How to Train Your Dog to Understand Pointing

Your dog's capacity to understand pointing is one of many things that is almost unique to dogs, when it comes to animal-human interaction. Most puppies intuitively understand pointing in so far as they will follow your finger's direction and look a short way further in the direction you are pointing. Your dog, however, may seem not have picked up on it as easily, and just looks from your pointing finger to your face in confusion. Even if your dog seems oblivious to the meaning of pointing, you can teach her basic pointing very easily. Teaching your dog to follow the direction of your finger for a longer distance, or to keep going in that direction until she reaches the reward, requires slightly more training but is very achievable for most dogs.

Teaching your dog to understand pointing relies on first getting her to pay attention to you, to look to you for help in achieving a reward, and finally to understand the physical meaning of pointing. Desirable rewards and novel stimuli are both extremely useful in motivating your dog to work towards understanding your meaning. Pointing is a great foundation activity to teach your dog to focus on you and look to you for all sorts of behaviors in the future. It also will make your life with your dog easier, as you can easily communicate the location of all sorts of interesting things. This behavior, once learned, will continuously reinforce itself. It is a lifelong skill worth teaching to any dog.

Gather all sorts of delicious treats, fun and new toys, and novel stimuli. It is a good idea to have lots of sizes, shapes, and colors of reward, so that you can increase the difficulty for your dog by giving objects that are easy to see and find and those that are more difficult. Some dogs benefit from having an extension to your pointing, like a pointer or a stick, at the initial training. For all techniques, it is best to begin training in a distraction free environment before progressing to more natural training locations.