Our dog, my ears when I need him.

I have a severe hearing loss and wear hearing aids. My hearing is so bad that I can't hear any normal conversation, can't hear the TV, traffic or any other of your everyday sounds. I can though, just about, hear a dog bark.

I'm still operating in the "hearing world" most of the time, i.e. relying on my ears to communicate. I'm not deaf and Rolo, our Labrador, is not a trained hearing dog. But he does help me out from time to time.

Even though I need my hearing aids to be able to hear anything it is often nice to leave them out for a bit of quiet time (well, quiet if you ignore the tinnitus) and just to let the ears breath a bit with nothing in them. I like to go "no ears" for at least an hour after having a shower and quite often when I'm working from home I will leave them out for a while.

Which is all great until I missed parcels being delivered a few times.

So now we've trained Rolo to bark when someone is at the door, not agressively but he gives it plenty of noise so there's no chance that I will miss the delivery now.

If you are interested in finding out about properly trained hearing dogs who do really amazing work then check out a charity that is pretty local to me, called Hearing Dogs For Deaf People. They have been training dogs since 1982 and currently have over 900 in the UK who are working hard to help their deaf owners. It's an amazing charity and the dogs make a real difference to the lives of the people they are partnered with.

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