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I have kind of a weird question. For years I made the mistake of thinking that I needed to use a growly, falsely deep voice to command respect when really the key was simply sounding like I meant it instead of being wishy washy. I have a very high squeaky voice, by the way - I could seriously voice a toddler for an animated show or radio.

 

We have a rescue dog that I trained to come to an excited, high pitched yell suitable for flyball training. She has a rock solid recall with me and my kids. My husband has trouble getting her to listen. Like, at all.

 

Do you men who get dogs who were trained by women, have to adjust their voices, pitch them higher, or sound "lighter" to help the dog adjust?

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Becca, when doing obedience training classes, lots of mens dogs wouldnt be as attentive to thier owners, and I could see it was because their voice being lower and more monotone wasnt half as interesting or as inticing to the dog as a female voice was, so Id tell the guys to use their girly voices and the dogs responded much better, althought the guys didnt care much for the method. :rolleyes:

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Funny this. I have witnessed just the exact opposite in my contact with the 'herding' community. The most blatant example being a woman who bought a dog from Great Britain that was trained over there by a man. She spoke much lower when she spoke to that dog, and when watching them on the trial field this low voice only got louder. I've even seen people try to imitate British and Scottish accents while working their dogs, and this is sometimes funny enough that I can no longer stifle my laughter. Of course I can't say what might be the flavor of the month in the obedience and agility worlds, but my suggestion would be to just be yourself, everyone else is already taken anyway.

 

Ray

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lol, my two seem to do just fine with my voice, the BC especially gets excited with a growly "get it 'for his tuggie! Someone once suggested using a girlie voice, but my vice just won't go there! So, I had to work with what I had :rolleyes:

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Early on with my dog, I read a lot of books. Can't remember which one of them it was, but one of them dealt with animal behavior in general. They looked at good horse trainers and good dog trainers, and found some universals of behavior among the trainers. In general, trainers who wanted to halt an action that was occuring used deep, slow sounds (like "noooooooo" or "heeeeey" or "whoooooa" or such) to get the behaviors to stop. When they wanted behaviors to begin or happen quickly, they used lots of short, staccato sounds ("Git up! Come on! Come on! Lookit! Lookit!") Seems like I recall the writer of the book drawing some sort of generalization about training mammals - that we respond to slow, low tones in one natural way, and to higher, quicker tones in another.

 

So... it kind of makes sense to me that the excited, happy tone would be used to get a dog to do an excited behavior, and the calmer, slower tone would be used to get the dog to go into a calmer state.

 

As far as Buddy's listening to me, my trainer did suggest that I distinguish between the happy, praiseful voice, which I leave naturally female or even go up a notch, and the corrective voice, which I lower on purpose (and also, by choice or habit, make slower at the same time). I would think it would be naturally easier for a man to do the deep voice and a woman to do the high voice, but I think we all have a natural rise and fall to our voices depending on what we're conveying. Come to think of it, my dog has a definite rise and fall to his voice: his deep-throated warning growl when he sees a dog approaching turns into a ridiculously girly, high-pitched squeal of joy when he realizes it's Joey the Husky who's coming. :rolleyes:

 

Mary

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I am a man and my dogs are going to listen and work with my "manly" voice, period!!! In the heat of the moment can you imagine a real man trying to talk girlie to their dog? I can't and would never do it. Not getting excited is different. But my dogs listen to me in my man voice!

 

OK "B" I get it. Thats an aweful lot of exclamation points! I doubt you'd be needing to join one of my OB classes anyhow :rolleyes:

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Okay guys, I think Becca was asking if you would pitch your voice higher if you got a dog in that had been trained by a woman and was used to a highe-pitched voice, not whether you used a higher pitched voice on a regular basis with your own dogs.

 

I have seenJack Knox pitch his voice higher when working in the round pen with newbie dogs who belong to women, so at least he must believe that there's some merit to changing pitch (only if they weren't responding to his regular voice though).

 

Mary,

One of the mistakes I made when starting Twist was to use a long drawn-out "Shhhhhhh!" to speed her up. I learned later that while that will speed them up it will also serve to widen them (just what she didn't need) whereas a series of short, staccato "shh, shh, shh, shh!" would have served my need to speed her up while perhaps working to draw her in a bit instead. I haven't trained huge numbers of animals, but I tend to agree with the source you cite regarding tones in training.

 

J.

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For the most part none of the dogs will work real well for Wayne, I think in his case the issue is two fold, first when he gives a command he throws it at the dog like a rock, the dog either runs through it or ceases up. The second issue is that he does not follow through to hold them to the command he gives them, so they just freelance and he stands there turning red throwing out commands like rocks, hoping that on will stick..never seen a rock stick. I was trying to get him to try something the other day that worked, but, he is not willing to make the effort to change. I suggested that when he gives the command to the dog to put "will you please" in front of it, when he did that the dogs came to life for him, I guess the change was in tone and influx (is that the right word). Then when he wants to give a correction, throw the verbal rock. He plans on just putting the dogs on whistles, but I warned him, if he fails to correct them when they blow off his whistles he's going to be in the same boat, standing there turning red blowing the shit out of the whistle, once they figure out that he's not going to do anything about it, it will be back to freelancing.

 

I understand why he fails at correcting them, he's not real good at covering ground on foot or stopping at the right time, his timing is not good, though he is much better at it on horseback, why he can do it on horseback and not on foot is beyond me. Only thing I can figure is that his mind will take his horse to the right place but not himself, is this a strange phenomenom or has anyone else seen it before?

 

Deb

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For the most part none of the dogs will work real well for Wayne, I think in his case the issue is two fold, first when he gives a command he throws it at the dog like a rock, the dog either runs through it or ceases up. The second issue is that he does not follow through to hold them to the command he gives them, so they just freelance and he stands there turning red throwing out commands like rocks, hoping that on will stick..never seen a rock stick. I was trying to get him to try something the other day that worked, but, he is not willing to make the effort to change. I suggested that when he gives the command to the dog to put "will you please" in front of it, when he did that the dogs came to life for him, I guess the change was in tone and influx (is that the right word). Then when he wants to give a correction, throw the verbal rock. He plans on just putting the dogs on whistles, but I warned him, if he fails to correct them when they blow off his whistles he's going to be in the same boat, standing there turning red blowing the shit out of the whistle, once they figure out that he's not going to do anything about it, it will be back to freelancing.

 

I understand why he fails at correcting them, he's not real good at covering ground on foot or stopping at the right time, his timing is not good, though he is much better at it on horseback, why he can do it on horseback and not on foot is beyond me. Only thing I can figure is that his mind will take his horse to the right place but not himself, is this a strange phenomenom or has anyone else seen it before?

 

Deb

You tell a dog WHAT to do with your BRAIN. You tell a dog HOW to do it with your HEART! Bob

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