As well as you teaching your dog to obey you through the use of verbal commands, you can also teach them to obey you when you only use hand signals instead. When it does come to you teaching your dog about such commands you will need to use them in conjunction with verbal commands in the beginning. In this article, we look at one of the ways in which dog training hand commands can be accomplished.
Teaching your dog how to obey hand commands is very simple and generally, dogs find it very easy to understand these along with verbal commands. Along with you and your dogs, when you start this kind of training you will also need some kind of treat (food is ideal) that you can reward your dog with when they react in the correct way to the signal.
As mentioned before it is crucial that when you are first teaching your dog to obey hand rather than verbal commands you use the verbal ones as well. It is important that before you start the training you decide exactly what hand signal will represent what verbal command. Only when you have decided which signal represents which verbal command can you then start your dog's training.
When you first start your dog's hand command training you will need to say the word and show them very deliberately the hand movement at the same time. This you will need to repeat several times to them before they start to understand what it is that you would like them to do. Immediately you notice that they have reacted as you begin to raise your hand and say the word then this is the time that they should be rewarded.
It is important that you continue to use the verbal and hand commands for some time, but very slowly you start to voice the commands far less and use hand signals more. At this stage, you should now start to only reward your dog when they actually respond just to the hand commands rather than when you say the word as well. It is important that you do not eliminate the verbal commands straight away, but rather gradually drop them. In the beginning, it is a good idea to do half the training when you do the verbal and hand commands together, and the other half just using the hand commands on their own.
After a period of time when they have begun to purely respond to your hand commands then you can start beginning to eliminate the food rewards also. It is crucial that you do not stop providing such treats as soon as they start responding to hand commands, but gradually eliminate them and instead offer your dog praise instead.
When you are going to be teaching your dog to respond to hand commands rather than verbal ones it is a good idea to start of with the most basic commands that you want your dog to respond to. Most owners will start of with the ones we all learn in the beginning with our dogs, which is sit, stay, down and come. Only when you feel that you and your dog are ready should you move on to commands that are far more elaborate.
When it comes to getting advice on the right ways for you to do dog training hand commands there are plenty of places where you can get help. The Internet is a great source for finding advice and information on the correct dog training hand command techniques to be used.
