#Dog commands and hand signals how to

So you can start training with hand signal non-verbal cues to puppies as well as your adult dogs! This will help to proof behaviors.ĭogs can learn these body cues at any age. As behavior becomes more fluent, you will want to practice with your dogs in a variety of situations, including stimulating situations, like outside or at the park. Training without distractions is key in the beginning. Keep training sessions short and fun to accommodate our furry friend’s short attention span. Important: the training process for new skills should always begin in a distraction-free environment. Is the treat visible? Is the dog’s nose busily sniffing to see if there is a treat? If so it will be better to keep the lure until you notice the dog responding faster. Does the dog respond? If not, try luring again and take note to make sure your hand looks exactly the same. Then you want to start trying repetitions without the treat in your hand. The trick here is to hide the treat with your fingers in your hand so it does not become a visual part of the cue. Hold the treat in your hand while luring for the behavior that you would like.

When you are teaching a new behavior cue with your furry friend’s favorite treats as a lure, Then you can turn that lure right into a hand signal. When this happens you will now have two ways to ask your dog for a behavior: both a visual and a verbal cue. You should start to pause for longer periods of time to give the dog a chance to start responding before you give the verbal cue. With enough repetition, your dog will start to see your physical gesture as a predictor that the verbal cue is coming. First, perform the new visual signal, then follow up with the known verbal cue. If your dog already responds to an auditory cue for basic obedience behaviors, the training process for teaching hand signals is easy! And because dogs respond more reliably to body language, teaching hand signals can actually help you build a better response to your verbal cues.Īnytime you want to build a new prompt for a behavior, you can use the same training process.

#Dog commands and hand signals how to

Training Hand Signals for New Behaviors How to Add Hand Signals to Already-Trained Behaviors Research shows that hand signals are much easier for dogs to understand when given by different people. Dogs may get confused by different intonations, accents or even tones of voice. If another person is with your dog, they can also use your dog’s visual signals with more reliability than with an auditory dog cue. And if your dog loses their hearing as they get older you will still have a way to communicate with them.

It can also be easier for your dog to read gestures during times they are a distance away from you. It is much easier for a dog to focus on their handler’s body positioning amongst these types of distractions. In addition, hand signals are useful in a noisy environment. It was found that the hand-only cues reached up to 99% reliability while voice cues only reached 82% reliability. One study looked at a group of dogs that had been taught standard cues with both visual and auditory signals. Because of this, dogs will usually respond more reliably to visual prompts, and will have a tougher time with verbal cues. The most obvious reason visual signals work so well is that dogs are themselves body language communicators, and readily read body cues.