Torque’s brain fell out this morning.
It was an absolute classic example of something we’ve talked about before, “offering behaviors.”
When you have a dog who’s learned how to learn, who’s been rewarded for trying, when his brain falls out he tries different behaviors to make the confusion go away.
The objective of today’s game was to put the rings on the post. We replaced the rings that come with the child’s toy with dive rings because our dogs were having trouble with the size of the original rings. The hole was a pretty precise fit, which our dogs found too difficult and caused frustration. We got the bigger, thinner rings to make it easier.
From the first time we took the rings out, Torque rocked it. He got all six rings on the post in record time. Today’s game was just the third time he’d played with the larger rings. First time, he got all six rings on in record time. So Hope thought she’d ask him to do it again for video.
Not a single ring. Moments later, and he couldn’t figure out what to do. You can see the frustration as he grabs a ring and lies down. And knocks over the post. When he does get one ringer, he doesn’t seem to recognize what he’s done, even tossing the rings around.
When you see your dog having a meltdown – stop. This was a surprising one because, as we said, he’d just done it perfectly less than five minutes previously. For whatever reason, he was done. Hope took a minute to recognize it, but there was no punishment, no correction, no negative consequences for Torque. We just put that toy away and moved on to other things.
Our dogs can’t tell us what’s going on, we can only read their behavior and adjust our plans accordingly. Torque and Hope did some simple heeling exercises to end today’s session so that he could regain his composure and get treats for something good.
We’ve talked about how dogs can shut down when they’re worried about getting things wrong. Torque isn’t usually a shut-down kind of dog, but something put him off the game today. We can certainly speculate about what that was, but we’ll never really know.
What we will do, next time we play our doggy version of “quoits” with Torque is go back as many steps as needed. Reward for picking up the ring, reward for carrying the ring, reward for bringing it close to the post, reward for getting it on the post.
Or we could find that next time Torque is, once again, a rock star and knows exactly what to do and does it in record time. He’s a dog.
