Recently  I blogged about Otis, a deaf dog being trained by his owner, to very good effect. Becky (from Ohio) and I have exchanged further emails and here is her latest update. Otis is the black-and-white one.

This is our 1st deaf dog but he is a lot of fun. I will say to anyone do not be afraid at all to adopt a deaf dog. They are really just like a hearing dog but it may take more time to teach them, specially if you do not have a hearing dog already in the house.

The other dog is our 3 year old named Buster. He’s a rescue who has helped a lot with training Otis. It is really funny — it is a “monkey see monkey do” thing with these 2 dogs.

When Otis was just 5 months old he won a blue ribbon at the animal charity dogs show of Youngstown, Ohio for best tricks. He is very good mannered when out around people. In my experience with this deaf dog it really takes a lot of treats to teach him, but he learns fast. We use pieces of his food rather than treats.

He now knows how to stay with pushing our hand towards him.

After we fill his dish he knows where he eats at and just sits down in his spot before we give him his food. He also has learned when we put a hand up going back and forth waving at him that it means NO!

When we get ice out of the freezer for our drinks he sits and waits for his ice cube too. He loves them and thinks one is a real treat!

Also we had to take the 40-lb plastic containers of dog food downstairs as Otis had watched us open them to feed him and he was opening them to get his own food. One day we came home and the container of food was on the other side of the room dumped out on the dog bed. This container had at least 30 lbs of food in it.

We had a plastic kids’ gate between our kitchen and living room.Otis had watched us open it to get through and finally he had that down also and was opening the gate himself.

This deaf dog is really smart, more so than many hearing dogs!

 
Here is a book about training deaf dogs: