A circle of miniature traffic cones is set up in the arena today, so Gus and I use it. We trot around its perimeter, with only a few head-flinging about-turns to pick up a cone in hopes of earning a click. A few times I resist, hauling him away from the cone by main force on the lead rope. But mostly I tell him “Leave it” and I wait, folding my hands in the grownups-are-talking signal, and then plastering my hands to my thighs and averting my eyes as he shoves the cone toward me. When he finally drops it, I click and treat. “Good leave-it!” I explain. If he drops it but then dives for it again, the next time he drops it I immediately ask him for a few steps forward or backward, and then I click that. When he passes near or between cones without yawing off toward one, he gets more clicks.
Now that we’re using the cones for dressage and lungeing, I’ve determined to use them nevermore for pick-it-up tricks. Instead, we use a plastic dog toy that looks like a big, three-armed star from a set of jacks, or the lattice basketball, or a length of corrugated plastic tubing, or — my personal favorite — a purple-and-white pompom.
We haven’t played with the pompom in a couple of months, and Gus greets it with great interest. I nestle it on the ground with the plastic handle uppermost and ask him to pick it up, but he seems to have forgotten the handle; he gathers up a hank of streamers in his mouth and flops the mess into my hand. In fairness, I have to click and treat for that. But before I set it on the ground again, I proffer it directly to him and make sure he gets the handle between his teeth — click! After we re-establish the handiness of the handle a few times, I place the pompom on the ground, and he’s pretty reliable about using the handle. Still, he’s not as precise as he had been months earlier: often he bites the handle plus a few strands of streamers, and a couple of times he inadvertently steps on some streamers, making it impossible to lift the pompom off the ground.
He clearly remembers the item and the game, yet he clearly forgets some of the finer points of both. What’s that about? To spare him the slapstick of standing on the item he’s trying to pick up, I set the pompom on the top step of the mounting block. He noses it off into the dirt once or twice, but then he begins grabbing the handle and picking it up cleanly. He eyes the nearby pedestal, so I invite him to “step up” and wave the pompom. Such a cute trick that I can’t help chuckling, and Gus seems to eat that up as hungrily as the treat. We bring pompom to pedestal several more times. Memory (nearly) fully restored?
Now I swap the pompom for the jack-shaped toy, which he immediately picks up and hands over. So I add a few new twists — which I’d never do at this point with a dog or horse, but Gus usually relishes being faced with more than one challenge at a time. I throw the toy farther and farther away and ask him to leave my presence to go fetch it. This is not his strong suit, but watching the tripod-toy cartwheel through the air and tumble to the ground seems to trigger a hint of predatory urge: he heads right for it, nabs it, and turns back toward me. Now I back away and back away, and he chases me assiduously to deliver the toy into my hand. Next I back away toward the wooden mat, and Gus seizes this new opportunity, striding straight to the mat and planting his feet there, toy raised in readiness for the hand-over.
Old toys put away for a few weeks or months and then reintroduced do stir a certain fizz in the minds of many animals. And for Gus that’s true with the beachball, the basketball hoop, the chair . . . almost anything. But I’m often suprised by which facets of the object, or of the game, feel particularly welcome, or novel, or confusing to him. Which parts of these reintroductions should be remedial training? when should I raise the criteria for clicking? how fast or far can his learning advance? The real question is, why don’t tack shops sell halter-mounted fMRI scanners?
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