International Hearing Dog

History

Hearing dog training was non-existent until the early 1970s, when a hearing-impaired woman made a simple request. Mrs. Elva Janke's dog had died and she wondered if another dog could be trained to alert her to sounds in her home, just as her first dog had done naturally. Mrs. Janke reached out to the Twin Cities Action News television and found her way to Mrs. Ruth Deschene, then executive director of the Minnesota Humane Society. Mrs. Deschene and board member Dick Lambert introduced Mrs. Janke to Agnes McGrath, a dog trainer serving the Twin Cities area. Agnes trained the first six hearing dogs in Minnesota, including a dog for Mrs. Janke, with financial support from the Minnesota Lions Club and the Minnesota Governor Wendell Anderson. On May 7, 1979, the