Quote: Greg Meyer

We do both hand signals and verbal, sometimes at the same time during our drills, sometimes just one or the other. It's nice to be able to be talking with neighbors, either close by or from a distance from our dog, and be able to just direct her without talking or shouting.

As for the thoughts on what our dog picks up on more, whether its verbal direction or hand signals, I can answer that from our little bit of experience with agility training. Near the end of the first round of agility training with Bailey, we finally got to do an entire course in a competition-like setting. We did three runs. The first was full of mistakes and slow. Second, much better, no mistakes. For the third run, our instructor had us run the entire course in perfect silence. We could only use hand signals and body positioning. Not only she have a clean run, no mistakes, but we shaved over 20 seconds off our previous time. With each course we took, the experience was the same, better times and results with no verbal commands. No doubt in my mind our dogs are much more attentive to our body language.

I'm getting a lot out of this thread!

Hand and verbal are both used at the same time in the send out and the blind search in Schutzhund.
From what I've seen agility uses both for most everything.

So there is no reason that anyone knows of to avoid hand signals, right? So far?

Only if they aren't called for on a trial field/ring. That could loose points for a double commands. It would be no different then "Sit", "SIT" if the dog didn't respond on the first command.

Thanks for all the input.

I feel strongly that body language is a more natural means of communication for a dog. I try to take advantage of this whenever possible, and always keep in mind what the dog may be interpreting during training.

Unfortunately with all the researching I have been doing changing my training style for my new pup, I have read far too much to remember all the sources, but I read of very interesting article on how dogs do learn easier visually then verbally. Sara Wilson perhaps, but I will say a large majority of what I found irregardless of philosophy was visual cue, when that became solid, verbal followed by visual cue, then verbal, pause to see if the dog performs the task, cuing with visual if needed. Then doing finishing work with verbal and correction. For me I have been very pleased with the results with my 9 month old, and rarely have needed to go to the correction.

Thanks for sharing your experience Billy.

If you happen to remember any of those sources, I would ask you to share them.

I will have a look through the usual culprits David, see what I can find. I read everything with an open mind, but must confess I narrowed my resources fairly quickly after I got my puppy, and found what gave the quickest/best results :-)

Merely a "pet" owner here, but have always taught & used hand signals simultaneously with verbal commands for OB and good K9 manners -- Now I do it without even thinking, after many decades ... I agree 100% with the folks above who have posted that communicating via body-language comes naturally to dogs, so they will quickly learn & follow any consistently repeated physical cue from their handler (even if that person gives them inadvertently).

In my personal experience, I find that most dogs typically utilize any & all means at their considerable disposal to decipher human intentions (pretty much automatically) for their OWN benefit & satisfaction, whether or not the person they are "reading" is aware of the dog's ability to do so -- I can't be alone here in having given (without thinking) my companion dog a totally untrained & completely unknown hand-signal, only to suddenly realize in amazement what just happened, as my pet instantly comprehends & complies with my silently indicated desire ... Dogs often appear to be psychic in understanding what we mean, but I believe this is simply in keeping with their natural attributes.

I have 2 questions, both on topic I hope...
I am a person with an amazing lack of both body sense and creativity (trying to improve on both counts).

I do use hand signals for my more formal obedience commands and on a few tricks where they are especially helpful or cute, but the honest truth is I usually draw complete blanks when trying to think up new signals and even Daisy's repertoire exceeds the number I already have. Does anyone have any helpful links on that account?

I think it would be a helpful exercise for me personally to be able to use hand/body signals exclusively for quite a while, kind of in line with the exercise Greg was talking about. I am also very curious. Is there any competitive venue anyone can think of that penalizes using silent cues exclusively? So "double" commands would no be an issue... I know most will penalize for "anticipating a command."