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 Excerpted from Dogs Can Sign, Too: A Breakthrough Method for Teaching Your Dog to Communicate by Sean Senechal All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
