Pet Forum

With the four or five dogs I've had during my life, I've always trained them with a different hand signal to go along with each command. That way they can sit, come, speak, or lay down and whatever else either with a verbal command or just with a hand signal. It's fairly easy to do, because you just use the hand signal each time you speak the command... dogs are smart, they pick up on these things.

Anyway, I keep running into people commenting that they've never thought of doing that when I thought it was fairly common. How many people do this when they train their dogs?

Yes, I train my dog with the basic hand signals for sit, down and stay - because sometimes in noisy enviroments its harder for them to hear you.

I train my dog using hand signals. Sometimes I don't speak anymore, he just watches my hand and he automatically knows what to do.

This isn't common? I thought almost everyone uses hand signals to train their dogs...