Whistles---An inborn instinct??

[OurBoys]

And of course your walk up tone needs to be sufficiently different from the lie down as to not confuse the dog....

I'm not very good at keeping a consistent tone yet. Hopefully, that will change with more practice but how would (general) you rate different tones vs morris code type of whistling in training a dog? If I don't become as good with a whistle as most on here, would it still be possible to train Jake using the morris code type of whistle?

[desertranger]

This has been some interesting reading. After a days practice I can make the whistle make sounds when I want it to.

[Eileen Stein]

Been doing all the usual stuff to get a down on her BUT today I started her and of course she got excited and blew off the down..had just got done working my other dog..don't know what made me do it but I whistled the down to her..she hit the deck..Picture me in shock..so I whistled her walk up she looks at me and I say walk up..She gets a little pushy I whistle down..she hits the deck.

 

John Holmes in The Farmer's Dog, first published in 1960, wrote:

 

One command which is practically universal is a long shrill whistle to drop a dog at a distance. This I advise you to use for several reasons. Being shrill it carries farther, more so to a dog than to us, as a dog can hear a note so high that it is inaudible to the human ear. Very often, when you want to stop a dog, he is rushing about in excitement and cannot or will not hear you shouting, even if he is quite near. You therefore want a high-pitched, penetrating sound which will make him hear.

 

Many Border Collies 'clap' to a whistle when they have never been taught to do so. This is probably because ( a ) they have been bred for so long to 'clap' to a whistle that it has become more or less an acquired instinct or ( b ) they don't like the high-pitched sound and cower from it instinctively as they do from a harsh tone of voice. Or, of course it could be a combination of the two. Whatever the reason, I have found that Border Collies will 'clap' to a whistle more readily and more quickly than to any other command -- which is as good a reason as any for using it.

 

I thought both reasons he gave were suspect -- the first one seems downright Lamarckian -- but apparently the phenomenon itself is known, and I have occasionally seen it. Certainly the stop whistle is the most uniformly used among all the different whistle combinations that handlers choose. OTOH, if I recall the McConnell piece that I read correctly, she said that a single long drawn out low tone like "Whooaa" was nearly universal across cultures in commanding an animal to stop, and multiple short, sharp tones were nearly universal across cultures in trying to get them to get moving, apparently because those are the reactions animals tend to have to those sounds. Don't know how that fits with the typical shepherd's stop whistle, but then I don't remember her addressing shepherds' whistles specifically in what I read (which was definitely not a dissertation, though possibly an abridgement or an article based on her dissertation).

[mjk05]

One of our dogs has always stopped dead on a whistle- my partner's whistle, sort of a midtone longish whistle made with his mouth, I think. The dog always stops on his feet rather than dropping, but interestingly one of his full brothers also had that natural stop right from puppyhood, and he used to drop to the ground sometimes, and stop in a stand other times. Another full brother has no stop whatsoever.

 

But it does seem to have some sort of genetic basis, because a fair proportion of this dog's pups have a natural stop to a whistle. The one I'm starting now always skids onto her belly, but then her mother is always clapping so I guess that's where that comes from.

[Laurae]

Laura,

If I were you, I'd go ahead and switch him to your come bye whistle. It wouldn't take a lot of effort (you could just go back to balance work or use situations like the one you describe to reinforce *your* come bye whistle), and it would probably be less frustrating for both of you, because you'd be more consistent with the whistle command you can blow better.

 

J.

 

Thanks Julie (and Bob)--that will be easier for me to do, so I'd be happy to switch to my own whistle.