Snow Deafness!

26th January 2013 by Gillie McNicol

Cant really let this pass without writing something about how the snow affects my dogs! For the past four days, I have taken the youngsters, Zolli and Zeaver to different snow covered walks. They are normally pretty biddable thanks to excellent training walks with several other dogs and Louie Adshead in control at Trainthatdog.com. They will stay in the car with the door open for as long as I want before jumping out, they will sit in an open doorway if told and wait until released, they will sit and stay for as long as I ask them and they walk to heel pretty well both on and off the lead. They even stay close to heel when we take them with the horses! However the snow has turned them completely deaf! Is this snow deafness or is it simply adolescence, they are nearly two years old so could they be trying to be independant? Zolli has only just had her first season and Zeaver is on her 2nd.

Three days ago my friend Tracy and I went for a walk in the snow locally with her English Setter, Beanie. We walked for about a mile and the dogs were rushing around here and there as usual. Then realised that Zolli and Zeaver were not checking where we were at all, but as we were local to home we did not worry too much. Finally Zolli appeared in the distance, but she had clearly lost our scent in the snow because she was going backwards and forwards, but she came when I blasted the whistle. No sign of Zeaver and Zolli had blood all around her nose! It was clearly not her blood, so we started to walk back the way we had come with Zolli and Beanie. We were to meet our hay delivery in the horse field, which kept me occupied as I was getting increasingly worried, they had never gone off for more than a couple of minutes before. finally about an hour after she had disappeared, she came running across the field and joined me seemingly genuinely quite worried, so hoped that would be that.

Next day, we went to Canada Cottages locally and walked through the snow for a while, again, they took off after a couple of deer and they were gone for far too long. then I heard the dreaded screech of brakes as a car on the road at the top of the track skidded to a halt clearly trying to avoid my dogs. The dogs both came running back pretty instantly and Zeaver looked pretty shaken. As it happened it was a friend who had nearly squashed them and he rang me saying he was pretty sure he had hit one of them as they had shot straight across the road in front of him! Fortunately both were fine, except Zeaver had black gunk around her neck where she had obviously tried to clean the bottom of his truck! She glued to my heel for the rest of the walk!

Yesterday they went flying off into the woods and Zolli came back hopping lame.. so all in all our walks over the past few days have been a bit eventful!

I just wondered if anyone else had experienced “snow deafness” in their dogs.