We've been partnered for 6 years now.
How does one describe what it's like to be partnered with a dog that goes everywhere with you, that functions as one of your senses, that knows you more intimately even than you know yourself?
Let me try.
Before I had Itzl, I was an average sort of person with a hearing impairment. I missed a lot of things because I couldn't hear them. I was almost killed because I couldn't hear a warning. I was injured several times because I couldn't hear warnings. I had to be hyper-alert all the time and still missed important, life-threatening sounds. I got so I didn't want to go anywhere alone, be alone.
When my children were still living at home, this wasn't an issue. They were, essentially, my service people. They alerted me to sounds I needed to hear - when they thought of it and weren't busy doing other things. But then they went off to college, and then the military, and I had to face the fact that I would soon be living alone.
Completely alone.
There would be no one to tell me about tornado sirens. No one would alert me to the timer on the oven. No one would tell me the batteries in the smoke alarms needed changing. No one would be with me out shopping to tell me about cars backing up behind me that didn't see me and might hit me (it's happened before...). No one would be there to alert me to police and ambulance sirens while I was driving - or people honking at me. No one would alert me to the distinctive sound of the rattlesnake - a common snake in my area.
Living alone, shopping alone, even gardening alone - this was going to be an issue.
And then came Itzl.
At 8 weeks, he was already trying to alert on sounds. He needed very little direction and training for that. Getting him to be an obedient, well-behaved, well-socialized dog was harder than teaching him to alert to me on sounds.
In the picture above, he's focusing on a clicker. That look on his face here is one he uses to alert me to sounds - he looks at the source of the sound, then, in the picture below, came to me to alert me to the sound. A coworker was clicking off to my left (his right).
And here, he got up to come to alert me to the sound.
Precocious, wasn't he?
See these faces? They all have the same look - "I hear something for you, pay attention!"
Being partnered with Itzl is freedom.
I can shop, eat out, take trips, and even live comfortably in my own home because I trust Itzl completely to alert me to the sounds of life and danger I need to know about.
He's silly, and goofy, and such an anal-retentive this-is-how-you-do-it dog that if he didn't have a real, important job to do, one he knows is essential, he'd be a nervous wreck trying to find work for himself.
I can read his signals almost intuitively. His body language is an open book to me. I can tell by the tilt of his head, the shape of his eyelids, and the angle of his ears how important the sound is.
When he's in his pouch, I can feel when he's alerting. He sort of shrugs, or perhaps it's a chuffing type movement where he expells his breath really hard in short bursts so his ribs jerk against mine and I can feel his head swivel in the direction I need to look. In his pouch, I don't even have to look at him to know I need to check things around me for something others can hear, but I can't.
When he's down, even if he's playing with someone else, he'll stop to come to me if there's a sound I need to "hear" - we'd gone shopping with some friends and were in the car heading to lunch when the noon sirens went off, and he promptly leaned over to nudge me (I was driving). My friends hadn't heard the siren yet - it was still winding up the way mechanical sirens do. I remember how they used to sound, where one would slowly rise in volume as it spun on its pole and then another would join it and a third, and then it would be loud enpugh to be heard over radios and TVs and traffic. So he alerted at the very beginning of the siren - a good thing to know!
He will leap long distances to reach me to alert me to sounds:
He's focused on me, on telling me about noise. And I'm focused on him, aware of his movements and when it's play and when it's an alert. He knows what sounds I want and need to know about and his learning curve for new sounds is remarkably short. He guides me through the day with his alerts.
The relationship between us is closer even than a marriage. He's my remote sensor, best friend, trusted companion, playmate, alarm, and guide.
Itzl lives to be these things for me. When he retires, I know I will never find another service dog as intuitively in tune with me as he is.
We have our own secret silent language that directs our moves.
Together, we dance to the sounds he hears.