But that’s not the main reason why they can be so useful. Hand signals are fantastic as they give your dog another enrichment and training element. Image Credit: Luca Nichetti, Shutterstock Why Should You Use Training Signals for Dogs? So, you can see how beneficial it could be if your dog were to learn. Dogs can make sense of hand signals with up to 92% accuracy. In fact, dogs can respond to visual cues more easily than auditory ones. So it’s no surprise that they can be extremely receptive to different types of training that require no voice. They communicate through a limited portion of vocalizations and body language. If you think about it, dogs don’t speak English or any other language. If you’ve already had a little training experience, you might want to take it to the next level. Utilizing hand signals can be very beneficial and it creates room for your pup to grow their knowledge. If you have a particularly calm or alert dog, they could be very receptive to hand signals, while a more energetic or scattered dog won’t as easily. Each dog will be completely different in the way that they interact and respond to your cues. That doesn't mean I will never use a hand signal, it just means that I need to put more emphasis type my words need power.Training your dog can be both a rewarding and complex process. I teach all of my dogs and my clients dogs on hand signals, the dog understands and very quickly, but I get away from them immediately because I want to focus more on my verbal cue. I want you to tag yourself while training your dog with the #Sayitoncehandsfree Tag me in it, and let’s see how you train without your hand signals! If they're not, we need to go back to the basics. See if your dog can listen to only with your verbal cue, and see if they listen quickly.
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If you don't believe me, I want you to try training your dog on all of their commands this week without moving your body at all. You need to incorporate the verbal cue before there is any movement from your body. This is also how do you have to train your dog. However if I said purple, delayed a half a second and punched you, repeated a second time, on the third attempt that I say purple you would be ducking out of the way like you're in the movie the matrix. You were too worried about the physical feeling of punch in the face instead of listening to the word purple. If I where to punch you in the face and say purple at the same time, and repeat this process three times, the fourth time that I say purple without punching you in the face you're gonna have no idea what's going to happen next because you never had time to process the purple man punch in the face. When teaching your dog sit, down anything, before you offer a hand signal, you must say the word for your dog to understand. Humans lack the ability to separate word from hand sign.
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![sit hand signal dogs sit hand signal dogs](http://www.dfordog.co.uk/user/images/articles/hand-signal-sit.jpg)
Hand signals can only be done in one of those scenarios. Your verbal cue needs to be strong because you are going to rely on this in almost all scenarios, whether your dog is looking at you or not, whether your hands are full or not, or whether you are looking at your dog or not. Do you I think I’m going to have a hard time getting my dog to listen if I have their 100 percent attention? No. Hand signals are only reliable when your dog is looking at you.However, I do immediately get away from using the hand signal when I feel like the dog has an understanding of the word. I know they do! I know they learn faster through using hand signals (also understand them when teaching all behaviors we lure with our hand, and develop a hand signal with every command. I always get push back from owners on, but my dog listens really well to the hand signal. There is a few reasons why I hate using hand signals in dog training, and I’m going to go over the biggest two. Do you want to know why I hate hand signals?