Advantages of Training Dogs with Hand Signals

This is the gesture I use for cuing “Down!” It’s a large signal that can be seen by a dog who is far away. This is bad news for putting behaviors completely on verbal cue, but good news for putting behaviors on a hand signal cue.

In fact, many dog folks think their dogs have learned verbal cues, only to find out that their dogs are actually keying off non-verbal communications the owner doesn’t even realize she’s making, such as a tiny bend forward at the waist with the “down” cue, or a slight movement of the hand toward the chest that accompanies the word “sit.” Owners do these things so consistently that they become an important part of the picture for the dog, and the human doesn’t realize that the verbal cue is actually secondary. You’ll realize how truly brilliant your dog is when you see how quickly she comes to understand the meaning – and offer the requested behavior – for your body language cues for sit, down, come, and anything else you want to put on a nonverbal cue. Our dogs already assume our movements have meaning we just have to make sure they’re attaching the meaning we want them to have for our particular signals. This makes teaching hand signals incredibly easy. McConnell writes in The Other End of the Leash, “All dogs are brilliant at perceiving the slightest movement that we make, and they assume that each tiny movement has meaning.” They depend on reading us to make their world work for them. Dogs need to make sense of our movements in order to survive. The general dog-owning population today is much more aware of the fact that dogs are, first and foremost, body language communicators, thanks to the work of people like Patricia McConnell, Ph.D., and Turid Rugaas. And hand signals can be used in many situations where a verbal cue just won’t work. What I didn’t realize then but I know now, is that hand signals are actually quite simple to teach to dogs – much easier than getting behavior on verbal cue.

Dog obedience hand signal for stand