114. VIDEO: Tickling those ivories

Several of the equids at Sandy’s barn get regular piano lessons — on a kids’ portable, electric keyboard.  It has lots of accompaniment settings, but mostly we keep those quiet and just ask our animals to nudge and nose the piano keys.  When I first showed it to Gus and said “Touch,” he readily bopped it with his muzzle.  But when I flipped the on-switch and it played a note under his nose, he stepped emphatically backward and gave it his signature ear-pointing glare.  There’s no volume control and it’s plenty loud, but it only took a few more encounters, with prompt and frequent click-and-treats, for Gus to become a piano aficionado.  Allegro con brio.

As with pushing the baby carriage, playing the keyboard requires an adjustment in Gus’s usual nosing technique.  For bopping the beachball, it’s all about contacting it with the top of his nose, which he then flings upward and forward.  To teach him to to push the pram, I had to focus on clicking him for setting the top of his nose against the handle but not flipping it, lest he topple the pram forward onto its prow.  And now with the piano, he also wants to get his nose under it and push upward; often he flips it in my hands, so that the blank bottom of the keyboard presents itself to him.  He gets no clicks or treats for this, or for bopping the underside, but he still seems to enjoy it. 

It didn’t take long for Gus to learn that the bulb-horn demands two honks for a click and treat, so I’m confident it’ll be no time before he understands that the piano requires not just one or two notes but a riff or phrase involving several keys.

(Thought my purchase of the baby pram was ludicrous and mildly unhinged?Well, lately I’m cruising Craigslist for a pedal-activated hi-hat cymbals set.  How can I resist promoting a one-ass band of keyboard, cymbals, and bicycle horn?)

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.

111. Hammer and tongs

An interesting aspect of the stall-door fix is Gus’s response as he witnesses the work firsthand.  It’s late afternoon when the repair crew arrives, and while husband evaluates the damage, friend and son come into the arena for a lovely floorshow from Gus, showing off his basketball, pram, and pedestal tricks.  When we finish and he’s greeted his adoring fans, we head toward his stall, where he seems deeply interested in the carpentry procedures.

But once the drill and hammer start up — and perhaps once the human contingent grows to include me and Sandy and the three helper-outers, plus briefly two others who visit their horses in the same aisle — Gus gets fussy.  I lead him outside to soothe his savage breast by grazing on the meager, matted, frozen grass alongside the barn wall.  When we return, he’s clearly of two minds:  he wants to barge into his stall for hay and possibly (it’s that time) his dinner grain, yet he also wants to get away from the noise and commotion.  He pulls back, he pulls ahead.  He yanks the rope from my hand, spins, and trots a few paces out into the driveway.  He lets me bring him back in.  I refill my apron with treats and even bring out the saltine crackers, and we play stationary games like head-down and the-grownups-are-talking and pirouette.  These distract him pretty well, but he’s still antsy and dancy.

When the tools are packed up and the crowd disperses, I wonder how Gus will approach his stall.  No problem:  he strolls right in, shoves his snout into his grain bucket, and chomps his hay without a care in the world.  I can only imagine the scene sometime later, when he idly strolls over to the formerly battered door and tries his luck shoving it.  Curses, he’ll say, in donkeyese; foiled again!

110. Maximum security

In yet another desperate bid for freedom, Gus has pushed several boards right out of his stall door.  These are thick oak boards, screwed into an iron casing at the top.  No more:  the screws are twisted or missing, the top casing and another iron strap are bent, the boards are splattered into the barn aisle . . .  What looks like ground zero of a bomb blast is in fact the result of one medium-sized, middle-aged donkey using his shoulder and chest as a battering ram.  Impressive.

Sandy manages to get the boards pretty much back in place, adds a strip of scrap lumber as a cross-rail, and shores up the bottom of the doorway.  When I tell a horse-owning friend about this latest breakout, she offers up her very handy husband and his vast array of tools and building materials.  He scopes out the damage, realigns the boards so the edges lock tightly again, drills new screwholes into the iron casing, and inserts longer, stronger screws.  After he sleeps on it, he arranges to come back a second time, to add even more reinforcements top, bottom, and middle.  Now we all have a good amount of time, ego, and reputation invested in something that we know Gus will do his best to trample into the dirt.  We wait.  Days pass and the door is still standing.  Can it be?

The latest report from Sandy is that Gus doesn’t even bother to test that door anymore.  After a long losing streak, a small victory:  humans 1, donkey 0.

Heehaw hiatus

See?  Both alive and well.

Just a quick note to acknowledge this blog’s radio silence lately. The health and welfare of both Gus and me are absolutely fine, we’re still working together regularly and mostly successfully, and posting will resume soon, I promise. We just needed a breather for the adoption of a new puppy, the election season, whatev . . .

News to come will feature cha-cha tricks, stall breakouts, and musical ambitions.  For now, I hope you enjoy the past 100-odd posts, in the sure and certain knowledge that more will follow shortly.  Really, I do promise.

109. Punk rampant

I open the little wooden storage box outside Gus’s stall (to stock my pocket with the regulation three peppermint candies that I allow as extra-special treats in each session) and half-notice its contents in disarray.  The bag of Buckeye-brand mini-cookies has a big hole torn in it; the two new boxes of saltine crackers are now one box and three unboxed plastic sleeves.  Hmmm . . .  

Gus comes in from the paddock eagerly and we play our games as usual.  Some dressagey walking and halting and backing up.  Some leg lifts with head-down, on our way to learning take-a-bow.  Some horn honking and keyboard playing.  Some pedestal standing and pompom waving.  All copacetic.

Also copacetic, when grazing time is up, Gus cranks his neck and resists only briefly before consenting to be led off the lawn and into his stall.  I assure him that it’s dinnertime, and he marches right to his feed bucket, where, sure enough, his token tablespoonful of grain is waiting.

Sandy is waiting too, to explain about the brushbox.  It seems that yesterday, Donkey Demento escaped from his stall (maybe she didn’t fully latch the bottom hook, allowing him to scootch under his stall guard) and launched a daylight raid.  Finding the box’s hasp secured, he resorted to the simple expedient of breaking a hinge off the lid to get at the treasures within.  After spilling everything out, ripping into the treat bag and the cracker boxes, failing to pry open the peppermint tub, and strewing some brushes and ointment tubes here and there, he made a good start on his neighbors’ boxes as well.

When humans discovered the barn aisle looking like a looted supermarket, Sandy says, she wasn’t surprised at the mess, only at the quietness with which it had been perpetrated.  Gus’s style is more raucous vandal than cat burglar, but this time he wreaked his havoc without raising any ruckus at all.

I bring a couple of screws and a screwdriver, fix the box lid, and assess the losses.  I calculate that Gus scored one whole sleeve of saltines and three handfuls of Buckeye treats.  He’s done worse — once, I’m told, he stole several full-size horse dinners — and with no ill effects.  When you have a mischievous mouth, you better have a cast-iron stomach, and he has both.

108. Smokin’

Standing around while an animal grazes may have its pleasures, but it’s far from intellectually engaging.  So while Gus grazes, I make it my business to shoo away the biting flies by swinging the lead rope against his legs, gently scraping my boot along his shins, and chasing them off his belly and back.  I also make myself useful with brushless pre-grooming:  running my hands all over him to scrub off dead hair and wipe away any clinging mud or shavings or other debris.  

Today the winds are gusty.  That helps keep the flies off him, but I quickly realize it also reveals just how filthy he is.  In the past couple of days, he’s rolled repeatedly in a dust-bath wallow that he and his pasturemate Henry have excavated in their sandy-soiled paddock.   Now each time I rub Gus’s fur or pat his back, a visible puff of superfine dust erupts into the air and blows away.  I rub and pat and rub and pat, and the puffs just keep rising and blowing.  Trapped between his skin and his coat is what must be a wheelbarrowful of powdered dirt.

Absorbed in his grassy feast, Gus is oblivious, but I’m having a high old time watching the billows burst from under my hand.  I begin thumping him in syncopated rhythms, emitting complex smoke signals.  As I pat his back and neck and rump like a beatnik on bongos, he just grazes on, smoldering nonchalantly in the breeze.  Summertime, and the living is hazy.

107. VIDEO: Dressage development

Dressage clicker-trainer Alex Kurland returns to the barn for a lesson day, and with his feet cured and comfy, Gus gets to take part.  We continue our shoulder-giving and neck-softening work, which helps equines step in a more relaxed and powerful way.  It encourages them to lift a little weight off their front ends, rocking them back a tiny bit onto their stronger (but often under-used) hind ends.  Gus is getting to be a pro, especially when we travel in a curve to the left; like many equines, he’s less athletic — stiffer? weaker? — when circling to his right.  After each arc around a cone or two, we return to home base:  a wooden mat in the circle’s center.

Here I’m sliding my front hand up along the lead rope, grasping the snap where it clips onto the halter, and then rotating my wrist just a bit to suggest that he flex his neck.  At the same time, my back hand touches his shoulder to cue him to move it out and away so that he can step under himself.  All we’re after is a centimeter here or there, an almost invisible soupçon of lift and arch.  But watch intently enough, and you’ll witness his entire walk improving, as the lightness in his front-end makes it easier for him engage his hind end and produce a more relaxed, swingy, and athletic stride.  Dressage donkey!

 

106. VIDEO: Fail of the week

As a break during our recent lesson with dressage trainer Alex Kurland, I give Gus the chance to play with the baby carriage.  But we soon learn that when he’s working well, he don’t need no stinkin’ recess.  At least not when he has an adoring, and adored, audience so nearby to distract him: 

After Gus fails to bring his toy donkey to the pedestal as per protocol, his totally abandons his performance as his social instincts draw him inexorably to the humans.  They’re there to view the lesson, but Gus figures their purpose is entirely for the greater glory of his sublime friendliness: