Dog whistle

Whistles are a great dog training tool. They are especially popular in training gun dogs and sheep dogs. Historically the reason why the whistle became the main distance control tool was that there is nothing scarier to a wild animal than the sound of a human voice.

Being able to communicate with your dog with a whistle is a great thing and not hard to teach your dog at all. You can replace practically any command with a whistling sound.
You can chose to whistle by mouth, if you know how, that is practical especially because you will never forget to take it with you.... I got my dog trained to both, my word commands and to specific sounds I can whistle by my lips, which is useful, when I am out and about and don't want to scream at him.... I just whistle. I got a different sound for when I want him to come back, different when I want him to just stop and wait for me so I can catch up with him.. and so on....
My dog is nearly 15 years old. Sometimes he can’t hear me shouting after him when I want him to slow down or stop to wait for me, but he always hears me when I whistle....

There is a reason for that. Dog’s ears are better equipped for hearing higher pitched sounds, so they can hear the whistle better than the human voice. It is thought that dogs can hear higher sounds better, because their wild ancestors evolved this higher hearing range in order to hear high frequency sounds made by small rodents they were hunting for.

But obviously, not everyone can lip whistle and in addition, is not as loud so using a whistle so many would prefer to do that. Now all you got to do is chose which dog whistle to buy.

There are many types of whistles used for loads of different purposes, the best known are the referees whistles that are used in sports (like football or hockey) but you don’t want to use those for dog training, they are too loud.
For dog training purposes, the use of ultrasound whistles are more common, they are quieter to human ears so they won’t disturb our fellow humans when out and about in the park with your dog.
You can buy dog whistles on line or in pet shops. They come in many different shapes and sizes, made either from metal or plastic some can even be made of wood or stag horn.
Dog handlers will often have their own dog whistle preference, often using the flat plastic ones, because they lighter and more comfortable to keep in your mouth and leaving your hands free. Many handlers will prefer to have a dog whistle that can emit several different frequencies, which can be useful when you want to handle more than one dog at the same time - each of them can be trained to only respond to their own sound so you can give different commands to different dogs... Others will prefer to use different whistles for different dogs.

Whatever your preference is, it is great fun to teach your dog to respond to it and then show off to your friends how smart he is.