Have you ever wondered how unilateral deafness might impact learning? What a dog with vision impairments might face? Angelica shares her experiences with both and shares her story in this episode. 

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau, and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Angelica Steinker here with me to talk about training vision or hearing impaired dogs. Hi, Angelica. Welcome to the podcast.

Angelica Steinker: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy and excited to be here. I'm super excited to talk to you about this.

Melissa Breau: It's a super interesting topic. Just to get us started, do you want to just share a little bit on kind of who you are, who your dogs are, maybe a little bit about your background and what you do today?

Angelica Steinker: I'm a certified dog behavior consultant. I have three different certifications in dog behavior consulting, really addicted to science, and, of course, dogs. And I own a dog school in Florida called Courteous Canine, and I have three dogs currently. A border collie, a border collie, papillon cross, and a papillon.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. So a little bit of every. The papillon, the border collie, and then the mix of the two, huh?

Angelica Steinker: Yes. Small, medium, and large. So how did you originally get into the dog robe? Well, the story I like to tell is, when I was little, I begged my parents for a brother or sister, and they gave me a dog. And that was the beginning of, you know, the end, I guess.

Melissa Breau: That's funny. So you're fairly young, then, when you kind of got interested in dogs and got into the dog world? Yes, I got into. I became a professional dog trainer when I was in college. And then after graduate school, I started my business formally. What led you to kind of dog sports specifically?

Angelica Steinker: I think just like everybody else, you know, I loved it at the time. There weren't a whole lot of dog sports other than obedience, and that didn't look, you know, a lot more fun than watching paint dry. So agility looked super fun. And the moment I did a little bit of it with my Jack Russell, I was addicted.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. So kind of what we're here to talk about, what got you into training vision or hearing impaired dogs?

Angelica Steinker: Well, it was not by choice. It just happened. Right. Like it does to many of us. So I had a dog, and I just was really struggling with his verbal cues, and he was a border collie, and I trained to other border collies, and I was like, I don't understand. This one's different, and that's okay, but, you know, could there be something wrong? And I started to notice that he would mostly turn in one direction if there were noises. And, you know, well, there you have it. Maybe he can't hear out of one ear. And then I found out he was hearing impaired.

Melissa Breau: Interesting. So was it just the kind of turning in one direction? What other types of symptoms might somebody see?

Angelica Steinker: Well, you know, it's one of those things where hindsight is 2020. So at the time, I didn't really understand the warning signs, but he wouldn't be able to find me on, like, if you did, you know, that classic game of hiding, he wouldn't be able to find me.

So, like, I tucked behind a tree or I laid down underneath the tunnel, and I call him. He would not be able to find me based on that. That was one of the red flags, that something might be wrong. And then he seemed to, like, just have a highly exaggerated starter response to noises, and that didn't seem to be subject to any sort of learning. Like, you know, if he was sleeping, for example, and he woke, he would be like, oh, my God, what just happened?

And I'm like, I walked into the room the way that I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and, you know, stuff like that. So. And with the visually impaired dog, it was, you know, a whole other bag of stuff, but it was more proprioceptive, and I was attempting to do agility with him. And that's definitely a way to figure out your dog can't see as well as other dogs.

Melissa Breau: Can you elaborate a little more on that? Just, you know, what was it you were seeing in agility? That you were like, something's not quite right here.

Angelica Steinker: So it wasn't just in agility with the visually impaired dog. Again, hindsight is 2020, right? I hadn't parented a visually impaired dog before, and that's why I really wanted to do this podcast and really share this information with you guys, because it was such a struggle with both dogs.

If you don't know that they have an impairment and. And you're having difficulty communicating with them, it's very lonely. And there's a lot of people out there who might use that to attempt to criticize you, and there's not a lot of people out there who know how to help. So I'm hopefully going to contribute some information to some people to be of help. But with the visually impaired dog, for example, he couldn't learn hand targeting, a very simple, basic behavior.

Like, why can't he learn to hand target? And, you know, my philosophy has always been, every dog is different. You train the dog that you have. And if he doesn't want to hand target, I thought maybe it was some sort of aversion to touching his nose to my hand, although he didn't appear to have issues in that, you know, way. But I just kind of was like, okay, he doesn't want to hand target, so we don't hand target.

And then he had a really hard time with anything that was body awareness oriented, you know, like anything with a prop. Obviously, target stick was a problem. Shaping was a problem, like he just had, in hindsight, a very different perception of the world that until I could see like he does, I was not as effective in communicating with him.

Melissa Breau: So once you maybe had a suspicion that something was going on, did you go to your vet and say, hey, I think this is it, or was it more of a back and forth conversation, or what did they do to kind of confirm that?

Angelica Steinker: Yes, we've got a vision impairment here. Yes, we've got a unilaterally deaf dog.

Melissa Breau: Talk me through some of that.

Angelica Steinker: So with the vision impairment, it was a process, and it was not fun. Initially. I thought, well, maybe he has some sort of orthopedic issue. And that seemed like a logical thing to outrule. So we saw, you know, a rehab that, like, all of us use. And she was like, no, he is rock solid.

He has some sore muscles, like a normal, active dog, sport dog, but there's nothing here that is a problem at all. And he. He wasn't ever lame or anything like that. So that, you know, ultimately made sense. So then pretty much ruling all those other things out, it had to be vision, right? Like, that was kind of the only thing left. So I took him to a board certified veterinary ophthalmologist, and sadly, the person was not very interested in, I think, actually listening to what I was saying and just said, you know, I think your dog has the retina is not normal, and your dog's going to be blind in a year.

And I spent three months crying and come to find out he does not have pra, because I took him to another clinic, a university veterinary school, and they had all the instruments to actually check the retina and to conclusively determine that he has not had pra. And they were actually able to check his vision.

I want to add that they did not want to do this. They pretty much kicked and screamed. I brought them chocolate. I bribed them with everything I could to get them to do it. And then they reluctantly told me that he is farsighted. And they said that several people did the exam, and they all concluded he was farsighted. And honestly, that was not sufficient data, because what I learned eventually, through doing more research and help with Nancy Guys, who's just an awesome person and has a beautiful Facebook group, early takeoff network, eto network for dogs that have visual impairment, that do agility, is that, you know, I really needed to find a pediatric ophthalmologist, so I found a pediatric ophthalmologist, and she agreed to see my dog after hours.

And she is the one that was really helpful to me. She explained that my dog has esotropia, which is improper pupil alignment. So his pupils actually cross. So he's cross eyed, and the brain does not, like, cross eyed, and so the brain will turn off one eye, and hence you have monocular vision. Well, gee, I don't know. Would you be able to, like, perceive where depth is if you have only one eye working?

When she told me that my life changed, my world changed and particles world changed, it was incredibly empowering, and then it was wonderful. The other thing that I was able to also, through Nancy Guys and Clean Run, has a really great magazine on early takeoff that was a wonderful resource, and this was pure luck. I found a visio motor therapist. So this is a person that works with nonverbal children and does visiomotor therapy.

Now, the key was that she was working with very low functioning children. Most visio motor therapy is for kids that need to read, for humans that need to read. And so a lot of it centers on reading, which would be very useless for a dog, was working with nonverbal children. She was working with children that are just trying to use a language board. So this is really ideal.

And she. Oh, my gosh, she changed our life so much. I can't go into all the detail of what I learned because it would take up the whole entire time of the podcast on its own. But it was amazing. And I'm very grateful to Denise Stipe for her amazing coaching and her amazing help. And to answer the question, in terms of the hearing impaired dog, it's very simple.

We have a bear test out there, and all we did was get Zoomy bear tested, and it came back one flat line, nothing, no data. And the other one was hearing. So that was very simple and incredibly helpful.

Melissa Breau: Now, with your dogs, are those things likely genetic? Are they just, you know, abnormalities that just, you know, kind of unique to that dog? Do you know?

Angelica Steinker: I don't think we know. In the last time I looked at hearing impairment, there are three known causes the Merle gene, the piebald gene and unknown. Obviously Zumi was a border collie, so he had the piebald gene, but like, whatever. Lots of border collies have piebald genes and don't have a hearing impairment. You know, I think stuff just happens to. I don't think it's kind to blame anybody. And with particle. I do know that he was stuck in the birth canal. So I suspect that it may not at all have been anything genetic. It just, you know, he just got stuck and that may have possibly damaged the vision part of his brain.

Melissa Breau: Really interesting stuff. Can you just talk a little bit about the difference since you've had both, you know, a dog with vision impairment and a dog with some hearing impairment, can you talk about kind of the differences in training them or the differences between them and maybe other dogs that you've had? Can you dive into that a little bit?

Angelica Steinker: Yeah, I'd love to. It's totally different and it's really hard with Zoomy, you know, like, I was used to border collies. I'd had several border collies and, you know, they're extremely verbal and, you know, they're often one trial learners. He required many more repetitions. I am not joking. Like, if a normal dog had it proofed and solid with 200 reps, he would take 2000.

And I don't think that there was anything going on other than he, like, I don't think he was mentally impaired. I think that he had sensory integration issues. I think that he had difficulty making sense of the world because no one could talk to him and tell him, hey, look, you can't hear out of one ear. It seemed to me like there was this fundamental distrust of his senses.

To some degree, he expected to be surprised. And he was very soft, what we trainers call, you know, a soft dog, and very sensitive. He would easily stress despite, you know, I had at the time, two other border collies that would not be like that. So I would say, well, I wasn't the variable because my other border collies were able to offset stress and Zoomy had a much harder time.

But I learned, you know, to just persist. And like, in agility, we learned to make the. If we used verbal cues, to only use them sparingly and then I spend a lot of time training them. So you learn how to compensate. There are ways to do it. You know, you use a release cue and you don't name any of the obstacles and you use left and right and you name the contacts.

And that's what I did and, you know, and then of course I had to release off the contact at the time. Two on, two off was the big thing. So you just learn how to help them.

Melissa Breau: What about particle?

Angelica Steinker: So with particle, um, my heart was broken because I spend all this time training agility and I feel like, you know, I, I teased him. I did all this foundation training for agility and then I, and then come to find out like, he can't do it.

Like it's not safe. So with particle, he had the, the classic early takeoff which means he took off too early in front of the jump and then he would tick it with his hind legs. And I just, no amount of jump shoot training. It was very fascinating. I'll share this. Like, if you put him in a jump shoot and you back chained it, he could do it. Like, I am amazed at what this dog can do physically when he is significantly visually impaired.

He continues to amaze me. He can do weaves. How did I teach him to weave? I put his face next to the first pole. Why? Back chained it. But then when I had all twelve, I put his face next to the first pole and I told him weave and he just did the pattern for twelve poles and was done with it. Right. So then how did I teach him entrances?

Well, that's only taken 15,000 years. And he can only do an entrance from certain angles. You know, you can't, there's just not, he can't really do it, but he can do enough to be exercised and have good quality of life. I taught particle how to do a teeter backwards because doing it forwards was not going to be a safe thing no matter what. I tried. I tried to teach as a walk, like a herding cue, you know, like walk, wait, walk, wait, walk, wait.

But the moment I'd say, okay, you'd be like giant unsafe walk. So I just decided, you know what, let's just do it backwards. So he knows teeter backwards. He can do tunnel forward and backwards. So you just make the best of it. And is he ever going to be able to compete in agility? No, most definitely not. It's not reasonable and I don't think it would be safe.

And his safety is first and foremost. But we have a lot of fun together. He does do dock jumping. Another super interesting thing about particle is one of the big things when you tell people he's low vision, he's visually impaired, people go, well, you can do scent. And as Stacy Barnett will tell you, they use their eyes when they're searching. And let me tell you, teaching him scent was, whoo.

Not for the faint of heart. It was very, very difficult. Shadows were huge issues. Huge issue. I mean, same thing in agility if there's a shadow. Same thing in dock jumping. If there's a shadow anywhere, I'm probably toast. My dog's probably not going to be able to do anything that he normally can because he cannot perceive the difference between a solid object and shadow. He does not understand that fundamentally, especially if it's bright light.

So I had to teach my dog to weave in the shade with no sunlight and then gradually increase the times of day to more light, and then gradually move the weave poles into full light and all this kind of stuff, things that we normally never do, you know, but, hey, it makes you more observant. It teaches you to be a better trainer, ultimately. So I'm very grateful for what I've learned.

Melissa Breau: Now, I know you've had Particle. You mentioned, you know, slow vision, vision impaired, and Zumi, who is unilaterally deaf. Have you had experience also with completely deaf dogs?

Angelica Steinker: So I own a dog school, and at my school we've had lots and lots of deaf dogs, and it's really fascinating. A lot of people don't realize that a deaf dog, in many ways, is easier to train than a hearing dog because you no longer have auditory distractions.

So, yes, you have some serious safety concerns with deaf dogs in terms of recall and having them off leash and them being safe, but they're really easy to train because especially when you, like me, work with pet people, and they go, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. They don't hear that. So that entire problem is solved. And if they give a hand signal, they tend to just hold that and not repeat it.

So the deaf dog training I find really easy and smooth, and they don't have any origin of sound issues. They don't have any sort of exaggerated start response spots. All of those things are gone with Zoomie, from the day that I got him to the day that he passed into doggy heaven, he woke up with a massive startle, and it broke my heart. I always tried to help him and reduce that, and I was never successful.

I tried to Helen Keller it and take his little paw and make a sound, bah, bah, bah, on his paw so that he could feel my breath and hear the sound, but he never, there was no. He had no concept of it. He couldn't. Or I was just not good enough of a trainer to reach him. I didn't find the right way, but he never understood that. And with Particle, he also has an exaggerated startle because I think he doesn't trust his visual data, which makes sense because it's impaired.

And I will say that a lot of things are improving. I'm not going to delude myself that he's ever going to be able to fully compensate for his visual impairment, but he is amazing and just. I just adore him and it's so much fun helping him and me learning how to help. How old is he now? Particles? Four. Okay, so you guys have quite a bit of time, probably, to experiment a little bit and see what else you can find to work together and do things together.

Melissa Breau: That's exciting. Okay, so you've mentioned agility in here. You've mentioned some doc in here. You maybe mentioned nose work a little bit. Is it common? Are these types of dogs able to compete successfully in dog sports? Do you kind of ask for accommodations? Do you provide them with accommodations? What might they need? What do they need? Can you dive into that aspect?

Angelica Steinker: Sure. So with Zoomy, you're a disc dog person, too. And what I noticed with him is he had to have a white disc. Like, he could not switch to a different color disc. Like, I don't understand what was going on with that. But if I was doing, you know, like, I dabbled in freestyle with him. If I did freestyle with him, I had seven white discs. They could not be any different color at all. That was it.

And he was phenomenal. I mean, Zumi was an amazing athlete. We did rally. He did very well in rally. He did amazing in disc. He was more ambitious in disc than I was. He loved it. He was phenomenal at disc. I mean, he was really exceptional. And then I did agility with him and he did well with that. He did have, sadly, some orthopedic issues. Nobody's fault. But he had to have one muscle of his quadricep removed.

And, you know, obviously, if you get an entire, one muscle of the quadricep that has four muscles removed, that's going to give you some physical problems. And so he had some compensatory shoulder issues and stuff. But when he was physically able, he was great. And once I knew he was unilaterally deaf and I did a deep dive and I got some help from people who were like, oh, yeah, it's way harder training a uni dog than, you know, a death dog.

And they did like, knowledge dumps for me. It was. It was okay. I mean, what I would say, you have to realize that they can't determine the origin of growling. So they have some social skills deficits. So if a dog growled near Zumi, he would put himself in a corner face first and just kind of shut down because he couldn't tell who it was. But he lived with other dogs, and he was okay living with other dogs and then with particle.

It's really fascinating. He also has social skills deficits. If it's a large white dog, like there's a large white great Dane right next to him, he's okay, because they're white and they're huge, and he can see them and. But most dogs are not large white grey Danes, unfortunately for him. Unfortunately. And there's a lot of small black dogs out there, and they are particularly terrifying. And the fast moving dogs are more scary.

But he can be off leash with other dogs. He lives, as you know, with two other dogs, and he has fun with them. He is a rough player because he doesn't understand fundamentally proprioception, no matter how much I try. And if you were to greet him, he would be very effervescent in his greeting of you, because he doesn't really understand where he ends and you begin. But I love it and I value it and I appreciate it, and I think it's one of the most endearing traits of my particle.

Melissa Breau: What other things do you maybe consider when you're looking at these dogs? Do you have other tips or tricks maybe for living with them successfully? So I would say, like, never blame the dog, always adjust your training. I would say, if you're not having success, it's not evidence that you need to climb the ladder of any sort of aversive stimulation. It's evidence that you need more data, that you need more input and mentoring.

And, you know, my success with Zoomie and Particle, despite their impairments, it took a village to get those successes, and there's nothing wrong with that, and it actually makes it a lot more fun. And my hope is that this podcast will help other people out there, maybe consider that their dog has some sort of impairment and make the effort to find a pediatric ophthalmologist to take a look at their dog's eyes.

Because veterinary pathologists, veterinary ophthalmologists are more interested in pathology. They want to, you know, they want to look at disease, and they're busy people, and they don't have time, and they don't have training in assessing vision. So that's really the only path to getting an answer.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, I can see how that would be a very different process than, you know, when you're just trying to determine if there's a disease at the root of it, then, like, okay, what? Where are we on the scale?

Angelica Steinker: Right. Like, those are very different from a problem solving perspective. Yeah, it's really fascinating. I've learned so much about vision, and I really would love to learn more. Like, for example, athletes have this higher level vision, right, that they use, like, it's vision that is for their sport. And that is, you know, supremely timed and they're visually assessing, you know, very precise data.

And I wish I could know more about that. And then in the context of dogs, but obviously that doesn't exist. There is a bunch of research out there on dogs. Well, I shouldn't say a bunch. A handful of studies. And then there's some on cats. Also, siamese cats apparently have a high incidence of esotropia, which is cross eyed. So. But, you know, the thing is, dog sports is a relatively new thing, right?

I mean, look at it in terms of the domestication of dogs in modern times. It's relatively new. And so there's just, there's. There's a void. And I hope that people will become interested. I think it's a great rich area for research because there's not a lot out there.

Melissa Breau: Do we, do we have any information on just how common vision or hearing impairment is in dogs?

Angelica Steinker: I don't think we do. I think there may be some data in certain breeds. I mean, you've probably heard the same thing. I've heard that certain breeds have tendency towards hearing issues and that obviously, Merle to Merle breeding can cause blindness and deafness and stuff like that. But I really don't think anybody's looking at, you know, an overall collection of data. And one thing I learned that's super interesting is you think, like, DNA is the big thing now.

And, hey, we can get DNA and know, like, why does a dog, for example, have pra, which Particle does not have? But sadly, some border collies do. So there are, there's DNA tests out there for pra, but they're breed specific. So if you send your dog's DNA to one of the organizations, you find out your dog does not have Dandy Dinmont pra. Well, that's really helpful when your dog's a border collie, right?

So I didn't know. And then I talked to some of the researchers who are trying to get border collie pra DNA tests, and I just thought, oh, all you need is one dog that has it. You figure out which gene it is. No. They need, like, many many, many dogs with pride, and then they can figure it out. So, you know, it's all very complicated and slow moving. Maybe artificial intelligence will help us. We can hope. Right?

Melissa Breau: Yes. Do you have any maybe final thoughts or key points you kind of want to leave listeners with or even, even any resources you'd point folks to?

Angelica Steinker: Yeah, I'd like to share, like, with the visually impaired dog. Scent is a really great thing to do with them. So I think it's fantastic. But you have to understand that to some degree, if, to lower expectations, there's going to be certain environments that they're not going to be able to search or they're not going to be able to search.

Well, Particle's very reluctant to search inaccessible areas. I've worked on it a lot in. He's a lot better. But if I'm in a brand new environment and there's a weird corner, he's not going to search that corner. And if the judge put the odor in that quarter, my dog's going to miss it. And you just have to kind of, you know, accept that. And however, if there's a search in a field and there's nothing out there, that kind of search might intimidate a lot of kind of people because they'd be like, oh, there's nothing to search.

Right. Particle will excel. He loves the searches where there's nothing. He is amazing because he doesn't have to think about, am I going to bump into something? You know, what is this? Is this an item or is this a shadow or, you know, whatever? I don't know, of course, exactly what he thinks, but he definitely has difficulty processing that visual stimuli. So I think that might be helpful to somebody doing scent with a visually impaired dog.

And. And also, you know, lots of dogs become visually impaired as they mature. My papillon, who presumably had normal vision, is now developing early takeoff. And I took him to the ophthalmologist and they said he's got some early cataract stuff, you know, just from aging, not. Not that anything did anybody did anything wrong. And so it's important that we educate ourselves because if you're doing sports with your dogs, you want to know what might happen as they age in their vision phase.

Melissa Breau: That's so interesting. And it's such a kind of a good point to make.

Angelica Steinker: Right? Like, we think about when we see a behavior change, maybe there's pain, but we don't always necessarily think about, okay, there's a behavior change or a behavior I'm not expecting based on this dog's genetics or based on this dog's breathing or based on whatever and kind of looking at. Okay, is it something like cataracts or vision or something that's starting to go as they age?

It's always worth thinking about those things, right. Instead of just assuming that it's a training problem. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, we all need to not blame our dogs, right? I mean, obviously, Denise is just an amazing person, and having brought so much positive training to such a huge part of the world, I'm eternally grateful to her. But we need to keep pushing that message out there because there's a lot of people training with aversive stimulation and, you know, their dogs might not be able to see.

Their dogs might not be able to hear out of one ear. You know, I do a lot of behavior consulting, and I've run into dogs in my behavior consulting work that I don't know, but I would bet money are unilaterally deaf and have an exaggerated reaction to the doorbell because of that. And, you know, gee, every time I made a noise behind them, they turned in the same direction.

So I'm not a veterinarian and I can't diagnose anything, and I would never do that, but I would say that dog definitely needs to be checked. And some clients choose to do that, and some clients choose not to do that. That most pet clients are not terribly motivated. I think us dog sport people are much more motivated to get down to the truth to figure it out. Yeah.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about all of this, and it was such an interesting topic.

Angelica Steinker: Thank you. I appreciate you.

Melissa Breau: Thank you for what you're doing. Awesome. Well, thank you again, and thanks to all our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided, royalty free by Bensound.com the track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!