128. VIDEO: Stompin’ donkey

The hi-hat pedal is now up-armored and virtually bombproof.  My tinkerer friend went above and beyond, adding a wide slab at the bottom, bolting a new footplate onto the broken one and covering it in thick blaze-orange duct tape, installing a padded seat for the footplate to hit when it’s depressed, improving the bicycle chain, and spray-painting the whole thing black.  It’s a marvel of DIY engineering.

As Gus and I resume our pedal-stomping practice, I find he hasn’t lost a step during the repair-work hiatus.  From his prior batting average of about .500 before inflicting the compound fracture to the pedal, within a couple minutes now he’s hitting .750 or so.  And he’s just as obsessed too, immediately striding forward after each step-off.  I can barely get the treat to his mouth before he’s reaching for the pedal again:

Once the pedal connects to a percussion instrument and he feels the gratifying agency of making noise, I fear he’ll be unstoppable . . .

127. Indoor amusements

This summer in upstate New York, with its hot draught in April and May followed by steamy monsoons in July and August, has produced a bumper crop of biting flies.  Even a normal summer’s worth of ankle-sucking stable flies and ear-biting face gnats is enough to drive Gus around the bend, fly mask and fly socks notwithstanding.  This year, faced with thick swarms of bugs (and a massive, mucky rain puddle at his pasture gate), Gus was simply refusing to be led to his paddock almost every day.

At first, Sandy allowed him choose alternative paddocks, as he gets along quite well with all the horses and often enjoys visiting their turnouts.  But no matter which group or which location he’d opt for, after an hour or two he’d get bored or annoyed, and out he would come.  It’s easy for him:  he just pushes his shoulder, or cranks his head, against a board until it breaks and he can squeeze under, over, or through.  Some fences are protected by a string of electrified wire running along their top edges, and if the juice is turned up high enough, electric can deter even a determined donkey.  But because Gus is so short, he scoots under the wire; and because horses’ legs are so fragile, it’s unsafe to run the wire down low.

This leaves Sandy with no choice but to shut Gus in his stall inside the barn all day.  He hates that, but perhaps not as much as he hates being outdoors.  Only a small fraction of the biting flies come into the barn, plus each stall has a big box fan strapped to its front grille.  The breeze helps blow away the heat and the bugs.  It’s uninteresting and solitary, but it’s comfortable.

For me, Gus’s daytime confinement (he still goes out to pasture all night, when the flies are much less obnoxious) means he’s extra-eager for our training sessions.  Before I finish parking my car, I’m greeted by a long, loud bagpipe-bassoon duet, and if I stop to chat or otherwise delay my arrival at his stall door, I hear more braying.  Gus is so happy to get out of the stall and into the arena that he readily performs any and all tricks I suggest; I almost always run out of treats well before his interest wanes.  

And he invents new games too.  When we find two 50-gallon barrels set up in the arena, he develops a particular walking pattern around and between them, which he wants to continue ad nauseam.  Also, he inexplicably turns his erstwhile pirouetting trick around the pedestal into a climb-aboard trick instead.  I’ve named this new trick “all four,” but now I need to reinforce his crowd-pleasing standard “step over” so that he doesn’t utterly abandon that front-feet-up twirl in favor of his new favorite all-four-feet-up trick.  No wonder he’s so keen on learning to step on the drum-set pedal.  To keep up with his newfound avidity, I fear I really will need to bring him a chess set or a trampoline or . . .

126. Destructo donkey strikes again

Today, Gus hits the pedal at a funny angle and flips it over.  He’s unperturbed, but now it’s cockahoop and I have to cram its side rails back into alignment.  The delay of game makes him antsy; he’s shoving his nose into the proceedings and wishing I would hurry the hell up.  I do get it fixed, but a few minutes later he stomps it a little bit off-center again, and the footplate itself snaps in two right across the middle.  It looks like it was cast from cheap pot metal, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it flunked the donkey destruction test. 

My plan was always to attach the hi-hat stand to a pyramid of two-by-fours or some other sturdy structural support, and I figured I might also need to widen the surface of the pedal just for visibility.  Having the pedal broken in half hardly matters:  I can still use four (or six) bolts to attach a thin square of plywood to its surface.  That’ll reinforce it against 700 pounds of donkey and also spread the impact over a wider area.  I show the pedal wreckage to a friend who’s an avid handyman and customizer, and he generously offers to make the repairs for me.  He’s thinking of rivets, and he’s pondering plywood vs. plexiglass, and then he asks about widening the base as well so as to minimize any future flipovers.  Now he’s got a nifty new project and with a spring in his step he takes the thing away to his workshop.

While it’s up on blocks, Gus and I are practicing the keyboard and bicycle horn, getting those instruments down pat in preparation for adding the cymbals.  It’ll be a crazy-ass one-man band, fer sherr . . .

125. VIDEO: Pedal mettle

Shopping success at last:  I score a hi-hat cymbals set at a yard sale.  I have to buy the matching snare, two toms, and bass drum as well, which I’ll give away at some point.  My plan for introducing the hi-hat to Gus was to start with just the detached foot pedal, and by luck the seller separated the bass drum’s pedal when loading it into my car.  That gives me two pedals to work with, which makes me willing to start training before trying to donkey-proof or reinforce the thing.  I was pleased to see how well it seems to be built — thick metal, a bicycle chain, a strong spring . . .   But who knows whether Gus will totally trash it, or what modifications it might need for equine-user-friendliness.

I begin, as I do for all unfamiliar items, with “touch.”  Gus is rarely spooked by any visible object, and sure enough he willingly noses the pedal, even when it moves and clicks.

Now I set it down in front of him.  Equines aren’t very good at seeing directly ahead of themselves — their long faces get in the way.  One of the many terrifying aspects of jumping horses is that, just as they launch themselves into the air, they lose sight of the obstacle they’re jumping. They need to see it in advance and then gauge their blind leap.  Likewise (but much more safely) Gus will need to know where the pedal is so that he can target his foot onto it accurately.  

To show him the basic idea, I pick up his leg and place his hoof on the pedal.  He seems clueless, but just as I reach down for his ankle again, he flops his foot up and over the pedal.  I click and treat him for that approximation.  I don’t want to keep handling his foot, though, because he’ll need to figure out the mechanics and placement for himself.  Since he knows and loves our chacha, I wonder if he might imitate me if I slowly, clearly, dramatically plop my own foot onto the pedal.  Again, clueless.  

 

Next, I play face-to-face chacha with Gus and set the pedal in his path, hoping he’ll accidentally step on it.  When any part of his hoof bumbles against any part of the pedal, I click and treat.  That keeps him playing the game, and in no time at all, he does happen to step smack onto the pedal.  I don’t just click and treat for that; before he can step off, I’m blitz-clicking:  giving him a click and treat just about every half-second.  I want him to know that foot-on-pedal is the best place to be in the world.  After six or eight clicks, I ask him to step back, and I click him for that too.  If stepping on the pedal is ab fab, he also needs to know that stepping off it again is nearly as fab.  After all, in concert (ahem), crashing the cymbals will require him to press and release the pedal repeatedly.

The next day, we play with the pedal again, and Gus blows my mind by landing on the pedal in at least 50% of our tries. He’s really digging this game, and suddenly he depresses the pedal especially deftly, with apparent purpose and confidence.  Click!  Peppermint!  (You can hear him chewing it in the last sequence here:)

 

124. VIDEO: Curtain call

As our final stupid-pet-trick update for today, we present our take-a-bow.  For some reason, the leg lifting and head lowering are taking forever to perfect.  Gus seems to enjoy doing it, often budging his foot before I even ask, yet training him to bend his knee and hold it bent is far more difficult than I expected.  I’m not sure what to do differently, and minimal advances are perceptible as the months wear on, so I’ll just keep slogging away at it.  I think it’ll eventually be pretty dang cute?

123. VIDEO: Donkey dance lessons

Here’s another project that Gus is throwing himself into with, well . . . gusto:  dancing the chacha with me.  Having learned to stop crowding him and get out of his face, I ask him to step backward by giving a cue and waiting, allowing him to respond within his own personal time-space continuum.  Arms akimbo, I tilt my elbows forward and cock my knee to ask him for a backward step with the same-side front leg; when I tilt my elbows backward and lean my body away, he’s to step forward toward me.

We also do a side-by-side chacha, which we began by exaggerated slow-walking and honed into a back-and-forth terpsichorean two-step.  So far, Gus needs the arena wall alongside him to keep him heading straight; the chances that we’ll ever progress to using the whole dance floor seem slim.  But it’s starting to look pretty good along the wall, and when we add a pole on the ground, our audiences have been known to gasp.  

It’s still extremely slow going, but the precision is improving steadily.  And Gus, for reasons passing understanding, absolutely adores this practice, offering to back up at any opportunity and practically dragging me to the ground pole to repeat the game.  So I have faith that we’re developing into a partnering powerhouse, on our way to winning Dancing With the Donkey Stars.  

122. VIDEO: Nanny redux

A lifelong learner, Gus doesn’t believe in letting old skills wane as he adds new tricks and accomplishments to his repertoire.  One example: his baby-carriage performances are more boffo than ever:

121. VIDEO: Music news

Videoworthy advances made by the doughty donkey Gus over the past few months include his musical versatility training.  He not only noses the toy keyboard without bashing its underside and flipping it over, but he now plays riffs — eclectic, atonal, postmodern riffs, like a John Cage with hooves, like a George Crumb with foot-long ears.

Lately he’s integrating the bicycle horn, for an even richer tapestry of sound: 

He had a hard time getting his muse around the innovation of going from keyboard to horn and back again, but these days he easily switches instruments without losing his virtuosity on either.  While I usually still have to redirect his attention between nuzzling the ivories and biting the horn bulb, he has begun occasionally picking up the horn On His Own after a piano riff.  His craft is developing day by day . . .

Soon he’ll be ready to add the final element of our orchestral trio:  a hi-hat cymbals set that he can play by stomping on a pedal.  It might take another few months to master and polish for prime time, but reserve your tickets now for a recorded-live concert by Gus’s Sweet-Ass One-Man Band.

120. Exit strategy

Despite Gus’s lofty level of education and acculturation and etiquette, mostly he operates on the principle that might makes right.  And when he puts his shoulder to it, he’s mightier than nearly any obstacle he encounters.

Today, for the umpteenth time, he breaks the leash-hook-style snap that secures the barrier across his stall door.  The stall guard is a thick, weighty square of rubbery plastic; at its four corners, it attaches by metal chains and snaps to heavy-duty eyelets screwed into the door jambs of his oak-plank stall.  Only it’s pretty regularly not attached, because if he wants out he has only to lean hard and either break a snap or uproot an eyelet.  His escape plan is not so much a strategy as a tactical nuclear warhead.

The snapped snap . . . and a closeup of the break

Gus’s humans have applied their best barn technology.  His is an especially heavy-duty stall guard; most of the horses are kept in by just a thick plasticized rope, like the crowd-control ropes that usher people into queues at cinemas or airports.  And he has one of those too, which we can add on top of the bigger stall guard, but it serves merely to delay him a bit when he decides to make a break for it.  The only sure way to keep Gus incarcerated is to hook up both stall guards and then shut the full, oaken door and slide home its finger-thick bolt.

Thing is, the vertically challenged Gus can’t hang his head over his door and kibbitz in the barn aisle the way the horses can:  stall doors are chest-high to horses but eye-high to a donkey.  For Gus a closed door is far more isolating than it is for his stablemates.  So we make sure to support his psychosocial well-being by giving him some time with his door open and just a stall guard to contain him.  Which is why barn-manager Sandy is shopping for yet another bulk consignment of those big leash snaps.

119. Grazing lessons

Now that snow no longer blankets the grass around Gus’s barn, we end each arena session with some grazing time.  The grass is still 95% brown, but the tiniest filaments of green are just beginning to sprout beneath the matted old turf.  Gus has to pull back his enormous lips in order to press his teeth right down to the ground where he can nip off these earliest threads of fresh grass.  These days he’s getting about two-thirds dead grass to one-third fresh with each bite, but soon it’ll be mostly green, and then it’ll be all pure, sweet, tender, green, fresh yumminess.  For now, when he occasionally pulls up an old blade that’s too tough and tasteless, he separates it with his tongue and ejects it from the side of his mouth while still tweezing and ingesting the next bites.  Equids never forget how to graze with top efficiency.

Gus also remembers how the extra-long, extra-thick lead rope works when I hook it to the far side of his halter and thread it through the near side.  How it works is like a noose, pinching all around his snout if he tries to haul his head away from me.  The first couple of snow-free days, I had to insist on a grazing end time though he wasn’t ready.  As I made to lead him off the grass, he yawed one way, and I leaned back and held on, so he yawed and tried to trot the other way, and I leaned back and ran along and held on.  Then he recalled his lessons from last summer:  there is no escape from the cinch-rope, no matter how obnoxiously he resists it.  And today he doesn’t bother to fight at all (“resistance is futile”) but immediately walks off with me like an obedient gentleman.  In his stall, I feed him the last peppermint from my treat apron.