83. Mistified

Donkeys are both spunky and spooky, using skills of fight and flight much more equally than horses, who are top contenders for the barnyard freestyle fleeing championship year in and year out.  Donkeys share — or even surpass — horses’ vigilance toward potential dangers, and they’ll jump, spin, and gallop away in violent panic at the drop of a hat.  But donkeys also evaluate threats with more confidence:  where horses foresee victimhood, donkeys may envision victory.  Donkeys are used as guardians of other animals, and indeed they’ve been known to beat, crush, and bite to death such predators as coyotes and bobcats.

So why is Gus terrified by mist sprayers?  Horses tend to be anxious about them too at first, but they soon learn to tolerate them.  Not Gus.  Let him hear the faint hiss of a spray bottle, and instantly his eyes pop wide, his ears shoot up, and his feets don’t fail him.  Sandy has tried to apply, say, wound-healing spray or fly-repellent spray, only to send Gus crashing into a wall or busting through a gate.  I’m not a big believer in fly spray — its toxicity seems to outweigh the short-lived, partial relief it can provide — but every summer Gus is such a martyr to biting flies that I’d like to at least consider spritzing him during the buggiest days.  Of course, there are wipe-on repellents too, which just take more time to apply.  And even more time with Gus, who’s gravely offended by any scents other than horse food and horse poop.  For him smelly ointments and liquids are only slightly less alarming and objectionable than those infernal spritzes.

Accordingly, I’ve embarked on a program of de-mistification.  Gus will gladly touch the proffered spray bottle in return for a click and treat, but if I bring it near his neck or flank — as if I might actually squeeze the trigger — he scoots away in panic.  Since he’s fine with it in front of him, I keep it there but I do spray it, just once and aiming away from him.  I don’t think he can even see the mist, but he hears it go “fffffft” ever so softly.  He backs away and stares in horror.  I stand still and silent, eyes averted.  After a good 30 seconds, he stre-e-e-etches his neck toward the bottle, but then pulls back.  I never budge.  After another 15 seconds, he takes one gingerly step forward and reaches out to barely touch the bottle.  Click!  We repeat this spray-then-wait practice until he touches the bottle pretty promptly and calmly after each squirt.  Next I offer him the bottle and, as he touches it, I hold it steady but squeeze the trigger for half a second.  Again, this takes several repeats until he can bear to touch the base of the bottle while the business end is misting Right Near his Face.  Oh, the slings and arrows he must endure just for a morsel of carrot and a scrap of approval . . .

I’m guardedly optimistic that we can cure Gus’s spritzaphobia, but I know it’ll take a lot more practice.  It’s hardly the fun fair of pushing the baby pram, but he’s just as persistent and willing, in his way.  And that unsinkable gameness keeps me from giving up either.

82. VIDEO: Rubber baby-buggy bumpers

Along with chanting “She sells seashells on the seashore,” my mother, who had studied speech therapy in college, used to sing “Rubber baby-buggy bumpers,” and finally it makes some sense to me.  Without them, Gus would already have beaten his baby carriage into twisted rubble.  He’s toppled and dumped it more than once, but so far it looks no worse for wear.

Always looking to shove objects with the top of his nose until they fall over, Gus naturally relishes scratching that itch with the baby buggy.  One good bop, and it tips up onto its front with a gratifying thud.  My job is to click and treat him for touching the handle and sending the carriage forward, but not for getting his nose under the handle and lifting.  Problem is, he’s so eager to play and so quick with his snout that I’m often a half-second too late.  One useful approach is for me to roll the carriage ahead of him so he’s always following it, which helps to keep his nose more behind it than under it.  If he overtakes the carriage and bops it broadside, I stop, reorient him by having him back up a few paces, and then guide the pram ahead of him again.  I hope he’ll catch on eventually that this trick is about forward movement and not about knocking things over.

If I mistakenly click him for lifting the carriage, he does seem to lift it more and more in each subsequent try; conversely, if I withhold the click for lifting, he seems to push it more properly in subsequent tries.  He’s a damn quick study.  His only learning disability is his teacher.

81. Stupid pet tricks

Gus is such a quick study, and his idle hooves are so often the devil’s workshop, that I feel a certain pressure to keep him physically and mentally active.  We’ll always practice and fine-tune his current repertoire of games and dressage maneuvers, but he really enjoys novelty and surprise as well.  What can I dream up next to engage and entertain him afresh? 

Today, I have an answer.  I’d like to plead temporary insanity or sudden dementia, but who’m I kidding?  I’ve been plotting and shopping for months.  Online I find a listing for a classic old baby carriage and I arrange a meet with the seller.  I mean, how freakin’ hilarious would it be to see Gus pushing a baby buggy ahead of him?  And riding in the buggy could be a stuffed-animal donkey.  Or a small, live dog.  Or any number of other ludicrous, vaudevillian figures . . .

Gus's newest plaything

Barbara agrees to ride along and help me check it out.  Turns out the pram has been in an attic for decades; it’s in quite good condition.  And it’s a famous Italian brand that seems both fancy and sturdy.  The seller is a beefy, crew-cut soldierly type living in a rather gritty neighborhood of a rather gritty upstate New York town.  He’s totally congenial, but I figure he’s got enough of a challenge dealing with two garrulous, grey-haired women in barn coats, so I spare him an explanation of how we plan to use his baby pram.  It’s exactly what I had in mind, so I slap $40 in his hand and he helps us load it into my car.  (As long as I’m not inside a big, windowless retail outlet full of overpriced, crappily made, off-gassing merchandise, I can be a shopping whiz.)

I deliver the new toy to the barn and park it inside the arena. When I lead Gus in, he immediately notices it.  His ears spring forward symmetrically.  We stand still, several paces from the contraption, and he simply stares.  New objects usually don’t give him such pause; but this one does have many parts and projections, and I suppose he might fear that any one of them could suddenly savage him?

He presses his ears even more forward, so they come down nearly horizontal, to aim directly at the Unknown Object.  I touch it lightly, and when he sees that it does me no harm, he slowly steps forward a pace or two. Then he touches it ever so gingerly with the very tip of his upper lip.  I click and treat that, and now he noses it more readily.  It bounces slightly when nudged hard enough, and that brings his ears to attention again, but he soldiers on.  As I take a step backward to give him more access, I throw a wrench into these promising works:  I stumble a bit on a stack of wooden mats, causing Gus to shy away and bolt into the middle of the arena.  I retrieve him and we walk around a few times, keeping our distance from the pram.  We walk over ground-poles, we halt, we circle.  Now we return to the pram, and Gus sniffs and nudges and bites it, seeming interested but not alarmed.

We take more breaks from exploring the baby buggy, and each time we return to it, he’s more confident.  He’s even fine when I roll it back and forth and jounce it a little.  I click when he noses the handle, but he keeps placing his snout under the handle and bumping it upward.  That’s his SOP for righting the up-ended chair; however, the technique for pram-pushing will require forward contact, not tilting.  I’ll need to click as his nose touches the handle head-on but before it slips under and starts to lift.  I’m gearing up for eagle eyes and a quick tongue.

80. Augean stables

With Sandy the barn manager out sick today, Barbara steps valiantly into the breach.  In the morning, she and Pam (who owns a sweet Appaloosa mare named Jewel) fetch 10 equids, one by one, from five different paddocks and lead them into their individual stalls.  They feed them breakfast — scoops of grain or other feed, plus whatever supplements and medications each owner likes to dose each horse with.  They use mallets and sieves to remove the ice from each stall’s water bucket; then they fill other buckets half-full from the spigot and pour those into each stall’s bucket.  

They let everybody munch and doze while they drag around a big cart to throw piles of hay into each paddock.  Then they return everybody to the paddocks again — checking to make sure the troughs have enough unfrozen water.  Thankfully, the horses possess accurate internal clocks, so they almost always come to the gate rather than making their humans hike over hill and dale to fetch them.  And they more or less wait their turns to enter and exit according to their dominance rankings.  Plus, Sandy gets big points for another blessing:  she’s trained them all to lower their heads so that short humans can slip their halters on and off easily.

Still, those 10 trips in and 10 trips out are no cakewalk.  In one direction, with all the horses in a paddock milling around the gate, the handler needs to shoo some away while haltering the departing horse and leading it out with one hand while using the other hand to hold the gate semi-shut to prevent escapes.  Then she and the horse need to turn back toward the gate so she can latch it (a two-handed operation), before heading for the barn.  In the other direction, the handler has to fend off the previously turned-out horses while leading the new horse into the paddock with one hand while using the other hand to hold the gate semi-shut.  Then she needs to unhalter the arriving horse and latch the gate.  Rinse and repeat..

In the evening, for dinner feeding and nighttime turnout, Barbara and I do all these chores again in reverse.  In the growing dark.  Over icy, rutted, snow-caked paths.

With everybody turned out, the real work begins.  It’s time to clean stalls.  This is less arduous than at stables where horses are kept inside all night, but it’s still a Herculean labor.  Some horses are tidy and some are slobs.  But they all move their bowels prodigiously and frequently, they all gush small inland seas of urine, and they nearly all trample and soil some of their hay.  Clods of soaked wood-shavings have to be dug out and tossed in the wheelbarrow.  Wet or nasty hay has to be teased away from still-edible strands that can be raked clear of shavings and repiled.  And the poops  — oh, Lord have mercy, the poops . . . They need to be scooped up and then the pitchfork shimmied like a pan of popcorn so that dry, clean shavings can sift back to the floor for reuse.  But the individual turds in each deposit are only loosely bonded, and they’re maddeningly spherical: they roll off the fork (the more so when frozen).  Some get impaled on the end of a tine; others get wedged between tines.  Gus the donkey is small enough that many turds slip between the tines and can’t be picked up no matter how many times you rescoop them. Sandy is super-skilled and efficient, but for a weekend warrior like me, mucking out stalls is time-consuming and awkward.  And spine-twisting.  And arm-tiring.

Nevertheless I’m happy —  literally joyful — to be able to help Sandy out a bit.  Moreover, I truly love doing each and every barn chore, and I wish my musculoskeletal decrepitude didn’t prevent me from doing more.  I adore the aroma of shavings and manure and hay and grain.  I groove on the Zen of focusing solely on one action at a time:  haltering, leading, mucking, bucket filling . . .  They each nourish my soul with deep, serene satisfaction.  I suspect Sandy feels that too.  What’s utterly beyond my ken, though, is how she physically manages it, by herself, twice a day, seven days a week.  She can do it solo in half the time it takes Barbara and me working together.  She's a force of nature.

To some people, women of a certain age — which is everybody at this barn — may look and sound like lightweights.  But step aside, Hercules.  We can mop the barn floor with you.

79. On again

Today, Gus evidently feels fine.  We enjoy a few bursts of sustained trot, then he beelines for a wooden mat and hits the brakes to land on it.  He tosses his head and dances in place.  We run-and-stop between two mats again and again — to his mind, a very exciting game.  I’m tickled by how tickled he is every time, so the first six or eight repetitions don’t drive me insane.  After that, I change the subject:  we pirouette on the pedestal, we dunk the basketball, we walk figure-eights.  

I bring out the 55-gallon drum, to see if he’ll lift it upright as he did so spontaeously and unexpectedly a few days ago.  He doesn’t.  He bops it to roll it all over the arena, and when he does put his nose on the flat end, I click and treat; nevertheless, he makes no effort to push it upright.  Has he utterly forgotten that he did it twice before?  We’ll keep experimenting . . .

At least Gus won't have the weight
of a rider on him

Meanwhile, the clicker-training-for-horses expert Alexandra Kurland has just published a new edition of her book The Click that Teaches, and I bought a copy.  It includes instructions for the Take a Bow trick.  Dogs can bow simply by lowering their front end, putting their elbows on the floor with their rumps in the air — a natural gesture both for stretching after waking up and for inviting playfulness in another dog.  Horses never ever do this, ever.  But it’s a trick they can learn, and I figure it’d be relatively easy for a built-like-a-fireplug donkey.  So we start the first steps, and Gus likes it immediately.

I begin, standing Gus on a mat to help indicate that this is a stationary exercise, by lifting one of his front legs and bending it at the knee.  Because he knows how to lift his foot for hoof-picking, he pretty easily raises his foot when I stroke down his leg.  I just build on that until he picks up the foot at a brief touch and lets me cradle his knee in one hand and his hoof in the other, to bend his leg pretty tightly.  We do this many times with each front foot, going through a pocketful of treats in short order.  We take a break by strolling around, and then we return to the mat for more leg lifts.  Now I also try guiding his bent leg back and down a bit; when his shoulder relaxes and goes with the movement, I click and treat.  

We’ll be doing weeks and weeks more of this leg work.  And once I decide whether he seems more limber or comfortable on his left or right leg, we can pursue the bowing trick on that side.  The other front leg will need to stay on the ground to prop him up as he lowers his head and chest.  But that’s probably months in the future.  One day at a time . . .

78. Pisspot

Today again, Gus is a consummate ass.  He’s contrararian and inscrutable.  He comes in from his paddock just fine, rolls luxuriously, trots along with me around half the arena and gets a click and treat, and then metamorphoses into an impossible brat.  He pulls the lead line over his jaw and across his thick neck and trots hard toward the gate.  I lean back with all my weight, get towed along, and eventually stop him.  I offer to let him roll again.  Phooey, he says.  I bring out his favorite wooden mat.  He turns his back on it.  I unsnap the lead line and set him free.  He stands like an ox.

I stroke and prod him all over, looking for an injury or sore spot, and he seems fine.  When I pat my belly and back away, he comes to me and eats up his treat as avidly as usual.  But he refuses to walk farther away from the arena gate.  When Barbara tells me that her quarterhorse Henry was apathetic and listless today too, and that all the two of them did was wander fecklessly around the stable grounds, I decide to indulge Gus as well.  As I walk out of the arena, he stays behind, standing at the open gate and looking vaguely sheepish, so I hook up the lead line and give him a maitre d’ “this way, sir” gesture, and he comes along.  I let him choose our itinerary.

First he visits his preferred grazing field, only to realize it's snow-covered.  Just under the barn eaves is a strip of bare grass that lures him over.  But the roof is dripping snowmelt, and that’s just too yucky on the back of his head.  We depart for a stroll down the driveway.  Gus stops to greet the big geldings over their paddock fence; he and Lar nuzzle sleepily, then he lets Sky nibble his halter once or twice, before he moves away; and he spends a few minutes eating a desultory mouthful or two from a little hank of hay that got dropped outside the fence.  His every action is carried out in affectless slo-mo.  (Horse-speak trainer Sharon Wilsie’s “swimming underwater while on Valium” comes to mind . . .)  Gus plods on down the driveway, where the snowplow has uncovered some narrow strips of grass.  He picks at these with zero enthusiasm.

To lure Gus back up the driveway toward the barns, I toss bits of apple and carrot from my treat apron.  When he sees them land and bounce ahead of him, he follows them and lips them up.  But as we apporoach his barn, he digs his hooves in and leans baaaaack.  OK, say I, wanna return to your paddock, where your pal Henry is hanging out?  Up yours, he replies.  At this point, I kick him hard and beat him with the lead rope.  Oh, I do not, much as I half-wish to.  Instead I let him explore a nearby paddock, empty of horses now but containing many manure piles and two small hay piles.  Gus inhales data from several poops, and then drops a load himself.  He noses through each hay pile, but barely eats a stalk or two.  Yet when I suggest we move on, he refuses adamantly. 

Now I yell insults and punch him in his stupid face.  No, I don’t; of course not.  I bite my tongue and convince him kindly and patiently to decide to come away with me.  At last he marches nicely into his stall — he knows it’s nearly dinner time — and lets me groom and reblanket him with minimal defiance.  What the . . . ??

There’s no full moon to blame this on now.  Maybe it’s the barometer shifting, as wet weather is in the offing.  Or maybe it’s just a pissy day in the life of a sometimes pissy donkey.

77. Neither snow nor . . .

It’s a bitter 15 degrees Fahrenheit today, but Gus and I barely notice.  Decked out with chemical toe-warmers in my boots, insulated ski pants, a down parka, a nylon and fleece hat, and knitted fingerless mittens over thin gloves, I’m nearly impervious to the elements.  And sporting his shaggy baby-musk-ox winter coat, not to mention his fetching nylon pony blanket, Gus is warm as toast.  And much happier with his paddock footing now that some snow covers the ice that had built up during cycles of thawing and freezing.  He comes to the gate for haltering, but he still tiptoes carefully down the path to the arena.

Two of his favorite fan-club members show up to share some carrots and pat-pats. After a roll and some nice, polite trotting, he entertains his audience by showing off his pompom and dog-toy retrieval tricks.  I roll out the 50-gallon drum, which he hasn’t seen in a couple of months, and I stand it on end.  He walks directly to it and pushes it over: Godzilla Gus rides again.  He remembers how to bop it and gets it rolling all over the arena.  But here’s what:  during a pause for me to blow my nose, doesn’t he set his jaw against one end of the big, heavy barrel and, pressing sideways, lift it upright.  !!!  In a daze, I click and treat.  What made him think of tilt-a-chair — a game we haven’t played for at least a couple of weeks — and then Apply it to a Different Object?  When I topple the barrel, he rights it again.  And gets a peppermint.  As with his previous quantum leaps (like walking while carrying the traffic cone), a couple of repeats is all we get at first.  After that, it’s as if a memory wiper totally erases the idea from his brain.  But I know it’s in there, dormant but ready to re-emerge the next time he encounters the barrel.

For now, we move on to other things, including matching steps backward and forward.  He cha-chas with me pretty readily, for several steps in a row each time.  He schmoozes with this admirers again, and then we repair to his stall for hay, grooming, and — because the forecast says zero degrees tonight — his Bubba Keg full of treat nuggets.

76. Rote and novelty

A circle of miniature traffic cones is set up in the arena today, so Gus and I use it.  We trot around its perimeter, with only a few head-flinging about-turns to pick up a cone in hopes of earning a click.  A few times I resist, hauling him away from the cone by main force on the lead rope.  But mostly I tell him “Leave it” and I wait, folding my hands in the grownups-are-talking signal, and then plastering my hands to my thighs and averting my eyes as he shoves the cone toward me.  When he finally drops it, I click and treat.  “Good leave-it!” I explain.  If he drops it but then dives for it again, the next time he drops it I immediately ask him for a few steps forward or backward, and then I click that.  When he passes near or between cones without yawing off toward one, he gets more clicks.

Now that we’re using the cones for dressage and lungeing, I’ve determined to use them nevermore for pick-it-up tricks.  Instead, we use a plastic dog toy that looks like a big, three-armed star from a set of jacks, or the lattice basketball, or a length of corrugated plastic tubing, or — my personal favorite — a purple-and-white pompom.  

We haven’t played with the pompom in a couple of months, and Gus greets it with great interest.  I nestle it on the ground with the plastic handle uppermost and ask him to pick it up, but he seems to have forgotten the handle; he gathers up a hank of streamers in his mouth and flops the mess into my hand.  In fairness, I have to click and treat for that.  But before I set it on the ground again, I proffer it directly to him and make sure he gets the handle between his teeth — click!  After we re-establish the handiness of the handle a few times, I place the pompom on the ground, and he’s pretty reliable about using the handle.  Still, he’s not as precise as he had been months earlier:  often he bites the handle plus a few strands of streamers, and a couple of times he inadvertently steps on some streamers, making it impossible to lift the pompom off the ground.

He clearly remembers the item and the game, yet he clearly forgets some of the finer points of both.  What’s that about?  To spare him the slapstick of standing on the item he’s trying to pick up, I set the pompom on the top step of the mounting block.  He noses it off into the dirt once or twice, but then he begins grabbing the handle and picking it up cleanly.  He eyes the nearby pedestal, so I invite him to “step up” and wave the pompom.  Such a cute trick that I can’t help chuckling, and Gus seems to eat that up as hungrily as the treat.  We bring pompom to pedestal several more times.  Memory (nearly) fully restored?

Now I swap the pompom for the jack-shaped toy, which he immediately picks up and hands over.  So I add a few new twists — which I’d never do at this point with a dog or horse, but Gus usually relishes being faced with more than one challenge at a time.  I throw the toy farther and farther away and ask him to leave my presence to go fetch it.  This is not his strong suit, but watching the tripod-toy cartwheel through the air and tumble to the ground seems to trigger a hint of predatory urge: he heads right for it, nabs it, and turns back toward me.  Now I back away and back away, and he chases me assiduously to deliver the toy into my hand.   Next I back away toward the wooden mat, and Gus seizes this new opportunity, striding straight to the mat and planting his feet there, toy raised in readiness for the hand-over.

Old toys put away for a few weeks or months and then reintroduced do stir a certain fizz in the minds of many animals.  And for Gus that’s true with the beachball, the basketball hoop, the chair . . . almost anything.  But I’m often suprised by which facets of the object, or of the game, feel particularly welcome, or novel, or confusing to him.  Which parts of these reintroductions should be remedial training?  when should I raise the criteria for clicking?  how fast or far can his learning advance?  The real question is, why don’t tack shops sell halter-mounted fMRI scanners?

75. Werequine?

Gus seems fine again.  He trots and trots and trots.  He walks swoopy figure-eights in the barn corners.  He pirouettes.  He does little shoulder-softenings and neck-gives as we walk in a big circle.  He grabs the ball and flaps it all over the backboard and rim before dunking it into the net.

He grazes eagerly on the half-dead winter lawn, but he leaves it graciously when he sees the horses being brought into their stalls and hears the rattle of grain and feed-buckets.  He tucks into his hay with such focus that he barely notices my arrival with the hoof pick; he hands over his feet (as it were) without even a flinch of resistance.

So . . . what was his problem last week?  The barn was the same, the weather was well within the same parameters, my visits were the same.  All I can recall is that when he was acting down (acting up is what he does when healthy), and several horses were also judged by their owners to be “not quite right,” we had a full moon.  Gus is already so hirsute that I can’t tell by looking, but maybe he’s a real-life were-ass?

74. Lazarus lives

Two days pass, and today Gus seems his old self.  He wants to trot around and seems comfortable doing it.  He pops onto his pedestal and begins pirouetting the instant I barely ask.  We invent a new game — walking figure-eights in the back corners of the barn (where the walls help shape our fairly tight circles) — and he grooves on it.  He doesn’t crank his neck and wrap the lead rope over his snout in order to pull it harder away from me.  He doesn’t plant his feet and pretend to be deaf and blind.  When we leave the arena, he does refuse to return to his stall and insists on taking me outside instead, for some grazing on the frosty, matted, brown lawn.  These all strike me as indicators of peak health in Little Caesar.

I give Sandy this update, and she recounts how, that morning, he barged out the paddock gate before she could get his halter buckled.  Yep, this is the Gus we’ve come to expect.  And curse.  And love.

We’re still keeping an eye on him, trying to judge which of his ornery transgressions might stem from his feeling bad and which simply reflect his feeling fine.  And we’re hoping hard for more fine-ornery in future.