This is a picture heavy diary, with various pictures and explanations of Itzl's signals and sign language.
Some of y'all already know Itzl, and how he's a signal dog, or a hearing assistance dog for me, a person with a hearing impairment. I'm not deaf, but I can't hear essential sounds: sirens, alarms, warning signals, horns, children's voices, microphone feedback, baby cries, cat yowls, small dog barks, and so on and so on. Some of it I'm glad I don't hear (microphone feedback, fingernails on a chalkboard....). Some of it I miss dearly (music). Itzl bridges the way between what I can't hear and what I need to hear.
We've been partnered for nine years, so we've developed a language of our own that is almost invisible to others, but I've managed to capture some of them in pictures, and I use them in his Service Dog Logbook.
If you have a service dog, I highly recommend keeping one because it allows you to track the effectiveness of your dog and alerts you to problems before they get bad, plus, if you self-trained your dog and you have to prove to authorities that s/he really is a service dog, a logbook of training with pictures can be very useful. And when your dog is retired, it serves as a scrapbook of your dog's career so when you are ready for a new service dog, you have all that documentation to help you either train a new service dog or gives a training and placement service an idea of what you expect and need from a service dog.
These are some of the pictures in Itzl's logbook.
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