ohmidog!

Ray Dobson was losing his hearing. Goblin, rescued from the streets of Puerto Rico, needed a home.

When they were brought together by the National Education for Assistance Dog Service, two problems were solved.

Dobson, Goblin and organizations like NEADS, which trains dogs from shelters to assist the hearing impaired, were the subject of an Associated Press story this week.

Based in Princeton, Mass., NEADS has placed more than 1,300 hearing dogs all over the country since 1976.

“What the dog does for me is hears what I can’t hear,” said Dobson of Orleans, Mass. “She can hear the phone ringing, alarms, knocking on the door, when people call my name.”

The dogs chosen for this job have to have special qualities — often exactly the qualities that land them in shelters.

“The hearing dog is usually the dog no one wants,” says Brian Jennings, who’s been a trainer at NEADS for 20 years. “It’s usually hyperactive, willful, compulsive. They have to be. If the dog wakes you in the middle of the night because the smoke alarm’s going off and you push them away, they have to not give up.”

The dogs are trained to touch the owner and lead him physically to the source of certain sounds.

Trainers look for dogs who are curious about sounds, but also very confident — the kind of dogs that may have driven their original owners crazy with their hyperactivity.

“Sometimes a dog’s weakness is its strength,” Jennings said

NEADS has no physical requirement for hearing dogs. “We’ve had everything from Chihuahuas to German shepherds,” says Jennings, and most of them, like Goblin, are mixed breeds.