Black and White Dog

Louise Stern at the BBC, on her book and experiences as a deaf person, and how she escaped the deaf ghetto...


"The family joke was that the dog could smell hearing
people, because whenever a hearing person came to
the house – a door-to-door salesman, or a Jehovah’s
Witness in a painfully neat suit, or one of the few
people they knew in the neighbourhood – the dog
would get caught up in an almost ecstatic frenzy of
barking, her body jerking and twisting. When deaf
people came to the house the dog would only bark a
few times and then settle down to her usual graceful
trot around the house

For a long time Beth believed that the dog actually could
smell hearing people, that they had a strange scent all their own.
It made sense when she thought about it.
Deaf people communicated with their bodies.
Their language was physical. They stood differently,
more heavily - or maybe it was more firmly. Most
hearing people felt flighty and nervous to her. So why
shouldn’t they smell different? She thought they probably
smelled a bit acid, although she’d never got close
enough to a hearing person to really smell them.
Later she realized that it was just the unfamiliar sound of
hearing people’s voices that the dog was reacting to."


Full transcript on page 2 of this blog.