If your dog goes blind, you can still communicate with them.

Your dog doesn’t have to be within eyesight to get your cue – for example you can call your dog to Come when he is wandering in the woods and he can hear you even if he can’t see you. If your hands are full, you will not be able to cue your dog. If your dog goes blind, he will be unable to respond to your cues. If your dog is out of sight, you can’t cue him. Dogs are very observant and slight changes in a cue can result in a nonresponse.īecause the cues have to be consistent, it can sometimes be hard to get the dog to listen to other people, who may not signal exactly the same way as you, so you have to teach your dog to generalize the cue a bit, to respond to gestures that are similar. It can be hard to learn to be consistent with your cues. Since your dog has to be looking at you to get your cues, it may promote better focus/attention on you. If your dog goes deaf, you will still be able to communicate with them. D’Aniello believes this is because dogs use their own body language as a way to communicate, so gestures are something they are naturally more inclined to notice and pay attention to, rather than human sounds. Biagio D’Aniello in the Biology Department at the University of Naples did a study on hand vs verbal signals and found that most dogs will respond more reliably to hand gestures over verbal. HAND SIGNALSĪ 2016 study conducted by Dr. To start, here are the pros and cons to each type of signal.

So is one better than the other? If you have a dog you are just starting to train, you may be unsure about what cues you should teach. And in herding, verbal (voice or whistle) is almost solely used.

Of course in agility, both hand and verbal are used. In fact hand signals seem to be the preferred signal by these competitors. If you have ever gone to a dog obedience competition, you probably noticed that many handlers use hand signals instead of verbal.

Using hand signals to train dogs