swayze.

I have a yellow lab. His name is Jack and I absolutely love him to death. He greets me, comforts me, and has this incredible ability to make me smile whenever he wants. He is literally the best dog ever. I have always felt like Jack needs a friend though so I’ve been asking for a new puppy for about seven years now. And for all of those seven years I have heard “We can’t get one because you are going to college soon.” Well here we are seven months away from when I move out and what does my mom decide to get? A puppy.

I was ecstatic when she told me she was looking at dogs. She sent me a link to this one she was convinced she was in love with. Her name was Brianne and she was a deaf, emotionally impaired American Staffordshire Terrior (a.k.a. a Pitbull.) Before Brianne I didn’t even know that deaf dogs existed. It’s just something you never really hear about. And after much research I found out the reason you don’t hear much about deaf dogs is because most of them get put down as soon as their owners find out they can’t hear.

Back to Brianne though, she sure was cute so we sent in an application and got approved to adopt her. My mom e-mailed Brianne’s foster mom quite a bit and we found out that she had a lot of other issues, issues that we weren’t ready to deal with. So there goes my puppy, there goes Brianne.

 My mom had given up the search for a little while saying that we should just wait until our spring sports seasons are over, but I was determined. My mom, brother and I had decided that even if Brianne didn’t work out, we wanted a special needs dog so I spent countless hours on petfinder.com looking for the perfect dog for us.

I found him. His name was Swayze and he was at a Saint Bernard rescue in Flint. My mom and brother immediately said he was ugly. I told them they were wrong. He was an all white, seven-month-old, boxer pup with one blue eye and one brown. I convinced my mom to send his foster home an e-mail. The next day our application was approved and my family was set on getting Swayze.

Within a couple of days we were picking out a new name for him and a full week before we got him we had already bought a bed, a water bowl, a food bowl, and a nametag. We decided we would name him Bo.

For about two weeks I had a constant countdown in my head of how many days until we get to meet Bo. I was telling everyone about him. They all thought I had literally gone insane. When they asked me why on earth my family wanted a deaf dog, I told them because we want a dog that nobody else does. We want to give a disadvantaged dog a fighting chance.

They also thought my family was insane for having our hearts so heavily set on a dog that we had never met. There were so many things that could go wrong. But my mom and I had a feeling that this was right, so we went with it. We were getting Swayze and as long as he got along with Jack we were going to keep him. We both knew it was not going to be easy, seeing as we had never trained a deaf dog before (my mom kept telling people we were going in “blind”) but we both knew that this dog was going to make it worth it.