I’m not sure, really. He was Deaf-O as long as I knew him. It just seemed such a natural fit, I never thought to ask. I shall ask my friend the next time I see her.
[hijack]By the way, we named our most recent adoptee Daphne and my husband kept calling her Dorothy at first. Now he calls her Mama since it turned out she was pregnant when we got her from the Humane Society. Whoopsie! Now we’ve got three little Hungry, Hungry Hippos in addition to our other three Cats from Hell. One of these days I’m going to get around posting some pictures of them.[/hijack]
My parents had a shih-tzu that first went deaf, then went blind in his old age. He still got along well enough when he was deaf. The one behavior that did change when he went deaf was that when my parents left the house he would lay down in front of the door and wait there until they returned, so that he wouldn’t miss them when they got back. If he was awake, he sniffed like crazy at the bottom of the door hoping to catch the whiff of mom and dad coming up to the door.
Later on, he went blind and he became pretty pathetic and was prone to panic if he lost track of his place in the room or his people. His nose worked well enough that he could find his food dish and his “spots”.
"In 1972, over Hellman’s fierce protests, the executorship of Dorothy’s estate passed to the NAACP. Ownership of the Parker literary property belonged to Martin Luther King during his lifetime… Hellman angrily called Dorothy ‘that goddamn bitch.’ Hellman claimed that she had ‘paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts – all with the promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. At my death, they would pass to the NAACP. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!’ "
Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What fresh hell is this?, p. 413
"Dorothy Parker had bequeathed her estate to [Martin Luther King]… He was surprised because he had never met her… In 1972, over Hellman’s fierce protests, the executorship of Dorothy’s estate passed to the NAACP. Ownership of the Parker literary property belonged to Martin Luther King during his lifetime… Hellman angrily called Dorothy ‘that goddamn bitch.’ Hellman claimed that she had ‘paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts – all with the promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. At my death, they would pass to the NAACP. But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!’ "
Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What fresh hell is this?, pp. 410-413
In her last few months, my cat Fluffy (Hey, I was six when I named her!) had a stroke that left her deaf and blind. As long as she was able to follow a familiar path, she was fine.
And my aunt’s cat (another white, blue-eyed cat-they’re almost always deaf) is deaf and she manages just fine. Hell, they let her outside. (She never leaves the backyard)
I had two consecutive white blue-eyed cats growing up (Speejinx and Canada), both deaf. Both could beat the besheezus out of any dog we ever had, though, and both were excellent hunters (mice, squirrels, rabbits [especially the caged ones], birds- even once a bison… okay, I made that one up).
I have a dog (baby pics- was he ever that small?) who is, I think, very near-sighted. It’s actually convenient since he’s mostly-Jack Russell (VERY high energy) and if he sees a rabbit or a cat or another dog outside he’s off and running, but he rarely sees them if theyr’e more than ten feet in front of him.
I have a deaf kitten, Marlee. White with blue eyes of course. She’s very sweet and not afraid of anything. It’s kind of nice to have a cat that won’t freak out and run away scratching you in the process when you happen to sneeze while it’s laying on your chest. She just looks at me like “stop moving! I’m trying to sleep here”. She does meow loudly and rather insistently at times. If she’s sleeping and I wake her up she makes this cute little happy trilling noise. There’s really not many problems with her being deaf, since cat’s don’t listen to you anyway.
