Talking to a dog that can't hear me

I didn’t know when I adopted him, but my dog Kluber is damn near 100% deaf. I know what you’re thinking: how could I not know right away that my new dog was deaf?! Well, he didn’t show any signs of having any problems during his short shelter stay, so they, and as a result myself, had no reason to believe that he wasn’t a fully hearing dog. Klubs, as I now call him, is an extremely observant dog when he wants to be and would use his other senses to notice and interact with the world around him. Couple that with the fact that he sharp as a tack doggo sister who already lived with me he could copy and we had a hard time figuring out that there was anything wrong.

It took a good six months for me to become confident that he couldn’t hear me. At first, I thought he was just an idiot who didn’t recognize his own name, which honestly seemed pretty plausible because he can be a huge dummy. Every time I would train Kluber, his pupper sister Darla had to be included; she was also extremely food motivated and knew that training time meant treats. Kluber learned that if he just copied what Darla was doing, he would also get a treat. I also used hand signs along with my word commands from the get go which helped Klubs start to equate certain commands with the hand signs.

It wasn’t until I started to attempt to give each dog separate verbal commands that I started to notice that it wasn’t just his name that he didn’t quite understand. I became more and more frustrated with the fact that my “dumb dog” wasn’t listening to me and for a time actually had to take a step back from training him. We even went to a professional trainer to try and help us get him to listen, but unsurprisingly that didn’t help either. After I had cooled off a bit, I started to observe his behavior more closely. I started to notice that he wasn’t dumb; he was actually incredibly smart when he wanted to be. So it couldn’t just be that he was not wanting to listen to me or couldn’t learn these commands; it had to be something else.

I tried to voice these thoughts with my then boyfriend, who brushed them off telling me that Kluber was just dumb and implying that I was too for thinking this (that’s a whole other story that will be told later). Being a science major, I decided to start experimenting to see if I could figure out what was up. I quickly started to notice that if I gave a command with hand signs and verbal cue, Kluber was able to do it even if Darla wasn’t there to follow. That led me to trying just hand sign cues with him, which he could also do with no problems. I then had to put this thought to the test: give the dogs separate commands, Darla’s verbally and Kluber’s with a hand sign. I was ecstatic when I could get Kluber to come while Darla stayed sitting!

Naturally, I had to test my theory out one last time before I could proudly proclaim that Kluber was in fact deaf and not just dumb. One day, Klubs was laying on my bed staring out the window with his head covered by a curtain. This was it! The perfect opportunity to see if Kluber could hear anything. I tiptoed over to him, stood right above him and screamed about as loudly as I could. Kluber did absolutely nothing. No movement, no reaction, didn’t look at me. Nothing. I then gently touched the bed next to him, he pulled his head out of the curtain and looked at me with such enthusiasm. That was it, that was my proof that Kluber could not hear a thing and this whole time had been learning and listening by watching, not by hearing.

This revelation truly rocked our world. We went from a duo that could communicate poorly and without intention, to a duo that now had our own secret language. I started using hand signs for everything and Klubs picked up on them right away. It worked out really nicely that we also had Darla because I could give her a verbal command that Kluber would copy and show him what hand signal that movement corresponded to. We went from not understanding each other to being able to work together in the blink of an eye!

Now don’t get me wrong it wasn’t, and isn’t, all unicorns and rainbows. It took time to get him to understand all the hand signs and to teach new ones, but we managed and now have a fairly robust list of commands. New problems that I never expected would pop up when we least expected it and we would have to struggle through it to find a solution that would work for a deaf dog. It has definitely taken some creativity and stubborn determination, but we have made it work.

I’ve now had Kluber for over 6 years and to this day have our struggles with communicating. But we are usually able to work through it because we know how to communicate with each other a little better. But Kluber also now knows how to avoid communication: if he’s not looking at me when he’s doing something wrong, he can’t see the sign I’m giving him to stop. This problem I haven’t quite found a solution for yet, but I think that’s how Kluber likes it.