To sign “animal” in American Sign Language (ASL), place your fingertips on your chest and rock your hands back and forth, keeping your fingers in contact with your body. The motion mimics the rising and falling of an animal’s chest as it breathes. From there, individual animals each have their own distinct signs, most of which visually represent something recognizable about the creature.
The Basic Sign for “Animal”
Start with both hands open, fingertips touching your chest near your shoulders. Then bend and straighten your fingers while keeping the tips anchored to your chest, creating a rocking or flapping motion. Some people describe it as looking like wings flapping against your body. Your facial expression stays neutral unless you’re specifying a particular type of animal, in which case mimicking its features can add clarity.
A helpful way to remember this sign: think of an animal breathing. The movement of your hands against your chest mirrors the way a creature’s ribcage expands and contracts.
Common Pet and Farm Animal Signs
Most ASL animal signs are iconic, meaning they visually reference a feature of the animal itself. This makes them easier to learn and remember than many other categories of vocabulary.
- Dog: Pat your thigh and snap your fingers, as if calling a dog to come to you. Some signers just pat the thigh.
- Cat: Pinch your thumb and index finger together near the side of your mouth and pull outward, tracing the shape of whiskers. You can do this with one or both hands.
- Bird: Hold your index finger and thumb together near your mouth, opening and closing them like a beak.
- Fish: Hold one hand flat and move it forward with a gentle side-to-side wiggle, like a fish swimming through water.
- Horse: Extend your thumb and two fingers from the side of your forehead (like an ear) and flap them twice.
- Cow: Place your thumb at your temple with your pinky extended upward, then twist your wrist. This represents a horn.
- Pig: Place your flat hand under your chin and bend your fingers downward repeatedly.
- Chicken: Open and close your index finger and thumb near your mouth (like a beak), then look down and make a pecking motion toward the ground.
Wild Animal Signs
Wild animals follow the same principle of highlighting a defining physical trait, but the signs sometimes involve bigger, more dramatic movements to convey size or ferocity.
- Bear: Cross your arms over your chest and make a scratching motion with both hands, like claws.
- Lion: Curve your fingers over your head and pull backward, tracing the shape of a mane.
- Monkey: Scratch your sides with both hands, mimicking the way a monkey grooms itself.
- Elephant: Start at your nose and trace your hand downward and outward in a long curve, drawing the trunk.
- Snake: Bend your index and middle fingers and move your hand forward in a slithering, S-shaped path.
- Frog: Place your fist under your chin and flick two fingers outward, representing the throat puffing out.
Tips for Getting the Signs Right
Your face matters as much as your hands. When signing specific animals, subtle facial cues help your conversation partner distinguish between similar signs. Puffing your cheeks slightly while signing “frog” or narrowing your eyes for “snake” adds a layer of meaning that makes your signing more natural and readable.
Movement quality also changes meaning. A sign performed sharply can convey something different than the same handshape moved gently. When practicing animal signs, pay attention to whether the motion is smooth (like a fish swimming), repetitive (like a chicken pecking), or a single decisive gesture.
If you’re learning from video dictionaries, resources like ASL University (Lifeprint.com) and SignASL.org host large searchable databases where you can watch native signers demonstrate each animal. Watching from multiple angles and at different speeds helps you catch hand orientation details that static descriptions miss.
Teaching Animal Signs to Young Children
Parents often use simplified animal signs with babies and toddlers as part of “baby sign language.” The sign for “animal,” for example, gets naturally reduced by small children to a simple flapping motion, sometimes with clenched fists instead of open hands. This is completely normal and mirrors the way toddlers simplify spoken words before mastering full pronunciation.
Starting with animals is a popular strategy because kids find them motivating. Signs for dog, cat, fish, and bird tend to be among the first a child picks up, since the iconic shapes are fun to produce and easy to connect to picture books or stuffed toys.
Why Visual Signals Work So Well
If you’re also wondering about using hand signals with your actual pets, the research is encouraging. Dogs respond to visual cues roughly three times faster than to spoken commands alone, according to studies covered by the American Kennel Club. Seeing a person’s gesture was far more effective than only hearing their voice, and visual signals even produced more tail wagging, suggesting dogs find them more engaging.
This means teaching your dog a hand signal for “sit” or “stay” alongside the verbal command can improve response time and reliability. Dogs are naturally more attuned to what you’re doing with your body than what you’re saying with your mouth. Even if you never learn formal ASL, pairing consistent gestures with voice commands taps into the way dogs already prefer to communicate.