Hearing Dog Training

(Note from MH: Jack's Hearing Dog Clover Belle is a gentle glossy black Cocker Spaniel mix. She is now 14 years old.)

Recently a young girl stopped me in the store and asked me about my Hearing Dog. My answer was the usual litany, "She tells me when the phone rings, someone's at the door, my wife calls my name, etc.." Then when I got home, I got to thinking about it again. There's so much more to having my Clover Belle than that.

I think the biggest help to me is that I live without so much fear. In a study I read when I was in college, I learned that us senior citizens live a life in much more fear than other people. I'm 220 lbs., and 5'10" tall. Not much scares me. I don't think that I lived in a terrible state of fear before Clover came into my life. It was more like a constant kind of anxiety. Like the fear of the unknown we all experience. With Clover around, there is little that goes on that she doesn't tell me about, and I have felt more comfortable in day to day life. It ultimately goes far beyond that.

I have always been an avid camper, and used to backpack at least
once a month. Out in the wild of the High Sierras, I came across many
kinds of wild animals, and never had any bad experiences. The wild
sort of separates us from dangerous animals, but now that my main
outdoor stuff means mostly just going camping, I'm more likely to
come into contact with animals that don't really fear humans in quite
the same way. I must be more on guard.

On one such trip a couple of years ago, we arrived at our favorite camp site up in the Western Sierras just after dark. This place is very secluded, and we seldom see any people in the 9 days we camp. As usual Clover was out sniffing around while I unloaded my truck, when I saw her alert with a point up a near by hill. I sent one of my grandkids to get a flashlight, and sure enough, when I flashed the side of the hill, I saw the eyes of a mountain lion just light up. I was most afraid for the children, and the dogs we had with us, but Clover's training is such that she is not supposed to do anything but tell me. The other two dogs belonged to my daughter and her husband. They wanted to head up that hill, but Clover growled at them to make them stay back. I had everybody load back into the RV, and I grabbed my shotgun. I fired two shots in the general direction of the large cat, and it skedaddled back up the mountain.

I think the lion was actually coming in to nab one of the dogs, and those two Australian Shepherds would have probably charged that cat. That happening wouldn't have ended well. Instead it became just a part of another adventure. Clover alerted me to the danger, and then stayed by my side until I had everybody withdraw to the safety of the RV.

"At the very least, you would have lost a dog" the Ranger told me a couple of days later,"but you could have lost a kid if one had wandered off just a little bit." We never saw anything but tracks in the ensuing stay there, but every night before I turned in, Clover and I walked the camp perimeter together.

Clover Belle is a city girl, and in that situation she responded
exactly as she was trained to do. She acts the same way at home. If
something, or anything out of the ordinary is going on, she points it
out to me. She never acts with any aggression, as is a dog's nature,
simply because she knows her job. Next time someone asks me what
Clover does, I think I'll say she gives me more peace of mind!