Part One

“The Dog Whisperer” - Talking to Your Dog

The other night I cam across a programme about communicating with your dog called “the dog whisperer” and I was intrigued. This programme made me think about how we communicate to our dogs.

Dog training is about communication. Unconsciously one of the owners of a dog was communicating something totally different to what they thought they were communicating and this caused the dogs behaviour to be unhelpful to say the least!

We as humans cannot help but communicate, even when we don’t mean to!! Some research has shown that nearly 93% of what we communicate, is not from what we say, but from non – verbal communication, “body language” Dogs instincts pick this up and will react accordingly.

From the dogs view we must learn what motivates the dog, if we want him to do as we say!
From our perspective we must communicate to (”tell”) the dog what behaviors are correct, desired, or preferred, in what circumstances and what behaviours are undesirable.

We also must also understand the communication that the dog sends to the handler. These signals can be that he is unsure, confused, nervous, happy, excited, and so on. We must pay attention to this because a stressed or distracted dog will not learn as well.

Tomorrow we will look at some of the important commands that we can teach our dogs.