Your dog’s skills are constantly changing. You and your dog have a lot of plates spinning!
Lots of new behaviors
For the most part, his/her repertoire is expanding as your 2-Minute-Training journey continues. Your dog is learning how to learn – offering new behaviors, paying better attention, becoming a team with you, and you’re building a great relationship as your understanding grows.
And then, for no reason, your dog looks at you like she’s never heard the word “Place!” before. Seriously, dog?
What’s going on?
It could be one of a couple of different things.
Short-term to long-term memory
When dogs (or people!) learn new things, it takes a bit of time for them to become part of our skills list. When anything is transferring from short-term to long-term memory, it can get lost for a little while.
The other possibility is that while you’ve been training other stuff, “place” got a little bit neglected. When was the last 2-Minute session that focused on “place”?
Remember the Ed Sullivan show?
The skills our dogs learn are like the “Spinning Plates” routine from old variety or circus shows. As the number of skills (plates) grows, it gets more difficult to keep each going. An occasional refresher session is all it takes to renew the behavior.
Hope hadn’t been working “place” with Torque in a while. They’d been having fun with tricks like “tap!” and putting stuff away. When she remembered, it only took one little session to remind him, and his “place” was back!
It might be time to revisit old skills
Just like it’s never too late for a dog to learn new things, it’s never a bad time to revisit old skills. It’s a good idea, especially if you’re having a difficult day, to just go back and refresh some familiar, fun skills that you’ve already mastered.
It’s nowhere near as frenetic as actually “spinning plates” – and it’s fun to relax and revisit the “oldies but goodies.”
Here’s a YouTube video of Henrik Bothe performing his plate-spinning act.