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November 2, 2002 Hearing dog looks out for Paradis resident By Allen Lottinger, Jr. When Dina Stelly comes in from her night shift job, the only thing on her mind is getting a good day’s sleep. Accomplishing that task has been made a little easier for the Paradis resident with the help of Ivy, a “hearing dog” she recently purchased from a company in Washington D.C. which specializes in training dogs to help people who are deaf or hearing impaired. Stelly has had hearing problems since age 10 as a result of a bout with the measles and at age 15 was officially diagnosed as hearing impaired. Since then she has relied on hearing dogs to help her with everyday tasks around the house such as hearing the stove timer, fire alarm and other sounds which could develop into emergency situations if not responded to. “It is important to be alerted if there is an emergency and no one else is home to hear the alarm,” noted Stelly, who is on the verge of being officially deaf with only 20 percent hearing without her aid. The threshold for deafness is 10 percent. Stelly, who works as an operation/production technician at Occidental, flew out to D.C. to purchase Ivy on Oct. 1 and stayed in the area until Oct. 9 receiving training from “Dogs with a Mission”, the company she purchased the dog from. The non-profit company acquires their dogs from shelters and breeders after testing them for intelligence. Her particular dog was originally trained for a girl on a respirator and subsequently had to be re-trained to respond to the sounds in Stelly’s home. The re-training took about a week to complete at the company’s D.C. headquarters the week that the sniper took his first victim down the block from Stelly’s hotel. “We spent a lot of time looking over our shoulders while walking around,” she said. Upon returning home, Stelly wanted to share the story about the service provided by hearing dogs. “Most people know they are something special because of the orange vest worn by the dogs,” she noted. “But they don’t know what it is they do because there aren’t too many of them in the area.” The cost of a hearing dog is around $150. The price includes training and implanting the animal with a computer chip in case she is lost. Allen Lottinger, Jr. can be reached at AllenL@heraldguide. com or at 758-2795, ext. 217.
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