Have you come across frustrated dog owners yelling desperately at their dogs or young puppies to obey their commands in public parks? It can indeed be very annoying when your puppy refuses to respond to your verbal cues. It is not that your puppy is deaf or stubborn; it is more likely that it is not accustomed to vocal cues yet. As a matter of fact, it is better if you start to train your puppy on visual cues instead because research has shown that dogs work better on visual cues than vocal ones. You can easily get hold of a puppy training hand commands guide to start off with.
Teaching your puppy to obey hand commands is very beneficial because you can still get it to respond to you even when you are in a crowded or noisy place whereby it will be impossible for your puppy to hear you. Even when your dog grows old and starts to be hard in hearing, the visual cues which you had trained it with in its younger days will remain useful.
When you are training a puppy, always remember that you need to be firm but not fierce. That means you should not give in to your puppy’s whims and fancy while at the same time, never spank or hit your puppy when it fails to obey your commands. Patience and rewards for your puppy are the keys to success in properly training your puppy to obey your commands.
It is commonly found in any puppy training hand commands guide that dog owners should start with basic commands and repeat it many times, especially when you use your puppy’s favourite treats as a reward when it has followed the commands correctly. Regardless of whatever hand signal you have chosen to associate with a certain command, make sure you follow through with the same hand signal each time. You might want to start with two basic commands of ’sit’ and ‘down’. Only proceed to more advanced commands when your puppy has mastered the basic commands.
One suggestion of teaching your puppy to sit which is commonly found in a puppy training hand commands guide is to get your puppy to stand right in front of you first. Then, holding its favourite treat in your hand, teach the verbal command of ’sit’ as well as your chosen hand commands. Remember to bring the treat up to its nose so that it knows the treat is in your hand. Guide your puppy to sit while saying the command ’sit’ as well as the hand command. Give the reward to your puppy once it sits. Repeat the training a few more times with the verbal command and finally without the verbal commands when your puppy has mastered it.
There are many ways in which you can train your puppy. When in doubt, you can look up a puppy training hand commands guide or even create your own guide. Just make sure that you use the same hand signal each time you are training your puppy so you can record the signals down in a notebook and use it as your own guidebook.
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Greetings,
Clicker training, like ‘hand signals’ can be very useful for quick results.
Puppies from most all breeds are very sensitive to ‘noises’ that interrupt or break into their environment, and the sound of the clicker gets their immediate attention.
Associating a number of clicks with a combination of a verbal command and a hand signal is a technique that I am trying to perfect.
My technique is to get spontaneous response from the combination of a click and hand signals that would substitute a particular verbal command.
The end result would be a little bit different from normal clicker training or hand signal training, to the extent that I can teach much more commands, so that I get different responses on the same single click, because of the different hand signal associated with the click.
I am a larygectomee, I lost my voice to cancer of the larynx, and speak through the aid of a voice prosthesis inserted into my trachea via a hole in my neck. To activate the voice prosthesis I have to close the hole in my neck with my thumb, that means to talk I need to use a hand – So whenever I talk or use my voice one of my hands become used, and nothing else can be done with it - Get my problem?.
The major problem is, sometimes the prosthesis plays up, and then I am like a mute, cannot even make a noise, leave alone issue a verbal command.
I will post another comment on the level of my success later on.
Noel Benjamin D’Costa.