Are you a deaf dog parent that struggles with communicating with your deaf pup? Then the video below is for you.

If you prefer to read about “How to Communicate with Your Deaf Dog” below is a lightly edited transcript from the video.

Hi, thanks for joining us. I’m Terrie Hayward from Positive Animal Wellness and today we’re going to talk about a question that I often get asked which is, “How do I communicate with a deaf dog?”

I did write a book, “A Deaf Dog Joins the Family.” Which might be handy and I also have an online course that’s coming out soon.

But just to give you some of the basics, I came up with an acronym which is CALM and it stands for Communication, Attention, LIMA, and Management. I’m going to explain what those words mean.

Basically, the first step is that you need a mode of communication with your deaf dog so this means that you need to teach and condition a visual or a tactile marker.

A marker, which I’m going to talk a little bit more in-depth about in another video, explains to the dog that the thing that they just did is the thing that has now earned them access to something that they find reinforcing. That allows you to have that dialogue back and forth.

The next part is attention because if a deaf dog isn’t looking at you (certainly there’s tactile to be considered as an option) they can’t “hear” you.

Therefore, we want to teach your deaf dog to actively and consistently check in with you. And we want to make that behavior of them looking back at you something that they do often, something that’s a default, and something that they find reinforcing.

The third component I mentioned is LIMA, which stands for
Least Invasive Minimally Aversive. This means that we want to use positive reinforcement techniques to communicate with
your deaf dog. Further, it means that we want to research and understand and find people to work with, and ways to go about teaching and training, that use these positive reinforcement methods.

Finally, management is an important component when we’re using any type of teaching or training because we want to set up the learner for
success. This means we want to avoid situations where the problem might arise while we’re subsequently teaching what we want the dog to do. And then reinforcing those behaviors so if we can use our acronym of CALM we can certainly have effective communication with our deaf dogs.

Thanks for joining us!