The following tips will help you along the way: Get Your Dog’s Attention Of course, the better they get at following your instruction, the fewer treats you provide for that particular task. Then, when they respond as you wish, offer a treat or other reward as positive reinforcement. First, you show them the command and the expected response, just as you would with voice training. It’s not difficult to teach your dog hand signals. Dog Training Hand Signals: Tips to Train Your Dog If all of this hasn’t convinced you to teach your dog these signals yet, then imagine how impressed your friends and family will be when you show them all of your dog’s tricks-no voice required. So instead, he will use body language to let them know what is going on. Do you think he is going to bark to his underlings to alert them to it? No! That will scare their potential dinner off. Why is this? As mentioned, dogs respond to body language. Furthermore, they followed 70 percent of the conflicting tests’ hand signals, meaning more than double that of the voice commands! While the dogs only correctly followed 82 percent of the verbal instruction, they accurately reacted to a whopping 99 percent of the hand signals. But for the last test, the dogs were giving conflicting verbal and hand commands to determine which one the dog responded to. First, the dogs were given verbal commands, while the second test used hand signals. These particular dogs are accustomed to responding to orders from the water or even from behind wire mesh barriers for their job. They took 25 water rescue dogs that were trained on land in both styles with basic obedience commands like ‘sit,’ ‘stay,’ ‘fetch,’ and more. So, if you are not in a competition, it is best to do obedience training with both your voice and hands, so they are prepared if they lose their hearing later in life.Ī study from the Department of Biology at the University of Naples even set out to determine which type of dog training was better. Teaching hand signals only work if the dog is actively looking at you. In contrast, they are quite adept at reading body language, so learning physical gestures like hand signals is second nature. So they have to discern the unique tones from other words that sound similar and react to them over ambient noises in the environment. In this case, you will have to train him with hand signals instead of by your voice.įurthermore, dogs don’t understand words themselves. Suppose you want to enroll your dog in competitive obedience sports. But if you teach them hand or visual signal early on, communicating with them will never be an issue. However, just like humans, dogs often start to lose their hearing as they age. For instance, if you are training a deaf dog, they won’t be able to hear your verbal commands. There are numerous situations in which you would want to train your pooch using hand signals. Why You Should Use Hand Signals To Train Your Pet Here, I will go over the benefits of dog training hand signals and ten of the best ones to teach your pup.

One of the biggest is that it may actually be easier for your dog to understand hand signals than your vocal instructions. However, it would be best to consider going a step further and adding in hand signal when training your dog for various reasons. Most people teach their dog verbal commands and stop there.

I personally like it as it helps my dog understand me more.

But I promise, with enough dedication, you can successfully train a dg using hand signals. Unfortunately, unless you are lucky enough to get one already trained, it takes a lot of time and patience to teach a dog properly. Be consistent with the hand signals that you use.Ī well-trained dog is a pleasure to have.It should also always be accompanied with verbal cues. It’s important to get your dog’s attention first before training with hand signals.These are also helpful in communicating with deaf dogs as well as aging ones that are likely to lose hearing. Because dogs are adept at reading body language, they respond well to hand signals.The common dog training hand signals are used in all sorts of commands such as sit, lie down, come, stay, heel, drop it, etc.FYI: we may earn a commission for qualified purchases made through the links in our articles ( learn more).

Dog heel hand signal