Target was the easiest puppy
and I believe he was for two reasons. One
reason was that he was deaf, so there was no real issue with loud noises “waking
the baby” so to speak. The other reason
was that coupled with being deaf, he was also the most easy going dog. He wouldn’t care if we pulled the blanket
down over his crate, he would just go to sleep.
As is the case with most new parents, we didn’t really know how great we
had it with Target until we brought home Comet a year later. I will eventually get to the Comet portion of
this blog, but for the time being I will leave you with two words to describe
our first few months of puppy-hood with Comet: Screaming Banshee
To say that I was in love with
Target would be an understatement. I was enamored with him. In the beginning,
the feeling wasn’t mutual. My boyfriend
was the puppy’s favorite, to the point that he would run, in all his clumsy,
puppy enthusiasm past me to my boyfriend.
I would often say as he charged past me, trying to make the front and
the back legs move in the same direction,
“Does he not understand that
he was MY idea?”
It wasn’t until I left my job
a few months later and spent a few weeks alone with him while my boyfriend went
to work that Target began to see the value in mom and her interestingly large
hand vocabulary. It was those weeks that
I spent with him, just the two of us that turned him from a Daddy’s Dog into a
Mama’s Mutt and we’ve been a team ever since.
Anyways, now looking back on
it, I feel like we should have known much sooner about Target’s deafness, but
the seed was planted when we saw our vet for Target’s second set of
vaccinations. Our vet surveyed him
carefully, poking away while Target inspected her for a treat. He didn’t have any issues with the vet as
long as she kept the cookies coming.
“Have you noticed any issues
with his hearing?” she asked me curiously.
“No” I answered. Yes.
If I had been really paying attention yes.
After this appointment, after
the vet had put the thought in my mind everything started to make sense. He slept peacefully through the night, no
matter what was going on. He didn’t
freak out during storms, I often wondered if music or television shows were too
loud for his little puppy hearing, but he never seemed to react. At one point, while playing at my parents’
house my mom had come up behind him and he had snapped at her. Target had received a puppy scolding, which
my mom later felt bad about, we realized she had snuck up on him by accident.
Target would often play way
too rough with our cats and other dogs he would meet on our walks. One day before we picked him up from the
breeders, Target’s mother actually picked him up off of his sister while he was
chewing on her ear causing her to scream.
Puppies learn a lot of their play and how to hold back their bites by
playing with their litter mates. Without
being able to hear her cries, he had no idea he was hurting her.
My training books had taught
me that dogs respond better to physical movements over words, so the best place
to start with puppies was with hand signals (thank god), so it was never
entirely apparent to me whether or not Target was reading my hand signals or
listening to my words.
I had been watching him
closely since the vet had commented on his hearing. My mother’s stories about their deaf sheepdog
sat at the front of my thoughts quite often.
I would sometimes go on a mission and do some “mom recon” to see if I
could prove to myself whether or not he was deaf. I would gasp and point off in one direction
until he looked and then I’d clap behind his head. I would ask him to sit without using our hand
signal, not aware that even at this young age Target had learned to look at our
facial expression and read my lips.
Without a BAER hearing test, I felt there might never be a way to know
100% and we didn’t. Until the day there
was absolutely no question anymore.
I was walking Target down a
very busy street when I heard the sirens of a fire engine screaming up behind
us. Cars pulled over and I tugged Target
to the far side of the sidewalk to make sure we were well out of the way. Target sat by my side looking straight
ahead. The wailing of the sirens did
nothing to phase him at all and he didn’t budge from his spot until the fire
truck screamed past him and he saw the flashing lights.
By the time we took him for
his next set of vaccinations and the vet confirmed it, I already knew. The vet wasn’t surprised, neither was I. I took the news that my dog was deaf the same
way I took my boyfriend telling me we were out of milk and needed to pick up
more, I was disappointed, but I guess we would just do the best with what we
already had.
Little did I know, that sides
would form up very quickly and with puppies, as with babies, people would all
have an opinion.
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