Teach Your Dog To Stack Rings
For many years, I relied heavily on using my voice with my dogs. My “sits” and “stays” and “twirls” and so on were often paired with a hand signal–but I relied on the cue from my voice. But, lately, as I’ve immersed myself in American Sign Language (ASL), I’ve realized that my dogs have been trying to have this exact kind of visual conversation with me for decades. I just wasn’t fluent yet.
The Silent Language: What Learning ASL Taught Me About My Dogs
My dogs are deaf. My daughter is hard-of-hearing, and our family has been working together to learn ASL since she was a baby. So, it made sense to us to adopt deaf dogs so we could integrate our training into our ASL learning. In fact, using ASL for dog training gave us a much more robust vocabulary to work with–if only I could learn to keep my mouth shut! 🙂
The Shift from Audio to Visual
Dogs don’t have a spoken language; they have a spatial one. Dogs use their entire body when they communicate. Everything matters: where and how they stand, the position of their ears, how they hold and move their tails, whether their eyes are hard or soft, if they have their mouth open or closed, even if they’re holding their breath or breathing calmly. No one can look only at one thing–say, the tail–and decide how a dog is feeling or what a dog is thinking. It takes the full picture to really get a sense of what’s going on.
In ASL, there are five parameters that are grammatical requirements. Handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual markers (like facial expressions) all contribute to forming a sign. Change one and you change the sign. (Ask anyone who’s accidentally signed “make out” when all they wanted was a cup of coffee…)
So, silencing my own verbal commands and focusing on my body posture–not just my hand signals–has made my cues so much clearer to Penny and Stola. Yes, I still vocalize because I’m human and can’t seem to help it, but the shift in focus to my movements has been dramatic.
One way to do this: Film your training sessions! I’ve been filming all of my sessions with Stola and hope to post some on Instagram soon, but it helped me realize I added a little step forward every time I cued “sit.” That’s not what I wanted to do. Same thing with “down.” I discovered that I bent at the waist each time I cued the behavior, and I did not want to anchor in that movement with the hand cue.
“Listening” with Your Eyes
This expression is modified from how we talk about reading paper books versus audiobooks: Are you reading with your eyes or with your ears?
In this case, we “listen” with our eyes to what our dogs are saying to us. Humans are vocal-heavy creatures. I know some dogs are, too, if you take barking, whining, howling, and so on into consideration. But dogs are masters of micro-expressions. The way they move their ears, their eyebrows, their tails–it all tells a story. We need to listen to that story with our eyes.
Learning ASL has helped bring this concept home for me. In ASL, verbs have direction. You make a change in your sign if you’re driving over hills or along a flat road; you change your sign if you’re walking on tiptoes or walking with heavy feet or a skip in your step; you change your sign if you’re singing softly or belting opera. Those movements convey so much meaning:
- A Hip Tilt: A subtle shift signaling they’re about to settle into a nap.
- The Lean: Into me for a pat vs. away to signal they were finished with snuggling.
- Weight Distribution: Front-loading weight to prepare for some zoomies vs. a relaxed, centered stance.
These subtle shifts tell a story if we can listen with our eyes.
Building Shared Communication
Incorporating intentional, clear hand signals has reduced the static in our training. It’s not just about commands; it’s about a deeper, quieter empathy.
Now, we have the advantage of a solid foundation in ASL. When Astrid was maybe nine months old, we started learning ASL with a Deaf mentor, and that one-on-one attention on and off until Astrid turned three gave us an incredible base for using a second language in our home. Since then, over the past three years, we’ve cobbled together classes, YouTube videos, apps, and so on to continue developing our signing skills.
And the dogs are coming along with us. This includes not just the specific signs I’m teaching them as behavior cues (key signs like sit, down, stay, wait, come, and so on) but also the incidental learning that happens as they watch and learn from how we communicate at home. Read more about incidental learning in dogs here.
Whether you choose to learn ASL to communicate with your dog or you decide to use traditional obedience cues, I challenge you to pay attention to all the nonverbal communication passing between you and your dog.
Observe what behaviors of yours make your dog excited, calm, overwhelmed, or even frightened. Build shared communication by listening with your eyes.
What that looks like for us right now: Stola tenses up whenever someone touches her ears. She doesn’t have an ear infection, but in case she ever gets one, this can’t be a disaster. So, I’m observing what kinds of touch she does and doesn’t like and counterconditioning what she doesn’t like. For Penny, her low vision is really impacting her learning speed, so I’m working on observing what lighting conditions help her and what conditions harm her. We know she can’t see well at all in bright light and really struggles when she moves from light to dark or dark to light. I’m experimenting to find the best conditions for her.
Learning ASL (and Deaf culture, too) has changed so much of how I move and operate in the world. Better communication with my dogs is icing on the cake!
If you’re looking to deepen your own bond with your dog through better communication, my book For the Love of Dog explores the science and heart behind how we connect with our best friends with stories about me and my dogs Emmett, Lucas, and Cooper.
Click here to grab your copy on Amazon or here for Bookshop.org.
It’s also available on audio if you prefer to read with your ears!
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