64. Here, there, anywhere

Generalizing a skill from one context to another isn’t always easy.  Especially if you’re a Bear of Very Little Brain.  But if you’re Eeyore, it appears, you’re a flexible thinker who can nimbly adapt to changing circumstances.

Today is cool and breezy enough to keep the biting flies largely at bay, so I take Gus into the outdoor arena for a change of scenery.  He’s tempted by the grass underfoot which I don’t let him munch on, and he’s enticed by the remnant evidence of the horses who spend their nights here.  Also, he’s distracted by the worlds outside the fence: people walking around, horses in nearby paddocks, a roaring lawnmower, etc.  First, the minute I remove his light blanket, he rolls in the bare dirt near the gate.  Next, we walk a full circuit of the perimeter, in both directions, stopping at each and every pile of manure new and old; he places his nose right on it and inhales in a deep, scholarly manner, then moves on.

With the tour of inspection finished, we do some walking and turning and halting and backing.  Gus doesn’t love this, and once or twice he tries his obdurate routine, stopping dead and/or pulling his head away, to see if I’ll just let him graze.  But without much effort, I’m able to resist and then cajole him back in step with me.  After just a few minutes of nice walking, I lead him to the toy basketball hoop that I lugged out earlier.

I figure that doing an old trick in a new venue will challenge his mind at least a little bit, yet he barely hesitates.  When I toss his rubber lattice ball, it takes just a half an extra second for him to fetch it.  To start, I ask only that he put it in my hand — going back to an earlier level of the trick, to compensate for the unusual surroundings.  Well, Gus don’t need no stinkin’ compensation:  the next time, he clearly turns toward the basket, so I cue him with “Dunk,” and as if nothing has changed from our usual indoor setting, he flaps the ball on the rim and backboard and then spits it into the net.  I toss the ball farther away, and he almost trots over to it, snatches it up, and heads to the basket for a lively flap-and-dunk.  He does this several times, so I figure we can up the ante yet a little more.
 

 I set the hoop at the far end of the low wooden bridge, and I set the ball on the ground near the other end.  This time, Gus does require a minute or two to wrap his mind around the new gestalt.  I chirp “Pick it up!” and he walks right by the ball, then steps across the bridge and half-off again.  We reset, standing on the ground near the bridge.  I pick up the ball and hand it right to his mouth, he takes it, and I click and treat.  The next time, I hand him the ball and get him to take one pace forward to return it to my hand; click and treat.  Now I set it back on the ground, and he reaches down and picks it up, but with a little question-mark forming in a cartoon thought-bubble over his head.  Quickly I render roadside assistance, singing “Good!” and tapping the basketball hoop.  He drops the ball, then walks onto the bridge and shoves his face into the net.  No click, but I cheerily urge him to step down and try again.  And sure enough, he bites up the ball, walks onto the bridge, flaps around the hoop a few times, and dunks.  Click!  Peppermint!

Would a dog or a horse succeed so quickly with such a new trick arrangement?  I suspect most would struggle a lot more to remember such a recently learned trick when suddenly flooded by new body sensations and surroundings and object placements. 
 
Memo to self:  try putting Reggie the brown dog’s footstool out on the sidewalk and asking him to sit on it and give a high-five.  Without succumbing to his powerful canine urges to pee on the lamppost and bark at a stray cat and sniff the neighbor's garbage can.

63. VIDEO: Globetrotter Gus

He’s way upstate, but Gus could join the Harlem Globetrotters.  His dunking-the-basketball trick is nearly perfect, with plenty of goofing around the net preceding a definitive swish.  

Our progress was a bit delayed because Gus enjoys flapping the ball back and forth, scraping it on the arena floor, and bashing it into the backboard a good deal more than he enjoys dropping it into the hoop.  To pinpoint the dunk as the sought-after behavior, I was clicking the instant the ball entered the net, because clicker-training rules clearly state that a click ends the behavior — that is, he should drop the ball immediately in order to get his treat.  But in this case, Gus prefers to continue his fun for a few more seconds, which often means dropping the ball when it’s no longer in the net, which I don’t want to click for, but I’ve already clicked . . .  aaargghhh!

Not to worry; it’s par for the course.  To teach a dumbbell retrieve to dogs, the moment they take it into their mouths, you click, causing them to spit it out instantaneously in order to get the treat, so you look as if you’re training them to drop the dumbbell.  Eventually, though, you can delay the click a teeny bit, and then a teeny bit longer and longer, to build the duration of the dumbbell hold.  Refining and chaining all the steps into one trick is a messy process at first.

Interestingly, what greatly accelerated Gus’s learning the dunk was my introducing the occasional peppermint candy as a treat for extra-special success.  Until now I never quite trusted that “higher-value” rewards would contrast with regular rewards in an animal’s mind during routine trick-training, but the first big, sweet peppermint made Gus’s ears and eyes pop visibly.  And sure enough, after just a few more peppermint specials over a couple of days, now the dunk is executed, though still with much prefatory monkey business, far more reliably.

62. Channeling Eeyore

With the forage around the farm beginning to toughen and dry out as autumn creeps in, Gus gobbles up as much as he can while the gobbling is good.  Plantains are flowering but still emerald-leaved; grasses are yellowing at the tips but mostly still green and fresh enough; chicory and chickweed remain off the menu. 

Today Gus suprises me by grazing around the gate of a paddock where boots and hooves have trampled the ground to barren dirt.  The nearby grass is dry and powdered with dust, but Gus rips it up hungrily.  This micro-desert also hosts mats of tiny, wiry, vining weeds.  Gus works at gathering a sizable hunk between his teeth, so that a yank of his head succeeds in tearing off the whole tangled skein.  He stands in the sun, chewing and chewing until the stringy stuff is swallowed. These scrubby plants are literally “the odd bits which got trodden on” that Eeyore dolefully expects when picnicking with Pooh and crew.  In fact, Gus’s unexpected Eeyore impression is so complete that, though he has never given a thistle the time of day, now he sniffs a big thorny one before deciding to move on.

When, too late, I identify the stringy little plant as a spurge, I worry.  Spurges are notoriously toxic to humans and many animals.  They can cause vomiting, which equines are structurally unable to do — so is Gus in real danger??  I quickly recall that he ingests the occasional mouthful of oak leaves, ragweed, buttercup, and God knows what else, all with apparent immunity, so I trust his iron constitution can handle today’s garnish of spurge with the same gay abandon.  

Sure enough, he’s hale and hearty on my next visit.  Nevertheless, I do not let him graze near the patch of spurge again.

61. Mammal a mammal

Gus seems to like every animal he meets — horses, dogs, chickens, humans.  He always watches them with calm interest, and if they’re nearby he invariably extends his snout to offer a greeting.  The barn manager’s little old dog has invented a game for the two of them, wherein she approaches, he lowers his nose to say hi, and she growls and snaps at him, making him jump back.  (My family once had a cat who did the same thing with our dog;  despite her hissing and nose-swatting, which made him sneeze, which elicited yet another swat, the two were great buddies.)  When Gus makes an overture to the chickens, they just waddle away at top speed with exclamation points over their little heads.  The only nice-nice he ever gets is from horses and humans.

But now some friends come to meet him and bring along their two wire-haired fox terriers, Norm and Hank.  Both are immediately fascinated by their first-ever donkey, and Gus is very keen to meet them too.  At first, the dogs shy away when Gus gets too close and lowers his big head toward them, but all parties (each on a lead line controlled by a human) try more rapprochements.  I want to show off some of Gus’s crowd-pleaser tricks, but he’s distracted and attracted by the terriers.  Norm is a bit more skittish with Gus than his brother Hank is, though both finally brave a few brief nose-bops.  At one point, Hank walks behind Gus and starts to stand up to rest his front paws on Gus’s hocks in order to reach high enough to sniff his butt.  !  Gus has never kicked that I know of, but Hank’s owner very properly brings him away.  All anybody gets to sniff is noses.

By going deeper into the arena, farther away from the visitors, I get Gus focused on some cone-fetching and tilt-a-chair games.  Then he socializes again with his new friends, and they join him for awhile as he grazes on the lawn outside the arena.  Since the entire environment is new to them, the dogs are overstimulated and getting tired; meanwhile, Gus looks gratified, fulfilled, and happy.  For him socializing is as thoroughly positive an experience as dining — and when he gets both together, he’s in asinine heaven.

60. VIDEO: Driver’s ed

In disaster-assessment mode immediately after the cart crash, Sandy and I blame ourselves.  We shouldn’t’ve assumed the best-case scenario, in which Gus remembers the enjoyable aspects of pulling the trap and is Just Fine with doing it again.  We should’ve predicated our training on the worst case, in which his memories of pulling the trap have faded except for the past episode of terrifying calamity.  In that frame of mind, we’d begin by clicking and treating Gus for staying near the trap while we jostle it a tiny bit.  And for hearing it rattle as we pull it around.  And for hearing it while his back is turned on it.  Later we’d manoever him near the shafts, immediately click and treat, and lead him away to safety.  We’d manoever him near again, have him wait one second, click and treat, and lead him away again.   We’d rest the shafts on his surcingle rings and then promptly remove them.  The most we’d accomplish, and it would be a crowning glory, would be to have him to take one or two steps forward with the cart.  Then we’d celebrate with a peppermint, unhitch him, and let him play fetch.

But now we’ve got on our hands a donkey who’s well and truly spooked.  And who, in a way, succeeded in escaping by means of running amok in the most dangerous fashion.  We need to get that taste out of his mouth and cover up that memory with a lot more positive and pleasant experiences.

First Sandy hopes that Gus might assent to being rehitched, so we try bringing the cart behind him.  Even at a distance, and no matter how rapidly and repeatedly we click and treat, he jigs and spins his hips away every time.  He insists on facing the menace head-on — perfectly natural.  Next she leads him between the shafts head-first, and he’s quite willing to make that approach.  Next she leads him across the shafts sideways, as if they’re ground poles, and he’s quite willing to step over them calmly.  But when she turns his back to the cart, he’s still not at all willing.  So:  the cart is tolerable when it’s stationary and visible.

Now she takes a Gus-rein in one hand and a cart-shaft in the other hand and walks forward.  She allows him a long rein, to let him put space between himself and the trap.  His body is tense; his ears move constantly, like ground-control signallers at a very busy airport; and he gives that rattletrap plenty of sideways hairy eyeball.  But he manages to walk along, with the trap rolling just on Sandy’s other side.  So:  the cart is now tolerable when it’s moving and visible.

These are much better outcomes than white-hot panic and emergency extraction.  

We set down the cart in the far corner of the arena, and I take Gus outside for some grazing.  He tucks in with gusto and relief, never raising his head from chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing.  After 15 minutes, we go into his stall for dinner — more oral gratification.  After gobbling his grain, he avidly browses his hay.  These are basically the equine equivalents of a carton of ice cream and a spoon.

Now that Gus’s last two experiences with the cart have ended in cataclysm, we’re definitely behind an eight-ball.  His powers of recollection are strong.  Yet so are his resilience and courage.  Each time I visit from now on, I can ask him to touch the cart and stand near it and hear it rattle, all in brief sessions and tiny increments.  Maybe that way we can work our way back to hitching up and driving with confidence and relaxation.  Eventually.

59. Cart-astrophe

Amid the riot of last week's New York State Fair — a butter sculpture depicting life-size customers in an ice-cream parlor; cage upon cage of ducks and chickens and rabbits; pen after pen of goats and sheep and pigs; a Snickers candy bar wrapped in bacon, then dipped in batter, then deep-fried; an exhibit of art made from “junk in a bucket” — I happened upon some carriage-driving contests in the equestrian coliseum.  There were pairs of dapper Belgian draft ponies, and also big Percherons in “tandem hitch,” which means one in front of the other like a tandem bicycle. 

I’ve seen a few cart and carriage accidents, and heard about others.  Driving is certainly more dangerous than riding:  if a cart bounces or tips, the humans can get catapulted from the seat while the animals can get entangled in straps and shafts.  Once upon a time, Sandy had Gus nicely trained to pull a little two-wheeled trap as she walked behind it, and after he was good with a 50-pound sack of feed in the trap, she figured she might . . . just . . . sit in it herself.  Instantly the imbalance or torque freaked him out and sent him running off wildly, causing the cart to flip over sideways while still attached to him, causing him to freak out even more.  Sandy managed to bail out and roll away unhurt, but by the time she and others got Gus stopped, the harness was so twisted and jammed onto his shoulders that they had to cut it off of him.

Happily, all went smoothly with the Belgians and Percherons I saw at the fair.  And when I tell Sandy about it, it sparks her interest in reintroducing Gus to driving.  His crash was far in the past, and he’s great with long-lining — what could go orwng??

First we fail to realize, when Gus shows some suspicion on seeing the cart in the arena, that he still associates it with bad hoodoo.  But he lets us bring the little conveyance behind him and tie its shafts with bailing twine to the side-rings of his surcingle.  Sandy takes the reins behind the cart, while I walk at Gus's head in order to deliver instant treats whenever she clicks.  Off he steps like a professional and walks along well.  Almost right away, though, he doesn’t want to stop to receive treats, and he doesn’t want to whoa on her command.  He wants to walk along smartly.  Then to quick-march.  Then to trot.  The more he accelerates, the more the light metal cart jounces and rattles.  And the more it rattles, the less he likes it.  Gus’s intent evolves visibly, from pulling the cart to fleeing the cart. 

At this point, when Sandy tries to slow him, he instead runs off blindly, pulling the reins from her hands.  He gallops to the arena gate and tries to barge out through it, toppling a couple of chairs and wooden rails loudly.  But the gate won’t give, and the trap won’t stop chasing him, so he veers back to the center of the arena and crosses it diagonally, bucking and bucking and bucking.  By this time the cart is upside-down, scraping and banging, the twine is broken away from one shaft, but the other shaft is sticking under and between his hind legs. It all started so promisingly, and now we're fearing for his life!

As he rampages away from the gate, I make like an X — standing tall with my arms extended in the air and my feet apart, forming the international (and interspecies) symbol for halt — and I aim my X at his neck.  Sandy probably does the same thing, but I don't look; I'm focused only on Gus, both to influence him with my body language and to keep my actual body far away from him and the cart.  To our amazement, he stops for us.  I put a hand on his halter to keep him still, and Sandy begins ve-e-ery carefully disentangling him.  I produce my pocket knife (exigencies like this are why I always, always, always keep it on me) so she can cut the twine and drag the cart back away from him.  Gus waits and then walks off with me.  Considering his ordeal, he now seems fine — no trembling or panting or jumpiness.  And by amazing grace, no injuries.

Of course we don’t want to end on such a negative note, so we work with Gus for awhile afterward, hoping to give him some positive, or at least not terrifying, associations with the cart.  Details about that in the next post.

58. Botanical update

Ragweed — yum?

Oak leaves — just fine?

As summer starts to edge towared autumn, Gus’s browsing preferences seem to be changing a bit with the season.  Whereas clover never gave him a thrill in spring, now that it’s blossoming it’s a huge favorite, worth strolling around in search of.  The bedstraw is acceptable, but not the special treat it seemed to be when it was young.  To my surprise, the carrot-cousin Queen Anne’s lace is still shunned; same for chicory and burdock and ragweed — until suddenly today he yanks up a big, multistalked, green-flowering ragweed plant and systematically chews and swallows the whole thing.  Wha-a-a-a??

Gus’s first choice is always grasses, especially if the blades are long and wide and rank, as they are under the fences where the mower spares them, and in the fenny and thickety areas where they’re overfertilized by proximity to old manure piles.  He also enjoys the mower-spewed cuttings when they lie on top of the recently cut lawns.  This fodder, though, is neither fresh like live plants nor cured like hay, so I worry that it could be mouldy or fermenting or otherwise unhealthy.  But this is the animal who blithely eats oak leaves with no apparent ill effects, so I guess he can digeset old grass clippings too.

57. Pigeons, plugs, and pie pans

Gus’s barn is now a pigeon exclusion zone.  Pigeons have long been numerous and ubiquitous above the stalls and arena in that barn, but we finally reached our limit of tolerance.  The makeshift ceiling over the little tack room has helped protect the saddles and bridles, but everywhere else the pigeon poop has been prodigious bordering on the epic.  The audience chairs in the arena have been covered in it, and ditto for the light switch, the entry gate, the stack of miniature traffic cones, the fetching toys, etc., etc.  In the stabling half of the barn, the residents have been shat upon, their water buckets fouled, their feed buckets caked, and their neatly folded blankets and flymasks besmirched.  Sandy was draping old towels over everybody’s feed buckets between meals, but the towels became stiff with dried excrement every couple of days.  

The cooing of easily 30 or 40 pigeons has rarely bothered me, but their frequent and  sudden flights in and out of the barn can be unnerving to horses and riders.  I think the final straw for Sandy was seeing how much grain the pigeons were  stealing from the coop of her very nice chickens while they were outside dutifully eating up bugs all over the property.  Which includes two disused barns that would make Perfectly Fine alternative homes for the pigeons to make their very own.

So, after extensive online and word-of-mouth research, Sandy has compiled an arsenal of pigeon assault weapons:  a SuperSoaker pump-action squirt gun, a toy rifle that fires plastic-foam Nerf bullets, and a big, long-handled net.  All humans who see a pigeon are deputized to grab a water or Nerf gun and let fly (and enjoined to gather up the spent Nerf bullets and return them to their ammo box for reloading).  To support her artillery and fusilier power, she became a corps of engineers, climbing up and hanging an aluminum-foil pie pan on a string to dangle in the center of each and every little window between the arena and the stable.  She tightly closes the big arena doors every night.  She has plastic owls posted around the building full-time.
 

In the face of this relentless onslaught, the pigeon population has plummeted.  There’s still a nest over Gus’s stall and a few others way high in the arena rafters, beyond the range of water hose or foam bullets.  But the barn is appreciably less shitted up these days.  Rows of pigeons now bide their time on the power lines outside, watching for a chance to retake their territory.  But our warrior spirits are steeled to keep up the good fight, never let down our guard, and beat back the invaders.  We hope the onset of winter will dampen their resolve and drive them at last to seek shelter elsewhere.

Victory won’t be declared until there are no more than a couple of pigeons resident in our barn.  And we fully expect to re-up and resume hostilities in the spring.

56. VIDEO: Dressage donkey

Another clinic day with clicker-dressage expert Alex Kurland, and while lots of lessons are learned and progress made by six humans and seven equines, for me the banner headline of the day is that Gus is declared a bona fide dressage donkey.

After auditing last month’s clinic, I’ve been working with Gus on the main lesson of that day, shoulder yielding — at least in a rudimentary, ballpark sort of way.  And he’s catching on quickly and enjoying it.  But I know my cueing needs a lot of refining, so that’s what Alex offers us.  She confirms my fear of shoving him into a stiff or unbalanced shoulder-yield, and she steps us back to a preparatory exercise focused on the tiniest, subtlest little gives of the neck.

The cue is the same — sliding down the inside rein and taking it up just a little, while using my “minuet hand” to touch or brace his shoulder if it starts to fall into the circle — but the goal is only a teensy softening of jaw and neck, a hint of releasing, a soupçon of acknowledgment.  All without any loss of energy or ground-speed as he continues walking along.  I peer intently at the faint vertical wrinkle behind his jaw, and the instant I see a little increase of crease, I drop the rein and click, following up with a treat.

And doesn’t Gus turn out to be a champ?  Alex praises the quality of his walk, his responsiveness, and the lightness with which he carries himself.  She notes how much those are improved since she saw him a couple of months ago.  And she reassures me that I'm clicking at the correct moments.

I mention my distant hope that I could joshingly call him a dressage donkey one day, and she replies that he already is one.  She figures he’s executing elementary dressage movement as adroitly as any equine classmate.  I am one proud auntie, trainer, and partner.

We practice this detailed exercise around and around in circles, and Gus only loses focus once or twice, upon which I walk him off the circle briefly and then return.  After close to an hour I end the lesson (with internal fanfares and confetti), but Gus refuses to exit the arena.  No wonder, given the quantity of clicks and treats he was earning, plus the limelight shed by his human spectators, plus his knowledge that some other equine will soon take his place and get all the fun.  I haul and cajole, but he plants his feet and leans back.  Finally, Sandy shoos him from the rear, and I wrestle him out the door.  He cooperates nicely once we leave the arena behind, and I strew imaginary palm leaves in his path on the way back to his stall.

55. How we doin' here?

Myriad and sublime are the blessings of retirement, not the least of which is the absence of annual “performance” evaluations.  If you’re on good terms with your boss, you both communicate well and often, making a yearly questionnaire just an empty ritual, a sham with the sole purpose of satisfying some CYA policy in the human resources department.  If you’re on bad terms with your boss, it’s still just HR balloon juice, plus it’s fraught with festering mistrust or veiled disrespect or baleful innuendo or uncomfortable pressures or all of the above.  Either way, it’s not a useful stock-taking or planning exercise.


By contrast, when it comes to animal training, I do find it edifying to look over the past year or so and meditate on our progress together.  It was early last September when I first took Gus’s lead rope in hand and we began sizing each other up.  While he’s still a little Caesar, mercurial and inscrutable, I can hazard a few then-and-now generalizations:


*  manners indoors and out:  steady improvement, to the point of near-angelic sweetness, except when paddock flies are most torturous 


*  refusing or pulling away during a session:  waned pretty steadily, returned a bit as the grass greened, and waning again lately


*  refusing or pulling away around the farm property:  waned in the winter, returned with knobs on [<—video] as the grass greened, and waning again lately, except when flies are most torturous  


*  busting out of paddock:  great improvement through the winter and spring, but backsliding lately when flies are most torturous 


*  personal hygiene:  quite tolerant of sponge-bathing [<—video]; much more cooperative for hoof-picking (especially if I remember to start with the right-front foot, proceed counter-clockwise, and finish with a treat); minimally more tolerant, or at least less explosive, about spray bottles 


*  distractability and sniff-wandering during a session:  gradual, steady improvement


* staying in his lane in hand:  still tends to veer wide, but good improvement since I adopted Sharon Wilsie’s matching steps and Alex Kurland’s coaching in [video—>] shoulder-yield and rope-handling


*  welcoming when I arrive:  started early and still going strong


*  complaining when I leave:  none early, then frequent in winter, but rarely now
 
*  tricks learned:  added pirouetting to pedestal standing; invented tilt-a-chair; added mat and pedestal as destinations for fetching, and added pompoms and other fetchable objects; extrapolated barrel rolling from beachball bopping



*  movement quality:  better energy and impulsion at the walk, especially as I match steps; easier backup (with my improved cueing — duhhh!); stiffer when moving to his left than his right, but overall limberness and fitness may be improving


Not too shabby, eh?  Most gratifying for me has been the slow but steady blossoming of our relationship, particularly the trust and comfort that’s now plain to see in his (almost always) soft eye and relaxed jaw and floppy ears.


Happy anniversary, Gus.