dog signing

Yesterday in our travels we came across this photo of cubs learning their semaphore in 1950's Melbourne. Boynton has recently been thinking of brushing up this skill learnt briefly in Brownies to communicate with her ageing deaf dog. Sign language may be more discreet but less distinctive. According to this training your deaf dog site, hand gestures must be clear, distinguishable from other signs and gestures you commonly use, visible from a distance, and consistent
One of bluejoh's recent links is to this British Sign Language site. This is Please. Seems easy enough. Perhaps not quite assertive enough to be effective with an old alpha male labrador with ingrained status issues. And that gesture seems to suffer from ambiguity. Boynton has probably often signalled Please when she was really feeling Whoops or even perhaps pardon me .Better stick to semaphore, or its variations. Luckily the requisite number of key commands has diminished with time, and we can get by with the usual standards. It was also bluejoh who once pointed us to the Fudebakudo Semaphore Kata Page, so we've extracted a few by way of example:
Walk... Dinner ...Off ... Off the Couch (This series of gestures is pretty much how boynton signals this anyway - expletives non deleted, and the dinner gesture is a mirror of doug's own dinner dance)

This and some supplementary semaphore phrases should see us through.

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Comments: dog signing

Slap. Tap. Wave. Flick.

Nup! Works better in person.
Posted by Tony.T at June 23, 2003 04:24 PM

Well of course I can only endorse numbers 2 & 3 -that is, if we're talking dog training, Tony.
(I was going to say "dog whispering" but it's more your "dog shouting" these days)
Posted by boynton at June 23, 2003 06:02 PM