A dog that can’t hear? The resourceful owner of a six-month-old Spanish Water Dog puppy has an idea for how she can still communicate with dog Rafa.
Dogs can do many things better than humans. Running, for example – even the smallest dogs just have two more legs. Smell, of course, even if they sometimes poke their noses into corners from which, as a human being, we will always keep a respectful distance, despite inferior olfactory perception. And, of course, hearing – five times better: Your ears are flexible and you hear in a frequency range between 15 and 50,000 Hertz (humans only manage 20 to 20,000 Hertz).
However, there are also dogs that do not hear anything at all. When Jo le Page bought a seven-month-old Spanish Water Dog puppy on Britain’s Channel Island of Guernsey in June, she quickly noticed that the puppy, named Rafa, didn’t respond to loud noises. In order to be able to communicate with him, the kindergarten teacher began to teach him sign language. In eight weeks he learned nine different signs: “Sit”, “Stand up”, “Look at me”, “Turn around”, “Give your paw”, “Lie down”, “Come”, “Stay here” and “Secure”. At the latter sign, Rafa runs under Jo’s legs, turns around and sits down.
Noisy Daily Mail Rafa now wears a yellow dog harness that reads “I’m deaf please pet me”. He recently started training as a therapy dog to support physiotherapy treatments – he would probably be the first deaf therapy dog in the world. “Most people wouldn’t have bothered to do that,” Jo le Page said. “Initially we thought it would be impossible to train a dog that couldn’t hear. But the training proved all our fears were wrong.” And Rafa can run and smell better than a human anyway.
Read previous episodes of the column here. You can find more good news here.