He's always watching

Rabbit factory

I should start by saying we put Janie to sleep just after noon yesterday.  She had gone steadily downhill since Wednesday, had stopped eating & early Saturday morning could no longer drink water. 

Four days beforehand, the two of us, me & Janie, were walking around the front yard at not-quite dusk.  A wild rabbit sat not five feet away from me, clearly aware I was there.  It hopped around I circles but made no move to leave.  Janie was so out of it she didn't even see it.  At first. 

When she did see the rabbit, she began to tremble all over.  Instead of bouncing over to & then after it, she began to slowly follow while the rabbit continued to make lazy circles.  They did this for maybe 20 minutes, maybe more.  The whole time Janie's body was tense & her nose was wrinkled & sniffing.  Eventually, the rabbit lost interest & hopped away home; Janie stood & watched it go & then we went inside. 

There is a particularly fecund rabbit population within our borders.  I mean fecund reproductively, not intellectually; these are quite the laziest most foolish rabbits I have ever even heard of.  I have a few theories & right at the top is that damn donkey.  People keep donkeys for a lot of reasons, but the most common is they will protect what they perceive as theirs.  Other equines range over large area & will probably return to particular places but they don't really care about those places.  Donkeys care. Many years ago there was a very high strung mare here temporarily & two dogs from up the road had a good time chasing her away from the fence, snapping at her nose & hooves.  Until. 

Until one day they crossed under the fence to run that mare around the pasture until she dropped.  It didn't work out that way; what horses run from, donkeys run towards & while I suspect the donkey did not give a shit about the mare, she was in his pasture & fell under his protection. There have been other dogs since then, but none that got so distracted they forgot whose yard they were in.  Donkeys are those mean old men who hold your kickball hostage...& try to kill you when you sneak in to retrieve it. 

As far as our donkey is concerned, those ridiculous rabbits are his & woe betide the fox, coyote, raccoon who thought he might have a quick snack.  As a result we are breeding a particular not-safety conscious leporidae.

Janie did catch a rabbit once, many years ago.  She reached over its back & grabbed it by the scruff of the neck.  Unfortunately (OKay, fortunately) her front legs did not reach the ground so every time the rabbit hopped, it levered her whole front end off the ground & up on her spindly hind legs.  Eventually Janie let go & that rabbit also just hopped away. 

The other life

The final exam for A's physics class was Saturday afternoon so bright & early Sunday morning he got to work.


Coco is always scratching her big horse rump against something.  After she did this, she moved down the fence line to the corner post & started rubbing on that.  As the fence sawed back & forth, this particular piece wold flex open & closed like an elbow.

& I am not sure who did it but someone kicked a chicken-sized hole in the back of the hen house early Friday morning.  I went out & found one small bird in the opening looking out.  By the time I got the materials for a temporary repair, the biggest fattest birds were trying to force themselves en masse through the opening. 

The donkey entertains himself on cold winter nights pulling down fence boards; this winter being what it was entire stretches of pole & board were just hanging off of their neighbors or gone entirely. But by lunchtime yesterday the fence looked like this:

Thumbs are overrated

I have told many tales of the donkey.  Not all of them here, but still there are a few:  there was the time he broke the chain holding the pasture gate closed & almost went adventuring in the middle of the night; he was foiled only by my realization that the gate only opened out & parking a Toyota against same gate would keep it from opening.  Then there was the New Years Eve he did get out & I ran after him, shouting all the way to the baptist church before I gave up & then he followed me home.  & who could forget the time he let Captain into the feed room where the last green hay in the county was stored & then latched the big draft horse in there, who had a mild panic attack including diarrhea...all over the last green hay in the county.  The donkey is an ass, there really is no other way to put it.

Today was another red-letter jack ass day.  For reasons known only to herself, Becca has been avoiding the stall I can actually latch shut at feeding times & it is quite the song & dance to get her there.  I would not care except as she has aged Becca has mellowed & she does not defend her food with the vigor of her youth.  Also, she gets a large helping of a more expensive feed because of her age, the condition of her teeth & her impending decrepitude.  The donkey would like some (as would the others, but he is the only one who has figured out she is not as fast to kick as she used to be).  This feed smells wonderful, even to me, but it is much too rich for any of the others & most especially the donkey.   Still from the moment I close that door he works on that latch. He presses his huge cheek plate hard to the stall door, he uses his prehensile lip to flip & twist & test every moving piece.  Because it defeated him it was worth the effort getting her in there.

Last weekend A took a couple of hours & installed the same hardware on the other stall.  No more rigmarole with Becca.  It was a wonderful week.

Today Bert did this:

An old story about a (then) new donkey

I suppose that before I tell even an old story about the donkey, I should tell you more about the donkey. His name is Bert. It is short for someone else's last name. That last name is shared by a favorite late-night-show host. Together they are the triple crown of Assdom: the natural-born ass, the entertainment ass & the beloved former co-worker.

People told me that horses were smarter than donkeys. This is a crock. I have met the occasional clever horse but never even heard of one that could out-shine the average donkey. People think donkeys are stoopid because donkeys do not care what people think.

I was also told that donkeys are stubborn. This is absolutely correct. If you have never had to negotiate with a donkey you do not know what stubborn is. On the other hand, more than once when faced with a particularly belligerent/spoiled/obtuse individual I have had the realization that I have dealt with a much bigger ass already that morning. It is more empowering then EST. I should probably start a self-help program. Our slogan could be "your biggest ass is behind you". Maybe not.

Back to the donkey. What I was not prepared for was not just cleverness, not just stubbornness but actual intellect-driven behavior. & to show you what I mean, I will tell you an old story:

Long ago in the mists of time....our donkey yanked so hard on the chain that winds around the fence post & the gate that he broke the clip that fastened the two ends together (believe it or not dear reader, there is actually ANOTHER story about the same donkey that begins this exact same way, but I will save it for another time). It was a fluke almost that I even caught him before he had run out the opened gate; I heard way-too-much rattling & went to investigate. I pulled the two ends of the chain back together, looped them through each other & fastened them with an inferior clasp. Bert went to work on this 'new' closure immediately & I sat down to think. It was late at night & even if I had time to get to the hardware store (I did not) it would not be open. A was out of town & there was really no one I could call who could be there in time to help, even if I knew what form that help could take; I had maybe ten minutes tops & then the donkey would be out.

One interesting thing about this gate: although the gate itself was hung to open either inward or outward, the slope of the land is such that outward from the pasture is the ideal way. You can pull it inward, up the slope, but it takes some heaving-while-lifting & really only works if the grass is closely cropped.

While the donkey worked on the chain, the horses had moved in closer to see what he was up to. They did not yet know Bert's stunts often resulted in extra food, some adventure, but for them it was still something new to watch.

As the donkey unlooped the almost-last loop, I pulled my car up so the bumper pressed against just the what-would-swing-open end of the gate. My thinking was that once the donkey got it unlooped & tried to push it open, he would meet resistance he could do nothing about & go find some other mischief. I was wrong.

Bert did not need to try to push the gate open to know the car would keep it from opening; he stopped unwinding the chain immediately. & then I saw his first full-blown temper tantrum. He he-hawed, he kicked the air, he yanked on the gate itself making a fruitless rattle. In short, he stopped working & started complaining. He paced back & forth in front of the gate (still barely held closed by the chain) snorting & stomping & shaking his head. The horses were fascinated. Then Bert just stopped & stalked off.

The next morning, A came home from his trip or I called someone to go to the hardware store or whatever & I got a new chain with a new clasp. What I do remember is that when I backed the car up so I could remove the bent & broken chain, open the gate, & refasten with the new one all the horses came to watch. Bert grazed at the back of the pasture & I never even saw him turn to look.

//for the record I have never had EST training, nor do I have a complete understanding of what it entails. What I did have (circa 1984) was a very hazy idea that the guy I had been assigned to work with on a project was trying to manipulate me into doing the yucky bits by claiming he was better qualified to do the fun stuff. My response: "All the EST training in the world will not bend my brain into thinking you are even 1/2 the genius you already know you are not. Knock it off." It turns out I had 1) made the correct assessment & 2) hit upon the exact magic words designed to deflate a seminar-puffed bully.

Equine cargo cult

I am a gynormous fan of the writer Nevil Shute. Not just On The Beach or A Town Like Alice; my favorite is definitely Round The Bend. I just love all those lists of airplane parts (oh fixed asset inventory, how I adore you). & I find cargo cults (& mummies) irresistible.

Cargo cults, for those who do not know are yet another example of man's interpreting as divine what he cannot explain through his experience. Specifically, when native (technologically immature) people were slammed right up against modern (technologically dependent) people, the natives saw the results of technology as miraculous. The most common example is the Pacific islanders of WWII. After seeing US troops clear drop sites & landing strips & line them with burning torches so supplies could be delivered with some accuracy, the natives would make similar clearings of their own & wait for manna.

What I did not realize until I took up Useless Ranching was that cargo cults are not limited to human beings. This is an excellent argument for the 'animals have souls' crowd & I would have clued them in earlier if I actually believed in souls, which I do not.

Our donkey, as I believe I have mentioned, is a clever bastard. Equal emphasis on clever & bastard. People go on about the nobility of horses. With very few exceptions, horses are idiots (so nobility just might be the right word). Donkeys are quite intelligent & not the least noble.

Bert (the donkey) likes puzzles. No really. He likes watching you do things & then he likes to undo them. This can be anything from the knot in your shoe laces to the latch keeping the gate closed. He is fascinated by the all things mechanical. He has stolen power drills, cell phones, all kinds of things of that ilk. He has never stolen the scoop I use to give him his food. He has tried to bump it out of my hands, spilling feed every where (he is a glutton, have I mentioned this? Well, he is), but the scoop itself holds not interest for him.

Not so the horses. If I pick up a bucket & put it down, they will kill each other trying to get their heads into what the donkey knows is an empty bucket. The donkey waits until I come out of the feed room with the full scoop. Then & only then does he behave as though it were dinner time. This usually means trying to muscle me around before I can pour the feed into a bucket that will be claimed by a horse, who may or may not be in a sharing mood. Pound for pound the donkey is stronger & pounds aside more clever by far, but he is always, above all things, lazy. He has no interest in expending energy fighting with a horse when he can steal from the barrel itself.

This brings us to equine cargo cults. The horses are not complete idiots, they know the feed is kept in the feedroom. They have seen me chuck out hay & refill the scoop from that magic den. But they accepted they cannot get into the feed room; the feed must come to them. Until the day the donkey opened the door latch.

Donkeys have a prehensile lip. You would be amazed how strong & limber it is (keep it clean, people). One day, Bert opened the feedroom door with it. This means he flipped a loop of metal from flush against the plate to 90degrees from the plate, leaned his weight on the door & pulled towards himself, sliding the locking pin back & opening the door. Then he went in & made a total pig of himself.

Captain, being a big Big horse could not have fit in there while the donkey was in there, but still managed to pull several bails of hay out & they had a grand time. Bert did this more than once (I thought I was forgetting to latch the door properly before I actually saw him do it). A has since made an addition to the locking mechanism: a latch that prevent the loop from moving up to that 90degree position, unless you can unclip it & lift it out, something a prehensile lip cannot do.

As soon as he saw this, Bert gave up. He knows what he cannot do. He then went on to accomplish other assinine feats, but I will save them for another day. Captain on the other hand could not be deterred. On any given day, he would stand at the feedroom for hours, hours & hours licking....wait for it....the hinges. He had seen Bert do this trick & open that door & dammit he was going to do it, too. It never worked but he never really gave up. You can argue that maybe the hinges had some quality he liked, a mineral taste maybe.Except he never licked the hinges before this & he never licked any of the other hinges, including those on the doors of the adjacent stalls.

As far as I am concerned that meets the definition of Cargo Cult. & I do not just mean Captain's behavior. The donkey is the modern person in this little tale & he is too close for my comfort: he would rather steal than work, he would rather work than wait & he would rather give up than pretend he could ever make it work again.

In rereading this, I realized I may have given the impression there are mummies in the Shute books. There are not, that I can recall. If you want mummies, let me recommend the works of H. H. Ryder (that's right, the King Solomon's Mines guy) or even better The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips, which does for mummies what The Historian did for vampires. Well worth the pages.

The petit percheron & her massive ass

For most people who see her for the first time, Coco looks like a big girl. Well, she is not. Yes, she is the biggest girl (or boy) on the place, but for a draft, she is small & for a Percheron she is petite. Which is not surprising as she is almost certainly not a Percheron, or at least not all Percheron.

Coco was born & will therefore always be classified a PMU foal. She was bought by a friend who realized that she did not have the time to train a foal that had not been born & weaned in a barn family; this wild-&-untamed thing was going to take more time than that. Coco came here while still smaller than the donkey & they have been in love ever since. Now they look like the Kissingers, but equines do not care about that kind of thing. Picture Nancy Kissinger with a long horsey face & a white blaze on her forehead. Henry & the donkey look more or less alike.

Before Coco came here, she lived on pasture with a band of other PMU foals. The closest human society I can think of would be Fagin's band of pickpockets. But here life was different. Captain was still alive, slow moving, gentle, enormous. He enjoyed the company of women & welcomed almost everyone. I miss him every day.

I honestly do not remember Coco's first day here. I do remember that she was called Celeste, but as she never answered to anything any human ever said, the change to Coco was easy (we already have a Celeste. She works in the Tech Services Department at the library; she is not a horse).

What I do remember is the extreme ease with which she bonded with the donkey. Let me be clear-the donkey is a trouble-maker. He opens doors, works latches, pulls down fence boards. The other horses look down on him. I am not joking; they treated him with as much respect as they give a goat. That is to say: none. In their defense, they were themselves a battered & damaged band that arrived here after starvation, abuse, untreated injury or some combination of the above. They did not have any interest in an energetic jack-ass. Still there did seem to be some strange racial divide. Mostly he was lonely. & then his dream girl arrived.

On winter nights, I often move the three mares, Coco included, to the pasture next door. I leave the donkey at our place. Have I mentioned he is destructive? Well, he is. It is one thing when he pulls down our fence boards (or kicks out the bottom of our barn door or yanks our fences post out of the ground, to open the whole back fence like a door) but to do it on W*****'s place is asking too much from her. I was prepared for & unsurprised by the long donkey moans of despair. The loud crashing & pulling of the barn doors against their latches, the chasing of the unhappy goats. Very unhappy goats. Very very unhappy goats.

Although we had reached an accord, I have been unable to make as regular use of W*****'s pasture as I would like. A happy donkey is trouble enough, a love-sick donkey cannot be borne. & so the ladies hang their heads over our common gate will himself tears down boards, bangs the barn doors until they fall off their hinges & generally makes an ass of himself. I am wondering if there is cuisine that serves donkey; perhaps we need to read a book from there for bookclub...