Dogs Can Sign, Too: A Breakthrough Method for Teaching Your Dog to Communicate - Softcover

Senechal, Sean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587613530 ISBN 13: 9781587613531

Verlag: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Imagine being able to ask your poodle, “Who’s at the door?” and having her respond, “It’s Katy.” Or asking your golden retriever, “Do you want a treat?” and him responding, “No, water.” Or asking your Border collie, “Which toy do you want?” and getting the response, “Stick.”

If you’ve ever wondered what dogs would tell us if they could, now you can find out. The K9Sign system teaches dogs to communicate to us–making it a first in any dog training book category.

Dogs Can Sign, Too is the first book dedicated exclusively to the K9Sign system for teaching dogs to communicate to their human companions using a vocabulary of gestures.

This extraordinary education tool, developed by the creator of AnimalSign Language exclusively for the canine community, teaches people and their pets a unique mode of communication that employs an extensive lexicon of specific signs. Sample signs range from general concepts, such as “Food” or “Play” to identifying special treats, such as “Liver” or “Cheese” and specifying a favorite toy, such as “Ball” or “Frisbee.” Signs also include useful questions such as “Who’s that?” or “What type?” to naming a particular friend or family member, or even indicating a stranger.

Learning and practicing K9Sign is a fun, challenging, and rewarding experience for both you and your dog that is sure to deepen the human-canine bond while expanding our ideas about interspecies communication.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SEAN SENECHAL is the founding director of the AnimalSign Center (www.animalsign.org) in Monterey County, California, and the creator of K9Sign Language. She also teaches Human Biology and Behavior at California State University Monterey Bay, as well as Canine Biology and Behavior as part of the CSUMB Extension Program. Sean is a member of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers, the American Behavior Society, and the American Associations for the Advancement of Science. Her work has been featured on Animal Planet, and she is a contributing expert to www.raisingcanine.com, www.simpledogtrainingsecrets.com, and www.thepoochplace.com.

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Chapter 1: AnimalSign Language

K9Sign Language is more than an idea. It is a communication tool that is researched, taught, and practiced at the AnimalSign Center, located in Monterey County, California. Dogs and their people come to the center to learn how to communicate with each other through signs. Learning to sign provides dogs and humans with the opportunity to communicate clearly, for function and fun, at home or at work. Through K9Sign Language, the relationship between dogs and their guardians, caretakers, pet sitters, and trainers is profoundly enhanced. Think about how communication strengthens your human relationships. Why not do the same with your dog? The potential is there, you just have to help your dog communicate better by recognizing her natural signs, and by showing her how to sign to you.

Outside the Center, dogs are already learning how to communicate with us through simple movements such as sitting, barking, nudging, alerting, and looking. Many make requests with simple moves such as door tapping to indicate a desire to go out. Some learning on the part of animals has been taught, while other efforts to communicate seem instinctual. Dogs who are trained to assist hearing-impaired humans often come to recognize and respond to many oral or signed words on their own. Many scientists, trainers, teachers, and enthusiasts have contributed to the education of animals for service, sport, and pleasure. With our help, dogs learn obedience, agility, tracking, search and rescue, assistance, and other remarkable skills. And dogs are not the only animals who learn from humans. Horses learn tricks, dressage, roping, and service skills. Animals learn, learn, learn. We even try to prevent animals from learning certain skills because we don’t want them to become bad habits (from our point of view). All these actions are mere fragments of what animals might be capable of doing; we have tapped only the surface of their cognitive abilities and skills. By providing them with a language tool, such as K9Sign Language, we might not only learn about their cognition, but just imagine what they might learn.


Expressing Details

Dogs are aware of many details about the world that humans are not. They smell, see, and hear things we don’t. With natural body language, they can grossly express their perceptions. Yet they have no specific way to express their detailed perceptions, thoughts, and desires to us. It is up to us to know dogs well enough to make educated guesses.

Dogs can be trained to identify cancer cell odors for both late and early stage lung and breast cancer, but the dogs communicate only by sitting next to the vial holding the cells they were asked to identify. Imagine if these dogs learned four K9Signs: Early Lung Cancer, Late Lung Cancer, Early Breast Cancer, Late Breast Cancer. With this the dogs could identify on a human or animal subject which stage and disease was present on one person, rather than being asked to answer with a sit when they smell any cancer. Dogs could be specific. Without the tools to be specific and elaborate, animals can’t communicate the details. With the tools, the animals could communicate details we can’t perceive ourselves.

Often animals move and vocalize in an effort to communicate something they know. We may understand the general idea, but not the details of what they are saying. Their natural body language only suggests their trains of thought and feelings. How frustrating to have such limited vocabulary (sit, stand, down, bark, growl, paw, dig, look) when they seem to have so much more to say. We can observe and reason, but only guess what dogs are communicating. Some professionals, such as dog language experts Roger Abrantes and Stanley Coren, surely read these animals better than others. But even their translations may be indirect or inaccurate. Animals might be capable of much more elaborate communication. With additional language skills, dogs could directly tell us what they are “saying,” and we could understand and respond.

Some people state they can sense, using some invisible, unmeasurable stimuli, then intuit, translate, and understand what animals are thinking. Some people, with their perceptions and interpretations of animal behavior, using a variety of techniques, have much to contribute to our understanding animal cognition. This book does not delve into those other techniques, but I do value sharing and pooling our diverse methods, resources, and knowledge to better understand and communicate with our animals.

If animals have the cognitive ability to know what they are trying to say, why can’t they directly, visibly tell us in detail? Because they have no organized, agreed-upon language other than a few natural body gestures learned during socialization. They lack a tool, a code, to precisely map their thoughts into visible signs. We haven’t taught them a method of communicating details in a visible or oral form that we can interpret. As much as we observe and spend time with them, as many treats we offer and tricks we engage them in, we have not yet taught dogs an expanded productive language (language that is produced). We leave their communication skills natural, but undeveloped; we leave them illiterate. Would we leave our human children in such a limited state?

What kind of productive language might be useful teach animals? One that is made for and customized for animal bodies and minds; one that includes signs for humans to communicate to animals, but specifically focuses on signs for the animals to communicate to humans. Animals, such as dogs and horses can’t vocalize as extensively as we do and they can’t fingerspell (not yet, anyway). Ah! But they can move their many body parts in various combinations and patterns, in space and in time! They have a natural body language to seed this learning. This mobility and the ability to learn are the foundations of AnimalSign Language–and specifically K9Sign Language for dogs.

Having a language ready to teach is one thing; learning it is another. Dogs have inborn mechanisms that enable them to learn, problem solve, and perform simple communications. Can dogs learn a simple language, or our type of true language? Can they learn a language that can be divided into receptive and productive components? Receptive language focuses on the understanding of the meaning of signed, written, or spoken words. Productive refers to producing words, for example by gesturing or vocalizing. There is documented and anecdotal evidence for dogs receptively learning language. Animals seem to understand what we say, sign, and possibly write. They run to the door when they hear the word “walk,” and grab their favorite ball when they see people gesture Play, and on seeing a street sign with the written word STOP, a dog for the blind will stop.

Researched evidence in this area is growing. Dogs have learned some receptive oral, signed, and written language. They understand our many languages, our spoken words, visible signs, and a few of our written words. Recently a particularly talented dog named Rico who understands two hundred spoken words was tested by animal psychologist Juliane Kaminski and others, and commented on by Paul Bloom in Science (June 2004). Dr. Bonita Bergin, founder of Canine Companions for Independence, has attempted to teach dogs to read (and posted YouTube videos) at the Assistance Dog Institute in California.


Capacity for Language?

Do dogs have the capacity to learn a productive language or true language? A few dog experts acknowledge we just don’t know; we haven’t tried or tested this ability scientifically. Virtually all others say or assume the answer is no. They don’t consider...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1587613530
• ISBN 13: 9781587613531
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland