A chip of the old block... :thumbsup:
I had a great Dalmatian when I first got married... She was so perfect for our family and I would love to get one related to her... However I think she was from one of the puppy mills in Missouri... So was the other one that we had at the same time... They were both from Missouri and born one day apart, with one brown eye and one blue eye, but on opposite sides... We got them from the same pet store in Detroit right after we got married... Different parents, but they were such a great match for each other... I called them bookends as when they sat together the same color eye was on the inside with the opposite one on the outside...
The male turned out to be deaf, but that was no handicap to him as he keyed off the female who was the dominant one... I didn't know he was deaf until he was 9 months old and my dad was watching them while we were moving from Arkansas to Michigan and he took him to the vet and had his hearing tested while he was there... He was completely deaf, with no ear drums formed from birth... But he picked up on training just as fast as the one that could hear as I trained them both with voice commands and hand signals at the same time...
I would flash the flood lights on and off two times to call them in from the back yard at night... I was able to train the female to "go get Buster" and she would go find him in the yard and let him know it was time to come in...
Buster had good peripheral vision, one time we had some chicken from a local chicken joint and we put the leftovers on the kitchen counter... They raided the leftovers and when I was coming down stairs, saw them in the kitchen and buster caught me in his peripheral vision and dropped his chicken and hi-tailed it to their bed in the living room... The female kept eating and as I walked in the kitchen said, "You're busted"... She dropped the chicken and made a round to the living room, passed up their bed and tried to go back through the kitchen and pick up the chicken again... I told her that she was busted again, then she went to the living room to their bed and hung out with Buster...
Another time she was being stubborn and was not listening to me... Buster did, and I told her, "He's deaf and he listens better than you"... She didn't know how to respond to that when I called her out...
They were great dogs...