushing to remove as much loose hair as possible, I begin wiping him down with water.  I know he likes the cooling ends, but he hates the dripping means.

The water from the barn spigot is always very cold, so I let the bucket sit awhile.  I get him to touch the sponge dry, touch it damp, touch it wet, touch it while I squeeze it so it splashes, etc., etc.  He eats up the clicks and treats but never loses his mistrust of the sponge.  I dampen a small bit of him, reward him for tolerating it, give him a break, and then dampen the next part (video from last summer’s bathing here). We spend at least 30 minutes on this refreshing toilette — enough time that I can now remove the smelly, wet bags from his feet.  Which, wonder of wonders, he again doesn’t mind one bit. 

Which only makes me wonder:  what are the odds that he’ll be a gentleman when I redo the soaking tomorrow?

98. Houston, we have liftoff

Gus and Sandy and I are still struggling to finally rid his hooves of white-line disease.  We thought the iodine was working (as it had when Sandy first adopted Gus years ago), but a complete cure is eluding us.  Sandy’s wonderful farrier, Larry, arrives for a scheduled foot trimming, and I attend in order to ask him questions and get his advice.

Normally, Gus is so good with Larry (really, it’s vice versa) that no assistant is needed — Gus stands nicely in his stall and picks up his feet for his manicure.  Today, Sandy and I enter the stall with Larry, and Gus immediately trots to the far wall.  I put his halter on and Larry approaches, and Gus scoots away wildly.  What the . . . ??  

Sandy takes the rope, and Gus jigs and plunges.  Larry takes the rope, and Gus goes bat-shit ballistic.  He bolts, pulling Larry around and scraping against the walls of the stall. Then he hurls himself at the stall door, rears, and leaps; the door is higher than his chin, but he nearly manages to jump it.  After crashing the door in vain, he does another frantic circuit, knocking into his water bucket, before taking a breather.  Amazingly, he neither pulls Larry off his feet nor tramples me or Sandy.  I make a quick, low-key exit, because fewer humans is always better than more humans when an animal is feeling pressured.

Sandy clicks and treats Gus for standing briefly still, and Larry gives him a slow, soothing patpat, and Gus regains his composure.  (Later Larry realizes that he’s wearing a brand-new set of farrier’s chaps today, and he wonders if the fresh leather smell may be the trigger for Gus’s temporary insanity.)

With Gus back on planet Earth now, I sneak back to the stall but stay outside it.  Patiently answering my questions, Larry gives us a mini-seminar on the hoof component called the white line and on the microbial infection called white-line disease.  He finds signs of damage in both of Gus’s front hooves, but his rear ones (which I had begun to fret about too) look clear.  Larry trims the hooves to tip Gus a hair more upright, to reduce the pressure a bit.  After he and Sandy discuss various over-the-counter remedies, they settle on White Lightning.  Its active ingredient is something like household bleach, but it’s to be diluted with vinegar and held on the hoof for 30 minutes with a gauze wrap or a plastic bag.  That way, the liquids — and, says Larry, the fumes they form — can penetrate the hard horn of the hoof and reach the bugs that need to be killed off.

So we have a treatment plan — yay.  All we have to do is stick Gus’s foot in a plastic bag of liquid and tape it closed around his ankle.  Waht coudl goe rwong??

91. Iodized

Soaking Gus’s feet turns out to be suprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult.  We heat water in an electric kettle and mix it with cold water from the spigot, and we add a big squirt of iodine.  We start with a small, shallow, rubber feed tub and do one hoof at a time.  Sandy hunkers down in the shavings of the stall floor, slides the bucket into position near his feet, asks him to pick up his foot as if she were going to pick the hoof, and then sets the foot down in the bucket.  Slowly.  Gently.  Sneakily.  All the while, I’m clicking and treating for his cooperation.

While he stands there foot-bucketed, Sandy massages his legs and I play “the grownups are talking.”  I give the hands-clasped cue, and the moment he turns his face away a bit, I click and treat.  We start by repeating this at a rate of one treat per second for at least half a minute.  Then we slow down only slightly for the next 15 minutes or so.  Gus stands like a rock the whole time, as long as I keep playing the game with frequent clicks and treats.  Then we soak the other foot, for almost as long. Can you say “teeeedious”?

Today we use a much wider tub that can accommodate both front feet together.  I try to save Sandy’s time by handling the job myself, and soon I wish I hadn’t.  Kneeling in the stall and maneuvering the wide, floppy bucket, I accidentally slop some of the solution onto Gus’s fresh bed of shavings.  Then I struggle to maneuver one foot into the bucket, while handing treats up to his mouth from my position at his feet.  When I place his right foot in, he stands like a good soldier, but as soon as I touch his left foot to the water, he pops backward, catching the lip of the bucket with his heel and spilling most of the remaining contents.  Annoyed and wet-ankled, he retreats to the far corner of his stall.  I retreat to the electric kettle to start the hell over. 

More cajoling and gentling, more sudden hoof withdrawals, and I throw in the (sodden, orange-stained) towel.  I ask Sandy to help.  She explains that Gus is unaccountably fussy about his left foot, so that’s the one to put into the tub first.  Sure enough, once the left settles in, adding the right is no problem (for her, anyway), and she leaves me to finish the treatment.  After approximately 6,287 iterations of “grownups,” Gus lowers his head and holds it down for a beat.  It’s an old trick that Sandy taught him years ago and I’ve almost never used, but once I tumble to what he’s doing, I click and treat for it.  Now we play “head down” another 793 times.  Hey, whatever keeps him stationary and soaking . . .

Because Sandy and I think it’s working, killing the white-line microbes.  We agree that Gus is now walking normally (without any doses of bute) and acting like his usual ornery self.  I think I notice something a bit stiff or ginger when he plants his front feet on a wooden mat or on the pedestal.  And I’m pretty sure he’s still slightly ouchy when he weights his front end to execute a turn with his hind feet.  But in general, I’d rate his ambulatory comfort as 80 to 90 percent improved.

That’s a big yay for him.  And a relief for us too, as we hope just a couple more scramble-and-soak sessions might effect a full cure.

90. Pain and pleasure redux

Gus’s front feet are still ouchy.  He stumps along with his head lowered, and totters a bit on uneven ground.  He doesn’t want to walk much, let alone trot.  Making a turn is clearly uncomfortable:  he stutter-steps and staggers until he’s walking straight ahead again.

He makes a miraculous recovery when he gets a dose of the anti-inflamatory phenylbutazone, or bute.  He marches right into the arena, ears up and eager for fun.  He instigates round after round of trotting.  At one point, as we’re trotting in a big loop, he hauls me off the circle and veers off to the pedestal, upon which he pops his front feet with a joyous toss of his head.  Before I even cue him, he begins pirouetting around it with verve and panache; and he does it in the other direction too.  I'm afraid to let him do too much fancy footwork, but it’s gladdening to see him so frisky.

When Sandy skips the bute, to see how he feels without it, he limps pitiably as we walk to the arena.  He’s willing to come when I pat my belly, and he’s willing to walk alongside me, so he gets clicks and treats for that.  The more he walks, it seems, the better he feels.  At one point, he noses the big beachball, which we haven’t played with in a long time.  I roll it slowly and he chases it, at the walk, and bops it nicely with his nose.  Click and treat for that too.  He wants to keep chasing and bopping the beachball several times around the arena, so I indulge him.  It’s a tad depressing — like watching a frail old man who’s determined to totter around a playing field that used to be the scene of his youthful glories.  But I stick with it as long as Gus wants to.

When we pause at the opened door at one end of the arena — from here, he can spy on the big geldings out in their paddock — he remembers that the chain-link gate across the doorway can sometimes be nosed open.  He presses his whole forehead and face against it a few times, but opposable thumbs have foiled him: we’ve attached a bungee cord to keep it latched.  Since he’s clearly interested in egress, and since I’m happy to end our session without stressing his feet any further, I bring him to the proper arena gate and we go out for some grazing.

A  classic white-line-disease
groove around the toe

Back in his stall, I pick out his hooves and squirt iodine on the soles of the front hooves, near the toes where white-line disease strikes.  I can’t see any line or groove there, but I do see a small round dent in the toe of his right hoof, which I had written off as nothing more than a shallow chip.  Sandy and I confer.  She recalls Gus having white line once before (it seems donkeys are more susceptible than horses), and she knows that it can indeed cause holes, not just grooves or cracks.  Apparently it can cause all manner of disintegration in the hoof wall.  Yuck.

Sandy crouches and rests the hoof on her knee so that she can closely examine the dent.  Suspecting that it’s deeper than it looks, she digs at it carefully, trying to open it up so that iodine can get into it.  Gus tolerates this with little fuss — it’s hard to tell if his foot is sensitive to her pokes and prods.

An advanced case —we won’t let Gus’s
get anywhere near this severe

We discuss calling a vet.  Most refuse to deal with Gus because he’s so violently obstreperous with them, and Sandy figures that any new vet would get the same evil welcome, because Gus perceives their medicinal or previous-horse-stress aromas from afar and instantly panics.  Anyway, we’re 95 percent sure this isn’t orthopedic or organic, so it’s more in the wheelhouse of a farrier.  We decide to start soaking his hoof twice a day in warm water and iodine, in hopes that will seep into the infection better and finally clear it out.  If need be, Sandy will call her doughty and savvy farrier, whose patience over the years has wormed him into Gus’s good graces.  

And for now she’ll keep dosing Gus with bute.  That gives him such relief that he’ll be, almost literally, dancing for joy.

89. VIDEO: Pain and pleasure

The soppy, gloppy springtime is always risky for Gus’s hooves.  Last spring he picked up a touch of thrush — a fungal infection of the frog, the soft V-shaped lump on the underside of the hoof — which cleared up easily with medication.  This spring he’s been a tiny bit sore on and off, and since it seemed to resolve once he got warmed up and moving, I figured it was just arthritis.  But today he’s almost head-bobbing lame when each front foot hits the ground.  I find iodine and a dropper outside his stall, and Sandy explains that he has white-line disease — it’s fungal and bacterial, and it can cause the outer hoof wall to crack and pull away from the core of the hoof.  Ick! and owww!   It needs to be stopped pronto.

I figure some games and treats will help distract Gus from his ouchiness, so we try some slow, easy interactions.  When I offer him the baby carriage, he perks right up — the joy of pushing it clearly trumps the pain of walking.  But I don’t want him stressing his hooves too much; to save him from himself, I put the carriage away early.  Now he indulges in his favorite self-soothing activity: rolling in the dirt.  Weight is off his feet, the dust and wood shavings provide a nice back scratch, and he luxuriates in the whole procedure:

I give him a nice rubdown, and Sandy adds an anti-inflammatory to his dinner.  I squirt iodine onto his hooves, aiming for where the white-line crack might be developing.  Now he’s frankly limping on his way out to the paddock, and Sandy contemplates soaking or packing his feet, to keep more iodine on them longer.  We’ll see how he does tomorrow.  Ever the hedonist and never the stoic, he’ll show us clearly just how he feels.