Training the Hearing Assistance Dog

Hearing dogs are trained to support the needs of severely hearing-impaired people. They serve as their handlers ears and provide the added benefit of companionship. Hearing dogs are trained to alert their owners to common sounds like doorbells, oven timers, smoke alarms, telephones, babies’ cries, the handlers name being spoken or alarm clocks. Hearing dogs make physical contact with their masters, nudging or pawing them to get their attention and are trained to lead their handlers toward the source of a sound if necessary.

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Outside the home, hearing dogs may also perform additional tasks. Hearing impaired people cannot always assess what is behind them or beyond their peripheral vision. A hearing dog is trained to watch for other people coming from behind and the sides and alert the handler that this is happening. Hearing assistance dogs may also be trained in crowd control, finding exits and vehicles or alerting their handler to the approach of machinery or bicycles.

In the home, the most important task a hearing assistance dog can perform, is waking up their person to an emergency or potentially dangerous sound. That means that even in sleep, a hearing assistance dog must be aware of the environment and any changes in it, be willing to wake up and then wake the hearing-impaired owner.

Not every dog can demonstrate the unique ability that a Hearing Dog must possess, and it is a significant decision to train your own Hearing Dog. Training requires a firm commitment, patience, and the ability to work hard and with our program, have fun doing it.

Though the decision to train your own dog is a challenging one, it can also be a rewarding experience. Having a service dog of any type means that you are a TEAM, not a human and a highly trained dog. Students are expected to follow our instructions and advice to be successful. Students must be willing to make a commitment to daily time for care and training of their dog. If you are not willing to commit to following the program's instructions and advice, this type of program may not be a good choice for you.

We have all seen dogs luring us. Most pet dogs learn to lure humans to go to places such as the kitchen or to the door for a walk, or to where their toy is under furniture.
But we think of that behavior as pesty or manipulative. We don't realize that a Hearing Dog is doing the exact same thing: luring us toward a sound or person in order to get rewarded.
This is natural behavior that intensifies through experience. With wolves, I've read that looking over their shoulder at another wolf is an instinctive signal to get that wolf to follow them. Our domestic dogs also do that. So do humans (another wonderful way our two species share signals!)

Marth Hoffman, hearing dog trainer extraordinary

The ability to do a “look at that” with sound is trained just like LAT and just like scent. Gather some noisy things around you. Your iPod, kids toys, squeaky toys, dings, dongs and crashes.

Looking at sound is essentially what a hearing assistance dog learns. Looking and reporting to us!

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