I needed a cue that’s distinct from his already extensive vocabulary for other tricks. So I describe the action of his muzzle: “Rub it.” I could probably teach him to manipulate forceps or engineer an electrical switch or program a radio frequency to lift the flag, but at least for now we’ll stick with basic mouth-smooshing.
.jpg)
It requires no introduction, as Gus is immediately enamored of it and able to swap it in for the previous object without rehearsal:
As I suspected, he’s better and better at negotiating the mailbox, even though he (a) can’t see the box when it’s right in front of him and (b) has to orient the magazine roll lengthwise. A few times he flops it crosswise against the mailbox opening, but even those are worthy efforts that earn him a click and treat. When he aims the magazines endwise and they begin to actually go in, he gets a click and a peppermint. Or two. And a hug. And acclamations on high.
He joyously takes the magazines (“Pick it up”) and desposits the magazines “(Dunk,” from his basketball trick) a few times —
— before he realizes that they’re paper and therefore eminently destructible. Suddenly, instead of lifting the roll from the arena floor, he holds it down with a front hoof and commences shredding the exterior pages and spitting them out, like a hawk plucking a pigeon or a dog disemboweling a plush toy. It seems the hold-it-and-rip-it instinct runs strong in a wide variety of species . . . Well, that little misbehavior needs to be nipped in the bud, and luckily it’s easy enough to reroll the magazines and re-interest Gus in the mailbox game. (Amazon promises the newspaper-shaped plastic dog toy will arrive soon.)
Gus rarely gives it a second thought. He’s so outgoing and confident that he doesn’t hesitate to shove his face into the unfamiliar. And chew it up and spit it out. Manipulating an object into and out of a mailbox? Bring it on. [With apologies for the undersea arena lighting.]
I start him with a cardboard eggcrate because it’s light and grippable, plus nobody cares that it will get destroyed. I’m not sure Gus has ever tasted an eggcrate before, but he seizes on it right away. I click and he relinquishes it, only slightly maimed. When I hand it back to him, he grabs it and waves it toward the mailbox that’s tucked under my arm. In fact, he drops the eggcrate onto the mailbox. As if he's guessing what the game might be? !?!?!!
Next I slip the crate into the mailbox and see if he’ll retrieve it. He noses and nudges, but then I help him out with a familiar verbal cue: “Pick it up!” Before the first ampere could arrive at a lightbulb, he’s got it: he authoritatively extricates the eggcrate from the mailbox. This entails reaching for it, finding it with his lips, getting his teeth around it before it gets bumped backward by those lips, pulling it out, and presenting it like a trophy. Okay, it’s not neurosurgery, but I’m mighty impressed.
One more practice session with object removal, and I bet we can move on to object insertion. The eggcrate is dead — in his zeal, Gus actually chews pieces off it, reducing it by two-thirds and mangling the remainder — but a plastic dog toy shaped like a rolled newspaper should be a handy, and relatively durable, prop from now on.
First he discovers the shoestring that I attached as a pull-tab to help him yank the door open. When I lift the string toward him, his natural instinct is to bite it, so I click and treat that. The Very Next Time I show him the string, he bites it and instantly tugs it. Click and peppermint candy. Now he feels for the string with his muzzle and maneuvers it between his teeth all by himself. Once he’s got it, he yanks promptly — and efficiently, straight out — to whip that door right open every time. Before he spits out the string, he does indulge in assorted, random, semi-violent yankings just for fun, but I think/hope I can train him out of that fairly soon.
Clicker-training protocol requires that the animal repeat the trick many times, to be sure it’s fully understood and mastered, before the human gives any verbal command. In fact, clicker gurus say that when you’d wager $50 that the animal will correctly and immediately execute the trick, that’s when you can start adding a verbal cue. Well, Gus compresses that process into maybe half a dozen repetitions before he seems totally ready for a verbal. For shutting the door, I’m saying “Bop it,” which he already knows from his top-of-nose bopping to roll the beach ball. For opening the door, I’m introducing an all-new cue: “Pull it.” And, contrary to protocol, I’m already asking for shuttings and openings in the same session. Cuz this animal be genius.
Now, I don’t believe Gus has figured out or memorized the new cue yet. Probably he’s taking a more gestalt approach, learning that pull-it is called for when he sees the door is closed and the string is salient, while bopping works when he sees the door is half-shut. But I’d bet $50 that he’ll understand and distinguish between the verbal cues in just one or two more sessions.
First I show him the main prop, a big, metal rural mailbox. He immediately sniffs it and shoves it and bites its edges and pokes his nose inside it . . . I half-open the door, and when he happens to nudge it, I click and treat. It only takes a handful of times before he realizes that pushing the door closed is a trick. In fact, he seems to catch on immediately that a hard nose-bop will slam it shut with a nice bang, so he’s extra-fascinated and doesn’t want me to put it aside.
But that’s all for today. Soon enough we’ll move on to the more technical maneuvers, like tugging the shoelace that I attached to the door-tab for ease of opening. Then there’s poking a letter (or a rolled-up newspaper might be easier?) inside and leaving it there. And smooshing the little red flag upward along the side wall of the mailbox might be the toughest manipulation of all. Never fear: there’s nothing on God’s green earth that Gus won't be able to learn.
Once in the arena, Gus quickly recalls all its joys: the chance to roll in the scritchy, dry dirt; games to play that bring sure and certain treats; occasionally some new learning, to really get those axons and dendrites firing. And I’ve learned how to lunge Gus the way Sandy taught him, so now he actually enjoys running around in circles to warm up and get some exercise. Her method is not to use a whip at all, but instead to twirl the free end of the lunge line toward his rump as the “Go!” signal. I still line up plastic chairs in front of the arena gate, but if I lunge him in his accustomed manner, he rarely even ponders pulling away and busting through the exit. Around and around he trots, his long ears flapping and his teacup hooves twinkling as he bounces over a couple of poles laid on the ground. I can even ask him to canter, though the gait change is hardly noticeable, because his legs and his strides are so short. It’s like watching a dachshund run an agility course.
Without a compulsive grass fetish to distract him, Gus is back to his mostly mannerly, often affectionate, always educable self.
Today I lead Gus out of his paddock with good faith that we’ll play in the arena, including some running around to drain the excess energy that’s helping to make him an obnoxious punk rampant lately. Not halfway to the arena, my faith is shattered. Gus is an unreconstructed evildoer: again he drags me onto his grazing patch and won't budge.
Before heading off to find the lunge whip, I remember to unclip his lead line for safety. Not that he deserves any safety, I grumble to myself. As I stalk back toward him, whip in hand, I’m grasping for any shred of positivity in this galling predicament, and I determine that I’ll still accomplish my goal of getting Gus to cover some ground and burn up energy — I’ll just do it outside rather than inside the arena.
And so the whip-waving game begins again. Even his goat-on-a-pogo-stick canter is faster than my run, so once he leaves me in the dust, he takes a moment to stop and chomp grass, giving me a sassy side-eye as I stonily close the distance between us. He really doesn’t care if the whip slaps his hind end, so he grabs one last mouthful before he picks up and flees just an inch before the lash might reach him.
After 20 minutes of racewalking and jogging, and dropping the whip once when I turn my ankle, and other Keystone Koppery on both our parts, I finally manage to approach Gus, hold the whip behind him as just an ushering tool, and direct his head toward his own paddock gate — which I had cunningly set ajar during one of the several times we’d racketed past it. Clang! Whew! He’s corralled again, and I can go home. Indeed you could say that my huff arrived and I left in it.
Thanks, dear reader, for allowing me to vent here. My fury has now ebbed, all the cut-up carrot and apple bits that I never got to treat Gus with are now in a baggie, and the prospect of using them on my next visit seems almost . . . promising. Still, just in case he frustrates me again with flaming assholery, maybe I’ll also bring a large gun.
He may be cute and winsome on video, but lately Gus is a major asshole. These past few weeks, the grass is delicious, the weather is brisk, and the biting flies are much reduced. Also, his paddock is muddy, so he’s mostly just standing and dozing on its small dry hill. Evidently those factors add up to a gluttonous, spirited, bored, and therefore outrageously disobedient donkey.
Today, as we walk from his paddock to the arena, he sets his neck, trots hard, pulls the lead rope from my hand, and runs into his favorite grazing area. Nothing new here. I allow him to eat for a good half-hour, but then I can’t get him to come off the lawn. I wait. I cajole. I lure. He tugs. He wrestles. He rams.
I know from painful experience that my psoas and other core muscles cannot survive being yanked and torqued by an 800-pound bundle of pure insistence. So I drop the rope, go fetch a long lungeing whip, and return, whapping it on the ground behind him to send him scurrying. If he’s going to disobey, at least he won't get to keep gorging on grass. So say I . . . But he outmaneuvers me, and before I can run over and stop him, he crouches and crawls under a fence board to escape into the adjoining pasture. There the three resident horses — very big, very athletic geldings — greet him joyously and commence galloping around with him.
Gus still has his long rope trailing from his halter, and that’s a safety hazard for all parties. So now I climb through the fence, into the melee of flying heels and thundering hooves, to try to unsnap the damn lead-line. I secure my own personal space by blocking the horses with the lunge whip, but that keeps Gus out of reach too. Finally I make my way through the hullabaloo, speak quietly to Gus and approach him, and remove the rope.
Now the youngest and silliest gelding is herding Gus in a small circle at high speed, while Gus tries to get himself onto the far side of the older horse, whom he’s more familiar with. When you see him right next to these big ex-racehorses, Gus is a shrimp, a peanut, a bug. He’s gamely galloping about, grunting and squeaking as he kicks vigorously at the horses, but to them he’s just a big toy. At this point he's wishing he hadn't busted into this paddock after all, and he begins eyeing the fence. He rams his chest against a board, breaking it like a ballbat, but it’s too high for him to jump. Harrassed by hijinks, he doesn’t have time to drop low and scoot under again. I run to the pasture gate and invite him out that way, but he’s still fooling around with the three big boys.
Anyway, now the hilarity is waning, and I figure he’s just fine. (He used to be turned out here with the geldings regularly, but he kept busting out when he got bored. That’s why he’s in a different turnout now: it’s small enough to encircle with electrified wire, which is the only way to keep Gus in.) I leave them to their own devices and help a friend who’s training Gus’s pasturemate -- a very nice, very polite gelding, thank you very much. A few minutes later, when I glance out to the big paddock, I see Gus and his merry band just grazing placidly.
When Sandy arrives, she helps me lead/shoo Gus into the arena. She picks up a lunge whip and stations me at the arena gate with another whip. And she chases him around that arena, turning on a dime and switching the whip to her other hand in order to cut him off and turn him if he tries to run past her. When he does head toward the gate, I’m there brandishing my whip, sending him back into the ambit of Sandy’s whip. After just five minutes, he’s slowing down, so Sandy slows and relaxes her energy. They both stop moving, and the former fiend turns and faces her quietly and submissively, just as if he’s memorized the horse-whisperer’s handbook. He goes up to her, she gives him nice scritches, and they turn and walk slowly toward the gate. When she stops, he stops next to her. When she walks again, he comes along with her. It’s magic, only it’s real.
At the gate, I clip the lead onto him and we stroll ever so nicely into his stall, where I dump his dinner into his feed bucket for him.
A large circle, marked by eight traffic cones, has been a popular arena installation lately. Sometimes wooden mats are set just outside the cones. It’s an easy way to help horses practice things like bending their bodies on an arc and matching paces with their humans. As soon as Gus sees it, he's intrigued.
First we walk around it, me just inside the cones and him just outside them. He already knows — and loves — stopping with his front feet on a mat. As always, he gets a click and treat for each mat stop. After one complete round, I begin to hang behind him just a bit and send him on ahead to each mat. At first, he turns toward me and waits for me to catch up, but by adding a little finger-wave behind and a maitre d’ arm ahead, I can usher him to the mat pretty easily. A few more clicks, and he’s got it down pat.
A couple of sessions later, I begin to sink away toward the center of the circle and hang back. Now his concern about my distance from him actually trumps his supermagnet attraction to the mat: he slows, he bumbles, he misses the mat. I simply go back to him, start him off again toward the next mat, and shrink away a teeny bit less far. When he does it well a few times, I try shrinking away a bit more again. Cueing him with a verbal “mat” helps him remember that the goal is to reach the mat regardless of my location.
It’d be fun someday to remove all the mats, stand in the very center of the circle, and just send Gus strolling around on his own. For now, it’s all about how much he dotes on this exercise. He wants to keep walking around and around and around. When I switch to a pedestal game or some cha-cha, he often blows it off and returns to the cone circle. Whatev: it’s always donkey’s choice.
