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??

97. VIDEO: Consummation

Two days after our initial toy-donkey meet and greet, when I offer it to Gus again, he grabs it willingly and shoves it back at me; granted, he lets it go immediately, but I get my hand on it, which earns him a click.  Within two minutes,  he’s bringing it to my hand wherever I hold it out.  And in two more minutes, he’s picking it up from the ground and delivering it to me.  Next he adds a few head shakes to get it flapping in his face, which soon seems to tickle his fancy as much as waving the pompom does.

Such good progress that I move right on to the next big step:  putting the toy into the baby carriage.  Off Gus goes, pushing the pram like a pro, then reaches inside for . . . Where’s the pompom?  What’s this toy doing here??  The sky is falling!  Still, despite the shock of the switcheroo, all it takes is a cheerful “Pick it up!” from me and he does pick it up.  All’s right with the world again.  Before we end the session, he’s reliably plucking the toy out of the carriage, bringing it to the pedestal, hopping up, and flapping it into my hand. (Video soon, I promise.)

This particular Stupid Pet Trick now has all its components in place:  pushing the empty-looking buggy, followed by removing the oh-so-adorable babydoll, followed by presenting it for audience admiration.  Only wrinkle is, there's so much violent flapping that perhaps the show needs an epilogue entailing a funeral for the infant with the snapped neck and the arrest of Gus as an abusive father . . . 

Memo to self:  Work on keeping the flapping as part of the pompom trick but removing it from the toy-baby trick.

96. Metadonkey

Amazon the Enabler drove me to it.  Amazon’s range of merchandise being universal (vast and ever-expanding), of course it has several stuffed donkey toys available for prompt delivery.  I settled on a midsized model with a cute face and cute posture, and I bought it for the actual, biological donkey in my life.

Gus is so good at pushing the baby carriage and then reaching inside to extract his beloved pompom, I just knew it would be a small extrapolation for him to extract instead a “baby” of his own species.  After all, we regularly play with a range of junky items with unfamiliar shapes and smells and feels.  Still, when I first show him the toy, he clearly finds it unprepossessing.  He’s mildly curious because I proffer it to him so deliberately, but his first sniff turns him off.  It smells of fake-plush acrylic and chemical sizing and he says the hell with it.

Since he gets clicked and treated for nosing the toy, however, he does keep coming back to it.  He soon reasons quite rightly that the next step would be biting and carrying it, so he gamely takes a taste.  Ptui!  He instantly spits it out.  After several such ejections, he holds it just long enough to toss his head and fling it emphatically.  (Somewhere in his eclectic education, he must’ve absorbed Dorothy Parker’s famous quip in a book review:  “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”)  Once or twice, when Gus hesitates just a half-second before the spit-out, I manage to slip in a quick click; and with that we end our introduction of Gus to his mini-replica.  We cleanse our palates with the pompom and the pedestal, and then adjourn for some grazing.

95. VIDEO: Twinkletoes

The indoor arena’s pedestal — a big tractor tire laid flat with a thick disc of plywood attached on top — remains one of Gus’s favorite go-to destinations.  Whenever he’s in its general vicinity, he gets drawn into its gravity field, and, unless I lead or call him away from it, his default is to pop his front feet on it and perch there, tall and proud and waiting for a click and treat.

Recently, the pedestal has been moved inside the little seating area that’s demarcated by PVC pipes on the arena floor.  It’s just as easy for equines to hop onto the platform, but it’s trickier to step off it backward, as a descending hoof can land on a pipe and roll or skid.  The trick is to take long backward paces in order to clear the pipes.  Or, in Gus’s case, simply to shift forward instead of back, and to clamber up with all four feet and then descend from the pedestal frontways.  In his limberer youth he could be persuaded to stand up there with all four feet; nowadays he already begins stepping down in front as he brings his back feet up.

I’d dearly love to train him to stand all four feet on it again — solely for the purpose of adding a pirouette or other circusy flourish — but he’s no longer a spring chicken, and it's not a very big surface.  Anyway, does a donkey d’un certain age really need to sacrifice his dignity just for a silly trick?  Ohhh, the answer is a resounding Mais oui!

94. Junky

Today I bring a totebag of random objects and junk to the barn.  I’m following Alex’s suggestion for accustoming Gus to pretty much everything under the sun, including his nemesis, flyspray.  Rummaging in my closets netted a foldable auto-open umbrella, a 5-foot-long strip of brass that was a threshold between a carpeted and a tiled floor and is now folded and floppy, and a plastic pistol-grip grab-stick whose pincer is the jaws of a dinosaur.  

Given the persistent April showers, Gus is wearing a rainsheet in his paddock, leaving his uncovered head and neck sopping wet.  When I remove the sheet and he rolls in the arena, he becomes Tempura Donkey, coated in a thick crust of mud from nose to ears to shoulders.  He doesn’t care, and he’s eager for entertainment.  After we walk around a bit and stand on the pedestal, I scatter the doohickeys and thingamajigs on the arena floor, and he’s immediately curious.

First he approaches the furled and folded umbrella.  I hold it up for him to touch, and he doesn’t hesitate. Click and treat.  I extend its handle, and it’s still fine.  I slowly open it into its wide bell shape, and it’s still fine.  I can twirl it and wave it in front of him, and I can hold it over his head, no problem; these are all just easy ways to get clicks and treats.  If I try to bring it near his flank or rump, however, it’s decidedly not okay: he keeps circling his hind end away from it.  He insists on facing it head-on so it can’t pounce on him from behind.  I keep it in front of him, and now I let it whoof open — not in a big burst, but it's sudden enough to make him throw his head back and his ears foward.  His eyes are bugging out a bit, but he reaches his neck out to it, and stretches out his upper lip, and taps it quickly.  Big click and treat for that.  When I walk forward with it, he comes along and touches it again.  I half-close it and let it half-pop open again, sparking the same startle response, followed by a gingerly touch.  Every time it goes “Whoof!” he goes “Yikes!”  So now I close it up for an easy touch, and we set it aside.

We make one circuit of the arena by way of palate cleansing, and then we check out the empty totebag.  He gets rewarded for putting his nose down to it, and then he tries picking it up in his teeth.  Big reward!  But next he only looks at it, so I cue him with “Pick it up” (as for fetching the dog toy or pompom) and he promptly does and hands it to me.  Peppermint!  Next I spread the bag flat (tucking the handles inside to avoid any trip hazard) and tell him “Mat!” and he readily puts one hoof on it.  I have him hand it to me again, and I rub it on his flanks and belly and head — all good.

After another little stroll and breather, we approach the long, zigzag-folded metal strip.  This piques his suspicious attention from a distance.  When I pick it up, and he sees it woogle and waggle in my hand, he takes one step back.  When I drop it and he hears its springy, zhingy sound as it lands, he takes two steps back.  This is something very much not of his world.  Judging from his expression, I doubt that he’ll get anywhere near it.  But I pick it up and hold it still and wait.  In less than 10 seconds, he walks forward and gives it a hasty flick of his lip.  Big treat!  Soon he’s able to touch it more solidly and to touch various angles and arms of it.  He tries touching my hand that’s holding it, but he gets no click for that dodge, so he screws his courage to the sticking-place and touches the actual thing again.  I can hold it up high over his head, but I can’t bring it around to his side or hind end.  No surprise there.  I drop it on the ground again, and I lead him in a circle, and he steps right over it without quailing.  Peppermint redux.

Finally, we try the toy-dinosaur grabber stick.  Gus has no problem touching it and taking it into his mouth to deliver to me.  Also no problem when I touch it to his head and neck and legs and back; ditto when I use the trigger to clack its hard-plastic jaws together near and around his head.  He stays cool and calm even when I make it lightly pinch his withers and comb his tail and nibble his belly.  This biting dinosaur is a creampuff, especially after he’s conquered the whangy, flappy metal strip.

Sandy has a toy piano keyboard, pool noodles, and other oddments that I’ll add to our repertoire for future junkyard experiments.  And at some point, I’ll sneak the flyspray squirt-bottle into the mix  -- shhh . . .

93. Virtual lesson day

If it weren’t for Covid-19, we’d be celebrating the end of winter by resuming the barn’s regular lesson days with dressage and clicker guru Alexandra Kurland.  Instead, we resort to info tech, which sucks but is better than nothing: we gather on Zoom for a video chat.

In spite of my low-rent wi-fi service and its sporadic momentary freeze-ups of audio or video or both, I glean several good tidbits of advice and inspiration for donkey training.  (And I’m eager to share them also with my friend  who has an Irish Sport Horse gelding and a Morgan mare.)  Here are just three:

1.  In response to Gay, who owns a magnificent jet-black Frisian and a magnificent pearl-grey Lippizaner — big boys who can get jealous when one of them is clicked and treated in the presence of the other — Alex suggests some ways to train them together.  They both like to stand on a mat, so one turn-taking game involves scattering six or eight mats, starting each horse on a mat, and then asking one horse to stay while sending or leading the other horse to an empty mat.  Upon arrival, the traveler gets clicked for stepping on the new mat and the waiter gets clicked for staying put.  A simultaneous cooperation game begins with two parallel lines of three or four mats each.  The handler(s) should lead or send each horses, both at the same time, to the next mat in his line.  If one horse barges ahead to his mat first, it doesn’t matter, because the click isn’t delivered until both horses land on the mats — that is, neither performer wins unless both performers work together.  Because making a bitey face at your little brother delays the reward, sibling rivalry diminishes, and therefore fearfulness of your big brother's bitey face diminishes too. This is fun for horses, dogs, cats, giraffes . . .

2.  For Julie, who is teaching her new Holsteiner the basics, like head-down, mat-standing, target-touching, etc., Alex gives a refresher course in front-leg flexion exercises.  It’s good for strength and limberness and balance, of course, but if done right it’s also good for the core-muscle development.  And done right means getting the horse to really unweight his front end and take more weight on his hind.  To start, Alex recomends placing both hands around the very top of the leg — almost in the horse’s armpit, as it were — and waiting to feel a slight lift, perhaps when the horse inhales.  Whenever and however it happens, click and treat that tiny lift.  Once the horse is lifting that shoulder a bit each time, move one hand to touch his leg just above the knee; reward when the knee bends up and forward to meet the hand.  Unlike a human’s lifting of the horse's foot, as for hoof-picking, this method ensures that the horse does all the work, and in the right way to help develop lovely and powerful dressagey self-carriage.  I can’t wait to re-teach the leg lift to Gus like this, for his orthopedic health and for the first step in our take-a-bow trick.

3. For desensitizing Gus to the spritz and smell of fly spray, Alex suggests dabbing myself (well, my clothing) each day with a different smell — not just fly-spray but perhaps citrus, spice, medicine, perfume . . .  I’ll be the same old me, still with ear-scrubs and games and an apronful of treats, but with various odors that he can learn to ignore.  Also she suggests goofing around with (e.g., touching, wearing, straddling, fetching) many different items only one of which is the fly-spray bottle.  By noodling with, say, a dog toy and an umbrella and a jar lid and a scarf and a sponge and a squirt-bottle (maybe one or two each day), Gus can get familiar with all of them pretty equally.  That way, the spray bottle won’t be presented only when we’re about to assail him with its startling noise and freaky stink.  I fear he might be too savvy an analytic thinker to fall for this ploy, but it does sound promising.  Anyway, the more objects he can interact with, the happier he is.  So I aim to gift him with a vast and motley embarras de richesses.

And we humans agree to connect again via Zoom in future, until such time as we dare to gather in person for hands-on lessons.  I’m drumming my fingers ve-e-ery patiently . . .

92. We’ll never know for sure . . .

. . . whether Gus’s relief from foot pain is due to the iodine soaks or just drier paddock footing and his own immune system.  But neither he nor Sandy nor I could give a rat's patoot: we’re just glad he’s feeling comfortable again.  

His biggest problem lately is hoovering up the lush, new grass blades as piggishly as possible whenever he gets a chance to apply his muscular muzzle to the greensward.  Tough life.

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.