Training and Communicating with a Deaf Dog

Throughout my personal life and professional career I have worked with, loved, and lived with deaf dogs. Dogs can be born without their ability to hear, or they can lose their hearing later in life due to accident, injury, or just the natural aging process. As far as the training process goes, it is extremely similar to training a dog that can hear. In honor of Deaf Pet Awareness week, I wanted to go over some ways that we can tweak things to make training and communication easier with these special dogs.

Use hand signals.

When we train dogs (or any other species) we tend to teach them verbal cues and visual cues so that they are able to respond to both a word and a hand signal from the owner. However, with a dog that is deaf or hearing impaired, this obviously has to be changed. With deaf dogs we switch to using a hand signal only. This isn’t as difficult or as daunting as you may think. Dogs are visually oriented and tend to respond better to hand signals as a species regardless of whether they can hear or not.

Be proactive.

Management is key to training ANY dog, but it is even more important with a deaf dog. Preventing problem behaviors from being practices and removing temptation before inappropriate behaviors can be learned is key. For example, crating the dog when you cannot actively supervise will prevent destructive chewing, inappropriate elimination, and other unwanted canine behaviors. By increasing our management strategies we can focus on being proactively preventing issues vs. reacting to undesired behavior in the moment.

Be patient.

We can’t manage everything, and dogs and puppies will perform behaviors that we do not want them to exhibit. It is normal for a fair amount of time be spent on redirecting them from an inappropriate activity to one that we don’t mind that they do. For example, if a dog is chewing on furniture, we interrupt this behavior (usually with a verbal cue like “no” or “uh uh”) and calmly redirect them to one of their chew toys. Deaf dogs cannot hear us, so we cannot use words to interrupt unwanted behavior. We will need to physically get up and go to them and calmly redirect them to another task that we deem appropriate. We may need to do this over and over within a short time period. Patience is key!

Be realistic.

Realistic expectations are necessary for living with any dog, and deaf dogs are no exception. Deaf dogs will still need to have their physical need for exercise and mental stimulation needs met, but this may look different than it does for other dogs. If you’ve taken a class with me, you probably already know that I don’t advocate for dogs to be off leash in general. However, I NEVER recommend letting a deaf dog off leash anywhere. This is just too risky for them and jeopardizes their safety.