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:

105. VIDEO: Airplane mode

In a tightly wound, aerodynamic creature built for speed, relaxation often allows certain body parts to go flaccid and dangle.  It’s not very dignified, but it’s a useful clue for trainers trying to judge the animal’s moods and interests.  When an ear-scritch or butt-rub is just right, equines may relax their jaws and muzzles so much that their lower lips dangle open.  Males sometimes let it all hang out — that is, their penises, from the sheaths where they’re usually stored up close to their bellies.  Several of us have remarked that slow, steady, clear training with a high rate of clicks and treats often induces a gelding to drop, and sometimes to dangle there for several minutes while continuing the training.  

Gus is unusually reserved and strait-laced as regards his boy bits.  He never peed in my presence until well after a year into our relationship.  And I’ve only seen him dangle once (I was momentarily perplexed to notice an extra hind leg . . .) during a training session.  But he’s a flamboyant and unashamed nudist from the neck up.  When his ears aren’t zooming around manically like antennae on a very busy bee, he lets them flop.  Horses also show airplane ears — horizontal on both sides — when they’re mellowed out.  But on Gus the vigilant-to-vegetative contrast is more striking, since his ears are so long and have so far to fall.

The horn-honking video displays this perfectly.  Watch it once here, for his trick with full semaphore ears, but then look below and watch only his ears.  I’ll pay you money if you don’t laugh out loud.

104. VIDEO: Honk if you love honking

On Gus’s list of reasons to love life, the classic squeeze-bulb bicycle horn ranks almost as high as the pompom.  After just a few bites on it, he was so eager and deft that I immediately raised the click-earning criterion to the signature two-tone honk.  He sometimes gulps the bulb too far into his mouth and sometimes not far enough, but he expertly adjusts his embouchure for the proper teeth to effect the proper squeeze to elicit the proper music:

103. Today’s menu

As this hot, hot summer progresses, Gus’s choice of forage does too.  Along with the grass, he’s delighting in big, shaggy ragweeds lately.  White clovers, even those whose flowers are gone by, are still pretty good; plantains, now most of them gone by, are apparently much less yummy than they were a couple of weeks ago.

What never changes, for Gus as for all the horses, is that bird’s-foot trefoil is universally rejected.  A friend who recently bought a small horse farm has found that one of its pastures is at least half bird’s-foot trefoil, and both her Irish sport-horse gelding and her Morgan mare eat all around it.  I’m surprised, since trefoil is a legume, like alfalfa — horses should love it.  My friend researched it and learned that it’s perfectly edible for horses, but they tend to avoid it unless nothing else is available.

In Gus’s little patch of heaven, there’s always something else available.

102. Happy hooves

As Sandy says, in the psycho-killer singsong of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, “He’s ba-a-a-ack!”  It’s her response to Gus’s recovery from the ouchy white-line disease in his feet.  She and I both notice he’s more obstreperous and obnoxious lately, a sure sign of his feeling in fine fettle.  Rather than stump along lamely as we lead him between paddock and stall, he now throws in the occasional neck-craning or foot-planting in an effort to control the direction of travel or simply to resist forward progress altogether.  

Flashing feet . . .

When Sandy sees us practicing the baby-carriage trick in the arena, she asks me to trot Gus a bit so we can assess his comfort level.  I pick up a dressage whip to send him along, but he pulls his refusenik antics until I smack the ground behind his heels.  Then he trots off, and keeps going voluntarily in a big circle.  Most of his steps look smooth and correct, with just a few strides that look very slightly gimpy.  As Sandy and I start comparing notes and I drop my whip arm, Gus immediately perceives our switch of mental focus, so he veers off and pops his front feet onto the pedestal with a sprightly clip-clop.  Of course, for that, he earns a click and a treat and laudatory huzzahs.

We’ve seen his soreness improve and then worsen before, and this time we’re taking no chances.  We agree on at least another two foot-soakings, just to make sure the fungal/bacterial invaders inside his hooves are well and truly destroyed.  I mix up another cocktail of bleachy White Lightning and distilled vinegar, and Gus is so inured to the treatment by now that when I approach with a Ziploc bag, he starts lifting his feet without being asked.  I pour in a few tablespoons of the noxious solution, tie the bags around his ankles with baling twine, and play a Scrabble game on my smartphone while he soaks.

Compared to keeping his feet in tubs of warm water, this is a (mildly smelly) walk in the park.  Still, I’ll be glad to finished with it.  And even gladder to cope with the behavioral fallout of happy hoof health.

101. Jawbone of an ass

When I watch Gus grazing, I get where Samson was coming from: like a heavy sword or battle axe, the jawbone of an ass really could slay a thousand men.  Gus chews like there’s no tomorrow — constantly, vigorously, powerfully.  I feel a twinge of sympathetic TMJ just thinking about the daily grind on his mandible, masseter, and molars.

As high summer diversifies the plants that are growing and flowering in our main grazing pasture, I’m once again keeping a mental log of what Gus chooses to eat.  Today he rocks my world by grabbing a big mouthful of Queen Anne’s lace, a carrot-related weed that I was surprised to see him avoid entirely last summer.  This one is over two feet tall, growing rank and dense under the fence rails.  Its stems are hard and thick and tough, but Gus’s jawbone doesn’t miss a beat, grinding up stalks, leaves, and flowers.  And going back for more.  

Then, to my even greater astonishment, he goes for a nearby chicory plant.  Last summer he took pains never to touch chicory, with its bitter radicchio flavor, but now he deliberately munches up the wiry stems, tough leaves, and blue flowers.  Wherefore, Gus?

Maybe he needs the minerals or alkaloids or vitamins in certain plants at certain times, and he knows what he smells inside each plant.  His main forage preference is always grass, but the other day included a plantain binge, while today (after the tall-weed appetizers) is all about white clover.  At one point, he stops munching and rubs his muzzle back and forth against the ground: either the flowers tickle his nose, or he’s been stung by one of the many bees working the clover patch.  

But soon he resumes chowing down.  When he wanders to some tall grasses, he tilts his head and maneuvers his very maneuverable lips to gather up a neat, long sheaf, which begins by hanging out one side of his mouth but gets shorter and shorter with each chew, as he efficiently ratchets it into his mouth and down his gullet.  Before the final bit disappears, he’s already mowing up the next serving.  Throughout any grazing session, his incisors pluck and yank a fresh mouthful even while his molars are still masticating the previous plug.  Not a moment’s rest for that awesome jawsome . . .

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.