If you are having trouble deciding whether to use a dog whistle, or are unsure how they actually work, then this article will give you a hand! Should you buy a dog whistle
It's the only sound my dog responds to .. calling him does not work....waving a treat does not work....whistle works! At least for me and Cooper. Plus a whistle carries far a wide....voice does not.
Should have read this article last week before I started on some whistle training with Juno and used the "standard" pips for certain commands. Oh well, we like to be unique and do our own thing
I use a whistle for recall and a few other things whilst out and about as my voice doesn't always work. At least the whistle is consistent
I'm really interested in using a whistle for Ella's recall but I'm not sure how to introduce it. We're into our fourth week of our obedience training (we're in the beginner puppy class at the moment - fingers crossed we get to graduate to advanced puppy next week) so we're being taught each step as we go and none of these include a whistle. Am I best to continue with this and introduce a whistle at a later stage?
Emily can't really help with that. Over here there are no puppy classes on passing tests. All our training was 121 with our trainer and we focused a lot on round town walking plus recall. My main interest was introducing as much about living and being in town as possible and we practiced recall etc in the garden and on our walks. It's quit recent that I decided to introduce the whistle for recall and basically just went out in the garden with whistle and high value treats (chipolatas) and off we went. I've got a couple of short videos of Juno recalling to the whistle that I need to upload when I get round to it. Also been practicing a down on the whistle as well
Juno's progress on recall with a whistle on yesterday's walk. We started training with the whistle 10 days ago in the garden and I'm now using OH as a distraction () Click on videos to start WP_20150817_16_39_30_Pro by Rosemary MCDonagh, on Flickr WP_20150817_16_39_05_Pro by Rosemary MCDonagh, on Flickr
Emily, you can introduce the whistle at any stage, the article explains how to transfer from verbal 'come' cue to a whistle, but you can also train the whistle cue from scratch just as you would with your recall word. It's up to you.
I think I started with the whistle as soon as Chepi was old enough to go out, about 13 weeks. She is 15 months now and I still reward her when she comes to the whistle.
My two came ready-armed with a recall, which was a pip pip peep pattern. Whilst I've been away on holiday, I've read some of the book The Other End of the Leash, which has some interesting sections about how animal trainers from all around the world, in all sorts of different languages, use similar sound patterns for similar applications. The "TLDR" of it is that, irrespective of language and type, animals are stimulated to higher speeds by repetitive short tones ("yip! yip! yip!") and slowed by a single, drawn-out tone ("whoooooooaaaaaaaaaah"). So, when you look at the traditional three or five pips for a recall, compared to a single, longer, peep for a stop, it really conforms to this pattern of training. I have no idea if it will make any noticeable difference, but I have swapped over to using three pips for my recall rather than two pips and a peep, because I figure that anything I can do to help my dogs be successful is a good thing.
I don't know if the different sounds make any difference to a good recall or not, or that those sounds are the "norm" for training. All I know is that playing the videos on my tablet the last couple of days as soon as Juno hears the whistle she comes to me - even when dozing in her bed
