Assistance Dogs Give Help to Hearing Impaired

Ray Dobson and the dog he now calls Goblin both had a problem.

This photo taken Oct. 22, 2009 shows Ray Dobson and his hearing dog, Goblin, near Dobson's home in...

This photo taken Oct. 22, 2009 shows Ray Dobson and his hearing dog, Goblin, near Dobson's home in Orleans, MA. Goblin, rescued in Puerto Rico on Halloween, was trained through NEADS (National Education for Assistance Dog Services) to act as Dobson's ears. She jumps up on him when the phone rings or when he needs to be alerted of a sound. (AP Photo/Julia Cumes)

(AP)

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 anti-social."

Both problems were solved when man and dog were brought together by the National Education for Assistance Dog Service, which trains dogs from shelters to assist the hearing impaired. Based in Princeton, Mass., NEADS has placed more than 1,300 hearing dogs all over 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."

The dogs chosen for this job have to 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 unique 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 who 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."