Training Deaf Dogs with Vibration Collars

Vibration Collar / Vibrating Dog Collars are good for many types of Dog Training, especially for training Deaf Dogs, hearing impaired dogs, and older dogs who can be hard of hearing.

Long before the invention of vibration based systems I had to deal with the issues of training a deaf dog with a remote collar. It has been my experience that some hunting dogs tend to have substantial hearing loss as they reach "old age."

We have had a few dogs that could still physically hunt past the age of 12 but many had limited ability to hear voice commands or whistle commands. Tone options were also useless on these dogs.

"How To Teach Hand Signals To Deaf Dogs"

We teach our dogs hand commands at a young age for long distant commands but we normally tie a whistle command or a verbal command to get the dogs attention prior to giving the hand signal.

When we ran into the issue of an older dog that could still hunt (with limited time on the ground) we needed a way to get the dogs attention to be able to give the hand signal.

I first did this with a female brittany named "Babe" (see photo - right) Around the age of 12 she had substantial hearing loss but still had the physical ability to hunt for short periods of time when the weather was cool.

I would seldom run her more than 30 or 45 minutes a day but this was enough for her to enjoy her last couple of seasons.

Using a remote training collar with extremely low stimulation levels we quickly taught her to look in my direction when I gave her two taps at the lowest level that she could feel.
• To start this training we put her on a 30 foot check cord and worked her in the back yard.
• I would give her a double tap and turn her with the cord so she was facing me.
• The second she looked in my direction I gave her the hand signal to change directions or come in to me).
• She quickly picked up the idea.
• It helped that hand signals were part of her normal training and that she had been using a collar the majority of her life.
Vibration collars allow you the option of communication without stimulation.

Much like every other signal that you introduce to your dog (stimulation, vibration or tone) they mean nothing to the dog without the correct association. Dogs do not understand vibration without the training.