Dogs learn to help hearing impaired
By LINDA LOMBARDI
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Published: October 29, 2009
Ray Dobson and the dog he calls Goblin both had a problem.
The little mixed-breed who was rescued from the streets of
Puerto Rico needed a home. Dobson of Orleans, Mass., was losing his hearing.
"My wife saw me kind of dropping out,” he says. "As people get deafer, they get more antisocial.”
Both problems were solved when man and dog were brought together by the National Education for Assistance Dog Service (NEADS), which trains dogs from shelters to assist hearing-impaired people. Based in
Princeton, Mass., NEADS has placed more than 1,300 hearing dogs across the country since 1976.
Goblin does for Dobson what his digital hearing aid can’t.
"What the dog does for me is hears what I can’t hear,” he says. "She can hear the phone ringing, alarms, knocking on the door, when people call my name.”
These dogs must have special qualities, often exactly the qualities that land them in shelters.
"The hearing dog is usually the dog no one wants,” says
Brian Jennings, who’s been a trainer at NEADS for 20 years. "It’s usually hyperactive, willful, compulsive. They have to be. If the dog wakes you in the middle of the night because the smoke alarm’s going off and you push them away, they have to not give up.”
What’s unusual about hearing dogs, says
Kathy Foreman of NEADS, is that they work without being given commands. A guide dog for the blind, for instance, is given a command to go forward, and while it knows to disobey if there’s danger, it’s still initially responding to the handler’s direction. Hearing dogs, by definition, need to do their work when their owner doesn’t know there’s a job to be done.
So, trainers look for dogs that are curious about sounds but also very confident. These may be exactly the dogs that drove their original owners crazy because they were bouncing off the walls, but as Jennings observes, "sometimes a dog’s weakness is its strength.”
The dogs are trained to touch the owner and lead him physically to the source of certain sounds. So that they’ll do this on their own initiative, Foreman says, the secret of training is to make the dog think "it’s a big game, and we are happy to play it with you any time.”
New owners are taught how to keep the dog’s skills sharp, such as praising it for responding to sounds even in unimportant cases.
NEADS has no physical requirement for hearing dogs. "We’ve had everything from Chihuahuas to German shepherds,” says Jennings, and most of them are mixed breeds.
For the hearing impaired, the dogs allow more independence, says
Robin Dickson of Dogs for the Deaf in
Oregon. One client told her that before she had a dog, "I never had time to think, because I was always trying so hard to listen.”
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The only dog program that bothers me is the therapy dog. After buying an airline ticket months in advance, Delta notified me that the now sold out flight may have to bump me because the lady next to me called them and said she may bring her therapy dog and I would loose my seat and there were no seats available that day with any carrier. My prepaid vacation was about to go into the dumpers until I called Delta and said I was diagnosed with heart failure and would declare a handicap with the FAA if necessary. Delta said "No sir, your seat is secure and I'm emailing your boarding pass as we speak."
The heart failure thing is true. Saint Antony's botched a diagnosis and had me with 80 percent congestive heart failure. Of course OU Presby found nothing wrong and I continue my 4-mile run each day.
So the fight went great and the lady wound up not on our flight as I talked with her in the security line as she walked with her dog. She wound up going to another city after her boss changed her business trip. I told her that her dog was beautiful and to have a nice flight.