How To Train A Deaf Dog

Hi. my name is Stan Rawlinson. I'm a dog behaviourist and obedience trainer.

This is Charlie, a cross Jack Russel - Dachshund. He's a rescue dog. This is Kaiser, a white German shepherd, also a rescue dog out of the four dogs that I own.

Today I'm talking about how to train deaf dogs. Now, it's quite a wide sphere, so I can only literally touch on it. But like anything else, you have to reward a dog one way or another, and the unfortunate thing is, with a deaf dog you can't reward it verbally.

And, as we communicate verbally, it becomes more difficult for us to be able to train that dog because we constantly think we can give it commands, which of course, it can't actually hear. Now, one of the first things you have to consider is the dog's main language, his body language. So we have to use body language with a deaf dog.

We cannot use verbal as I said before. It is vitally important under all aspects that the dog is looking at us and we can use touch and we can use a couple of other techniques to gain the dog's attention when we want him to look at us. But, one of the most important ones is to tell the dog when it's doing something right.

If it was a clicker trainee, you could click a clicker but with a deaf dog, you would use something like that. a nice easy one. So you go like that treat.like that treat, so it knows that's the positive (like the clicker) and that's how you would work that side of it. Now, part of dogs that are deaf, of course, they don't know other than if you touch them or you are able to make a sound or a situation whereby the dog is aware that you want to communicate with it.

Unless you got something like that, then you are going to have difficulty. There is a collar that is a vibrating collar, and that vibrating collar very simply acts over a distance of around about 100 ft. and what it only does is vibrate.

I will show you the collar a little later. At least, if the dog is running off after something and as long as you make that vibrator a positive rather than a negative. You don't want to make it a punishment.

You want it to be "look at me". So what you would do if you put a vibrator collar like that on, obviously it's not an electric collar, it doesn't have prongs or anything like that which could possibly hurt it. It literally just vibrates.

What you would do, you would put it on the dog, in fact, you would put it near to the dog before you actually put it on and activate it. You would activate it and go like that. and when it vibrates, give the dog a treat. Vibrate, thumb, treat.

Vibrate, thumb, treat. The dog then, will look at you. Once you get the dog to look at you, then it will do very little things, the visual for sit, sit, visual for good, visual for down, visual for stay.

All of these you don't have to vocalize but sometimes it helps us to be able to understand what we're doing, but each time you get the dog to look at you, you can give it the communication. So the vibrating collar can be very very helpful. It costs about thirty to thirty-five pounds and can be very very helpful even for the dog that was not born deaf because its one of the first of the senses of dogs to actually go.

So, hand signals, loads of tricks, loads of praise, make sure the dog can look at you. You use anything from a touch to a vibration, and what I am going to do is let you hear the vibrate from that and see if any of the dogs will react here even from the distance from that vibrate because I haven't put the collar on at the moment. Okay, so this is what the vibrate collar looks like, with terminals on it.

You have the buttons, a bit very low tone on it as well, but the vibrate is much much better for it. So what we're going to do is make a vibrate sound with this at the moment and see what happens. Okay,.

So if I press this, I don't know whether you can hear that from there but I will give you it again, and again.

And that's the sort of sound and vibrat