Dogs Understand Human Gestures As Well as Toddlers (and Better Than Chimps)

By Eric Goebelbecker | Published: July 13, 2009

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Two recent studies indicate that dogs understand human gestures such as pointing, head-turning and gazing as well as two year old toddlers and better than primates.

This is a by-product of domestication. Humans have been selectively breeding dogs for thousands of years. (Even though the notion of breeds and breed standards are relatively new, man has been breeding dogs for thousands of years both by accident and by design.) It makes sense that after what some anthropologists estimate to be as long as 10,000 years of breeding for work and companionship, dogs have a unique ability to understand human body language.

So why is it that some trainers insist on trying to duplicate canine communication, even going as far a simulate bites with their hands or creating langauges like “doglish?”

 

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  • I find this really interesting. My Malamute loves obedience work and I accidentally discovered he is responding to my hand gestures, not verbal commands, so that he will respond to gestures alone without the verbal command.

    I wonder if this means he is a "visual learner" rather than an "auditory learner" and if dogs, in fact, have these different learning aptitudes which are used to describe the different ways people learn things?
  • Oops, I should have said that the obedience training we did involved using both hand gestures and verbal commands - eg tilting hand upwards for 'sit' and hand into chest for 'come' and flat palm for 'wait' etc.
  • In lure reward training we generally train the hand gestures first (as part of the lure) and then train the verbal cue afterwards. Adding a new cue for a behavior is simply a matter of issuing it before the cue that is already trained. If you check out my training sit you can see the process.

    In my experience (but I can't quote any research off the top of the head) is that dogs are visual learners, at least more than they are auditory.
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