Meet adoptable deaf dog Spot who is looking for a loving forever home with someone who works from home or who is retired.
From his caregiver: Sweet Spotticus is 48 lbs of pure lovebug. He adores snuggles and loves meeting every new person and animal friend he encounters. He is a little tentative and shy until someone approaches kindly, and then immediately happy to soak up the pets & love. He gets a little rambunctious when playing with friends at his daycare, so we’re working on training him with a vibration collar to help with recall and redirecting his energy.
Spot came to our family last September (at 10 months old) along with his sister as an emergency foster, to save them from a bad situation: abusive levels of neglect and deprivation. They were being left in a small kennel outdoors 24-7, fed trash kibble once daily in one huge, unwashed bowl, with no shelter beyond one tiny plastic dog-house, no toys, no walks, no training, no enrichment, coated in the reeking filth of the mud-and-waste floor of their enclosure, occasionally being sprayed with a cold hose to break up the fighting that was inevitably sparking up amid those conditions. The smell made me cry when I went to pick them up. I know that for a deaf pitbull mix, his beginnings could have been way worse, so we do feel grateful that he doesn’t seem to have been physically abused in any recurring or extreme violent way. It’s a relief on his behalf, but also means he doesn’t suffer from the kind of extreme reactivity or trauma that so many rescue pibbles endure after horrible starts in life.
We got the dogs resettled and began training at our house, which is when we discovered Spot’s deafness. I took a month off of work last fall to do daily training, and got his sister trained to adoptable levels and found her a good home of her own, and continued training with Spot.
He is wonderful and silly and adored by all who know him. He is funny and clever and affectionate, he loves to cuddle and play, and it truly breaks my heart even writing this listing, but we would never have taken on the responsibility for a deaf high-energy breed if we’d thought it could be a permanent commitment. The idea was to foster for a few weeks in order to train them to be adoptable as good family pets. I started trying to list him for adoption almost a year ago, and many people expressed strong interest, including doggy daycare employees who fell in love with him (two different young hopefuls said they cried over him in the night wishing they could adopt him), but nobody was able to follow through. Now Spot has been with us for a year, and we would keep him if we could, but I have a back injury and a full-time job, and my partner works 70 hours a week running his own business, and we just don’t have the physical or financial resources to keep up with the level of exercise and activity that Spot needs. It’s unsustainable for us and unfair to him.
We’ve been doing 3 days of doggy daycare a week and hiking at least an hour each of the other 4 days, as well as training. The training goes well– he’s very clever and happy to learn– but we’re much further behind than we would be if one or both of us had more time, focus and energy to give him, or the money to have him in regular professional training. He’s still got minor pulling issues on-leash, and because of his deafness he still has a lot of anxiety about being alone, and his recall on off-leash hikes is a work in progress, though he’s making steady improvements in all these areas.
All he needs is a family or caregiver to love him who are either younger and/or more athletic than my partner and I, so that daily or 4-7x-weekly hour-long hikes or sniff-walks are comfortable, and keeping up with frequent doggy daycare and/or training is comfortable financially and logistically. He’s still learning about his physical boundaries and just beginning vibe collar training (in summer of ’24) so although he LOVES children and other dogs, he would do best in a household with calm energy and only kids (or pets!) old enough to learn how to calm him down and reinforce his training. I don’t worry about him being reactive, but for the next year or two I could imagine him getting overexcited and too rowdy for little ones to handle safely.
I work with infants in my home, and I handle it by just being very careful and alert, and always having a barrier like a baby gate or pack n’ play between them so they can interact through that, and it’s very very sweet. He gives them gentle kisses on the hand through the gate and they adore him. When we’re all in the car, he rides with a special car harness-and-tether. I’ve also seen him startle and shy away from a quail, a squirrel, and a chipmunk, on various occasions, and give a curious and gentle sniff to a couple of different cats he encountered by surprise, so I’m pretty sure he’d be fine in a household with cats or mature/calm dogs.
He’s such a dream-doggie and if anything, we love him TOO much not to keep trying to find him his perfect dream-life where he can truly thrive!
Spot’s adoption fee is $150 to a screened and approved home. If you are interested in adopting Spot, please email: ivy.ivy.ivy@gmail.com
