Emergency down
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| Assuming your dog already knows how to down, the next step would be to start associating a hand signal with the verbal command. The 'new' hand sign for downing is to put your hand straight up in the air. This way even if your dog is across the street or very far away from you he will be able to see it.
Make sure that your dog is looking at you, giving you attention, and give your down command. (Remember one word commands work best, like "down" instaed of "lay down".) As you give the command, do the hand signal at the same time. Make sure to reward your dog when they do the action correctly. After a while, your dog will start to associate the hand signal with the verbal command. You can then begin to give just the hand signal. The easiest thing, for us humans, is to work in threes. Give one set of commands, when he downs, reward, have him stand and then give him the down command again. Repeat 3 times. The first set, do all 3 with verbal and hand commands. Break. The next set do the first 2 with both verbal and hand commands and the third with just the hand command. If he doesn't respond to just the hand command, don't give the verbal, he'll just wait for the verbal next time too. Go to your dog and place him in the down position. As you progress, you can do more reps with just the hand command until he is responding to the hand command all of the time. The other thing about the emergency down is that you want your dog to wait in the down position until you physically come over and get hold of him. Think of it like you are on opposite sides of a busy street. If you call your dog's name, he will take it a a recall and come running toward you, through traffic. You need to keep working with your dog until he knows that he needs to stay down until you tell hem it's okay to get up. Start with short distances and short times and keep progressing until you are further away and he is waiting for longer periods of time. Remember, positive reinforcement only. No harsh corrections. If he goofs up back up a step in the process to a point where he is accomplishing the task well and start there. This can be a long process! This is an important command that could save your dog's life and is well worth the time and effort that it takes to teach it. If you need more help, fell free to PM me. Mandy |
| Hmm, nobody? Darn, I was really hoping to teach that to the puppy. Well, thanks anyway! |
| Patience, Grasshopper, patience. |
| Oh! Thank you very much! |
| yeah, I'll work on that! Thank you, I'll try and teach her that! |
You must be from New York City to expect an answer any faster than that! LOL  |
| Reading the post written by Maxmm may sound long and complicated to you with a puppy, but I have a 14 1/2 year old that is deaf. I started teaching my dogs hand signals along with the verbal commands for no particular reason when they were pups, and now it has paid off. Doing things in sets of three as they described is also important when done the correct way. I had a sheepie years ago that was very smart. So smart that she would respond to my commands before I even gave them. Why? Because I started out say with, Keshia sit, Keshia down, Keshia roll over, etc. Well, she knew them all and all I had to so was say Keshia sit and she'd sit, lay down and roll over and sit again waiting on her treat. lol This was my fault, but I soon corrected it. Yea right. After she learned more commands when I would tell her to do something she'd do it and depending on how excited she was, she'd do some or all of what she knew. It was very cute but took her (and I) maturing to finally get it right, but not perfect. So, don't be quick to run from doing something that takes a little longer than you would like. In the end it will be less work and take less time. You'll be glad you did and you'll be amazed how well they respond to the hand signals. Good luck and have fun. |
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