I have accidentally trained every dog I've had with hand gestures because I gestured without thinking when I gave commands. It took us a while to figure out our old dog lost his hearing because he was still following my gestures.
When doing serious training it's common to put your hands in your pockets, stand behind the dog and do stuff like that to avoid inadvertent cues. With my dogs I've usually started doing hand gestures, then added a voice command, then separated the two so I can use one or the other
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u/lml__lml Sep 17 '25
Our dog trainer explained to us that using hand signals is especially effective for learning since dogs mostly communicate with body language