Non-Verbal Fluency: Steph & Jamie
Steph and Jaime arrived for their leash-walking session on a quiet afternoon in early December. It was a crisp, late-fall day, the daylight noticeably shorter and the air cool but comfortable. The campus moved at an unhurried pace as I invited them into the warm hallway leading to the office. What I noticed first was not the slight tautness of the leash, although the tension would come to define so much of what I later observed and measured. It was something about the quality of attention moving between them. Jaime’s nose was pressed earthward with the single-mindedness of an animal entirely absorbed in scent. Steph was soft-spoken and slightly unsure, protective of Jamie in the way of someone who has learned, through difficulty, that the world requires vigilance on his behalf. It was not the quick, easy attunement of a pair who has always spoken the same language, but something harder-won and more deliberate. The two settled in my office in a quiet way that somehow said so much.
A pale, lean hound with a nose trained by instinct, Jamie does not hear the world. He never has, or at least not in the way most of its creatures do. And yet, watching them together, Steph completing paperwork between intermittent glances towards Jaime and him with his nose racing through invisible topographies of scent, there is nothing that reads as absence. What has been subtracted from their relationship in the auditory register has been, slowly, painstakingly, replaced. What you see in its place is a different kind of fluency: tactile, visual, patient, and built from the ground up.
In my work, I follow the lead of greats such as Donna Haraway in viewing the leash as more than simply a restraint. Instead, I believe it to be a medium. One that enables two different kinds of bodies to begin the work of navigating the world and its uncertainty securely. Steph and Jamie, more than most any other dyad I studied, make this legible. Because Jamie cannot hear, he cannot receive the voice commands, the verbal praise or the offhand "come on, bud" that most handlers use to orient their dogs across a gap in attention. The leash has become, for them, not one channel among many, but the primary channel.
What struck me most, watching them walk through the session, was how quiet they were. Quiet in a deep, clearly intentional sense. Jamie moved soft-footed and absorbed, his nose working the ground with a focused reverence, his whole body organized around the scent trails only he could read. Steph followed at his pace, unhurried, her eyes on him. She was not managing him. She was watching him. Watching him with the particular quality of attention that belongs to someone who has spent years learning to find meaning in small things: the angle of an ear, the brief lift of a head, the way he would pause over something invisible and then move on. There was no narration between them. No commands, no corrections, no voice filling the space. Just the soft sound of footfalls while two beings moving through the world in a silence that was, unmistakably, their own.
In the context of Jamie’s deafness, we find a pattern of quiet tension that is particularly meaningful. The leash becomes a haptic language: a medium through which brief tactile signals carry the information that sound ordinarily would. It contains the dialogue between a dog who has learned to speak through the line and a person who has learned to listen through her hand.
Meet the Pair
Steph is a 31-year-old woman working as a policy researcher at a university. She is warm and thoughtful, the kind of person who chooses her words carefully and means them. She and Jamie recently moved to Durham- the two of them arriving together as a unit already five years in the making. She speaks about him with a quiet pride in her voice.
Steph got Jamie in May of 2020. She was living in upstate New York, in graduate school, and had been searching for a dog through shelters. Navigating waitlists and dead ends in that notorious pandemic spring when time had collapsed into something formless, and the desire for companionship had taken on a new urgency. She connected eventually with friends in Durham who were fostering a dog they had received through a rescue network: an American Foxhound, abandoned somewhere in rural eastern North Carolina, transferred to a rescue organization in Raleigh, and then handed off to foster care while a permanent placement was sought.
She met Jamie through this chain of connection and chance and had fallen for him before she fully knew what she was taking on. And then came the news that her friends, in the weeks before Steph brought him home, had figured out: Jamie was deaf. Completely. Congenitally. He had never heard a human voice. The deafness reframed the difficulty Jamie was having without resolving it. It explained the gaps: the non-response to commands, the apparent stubbornness, the way communication seemed to dissolve before it arrived. But it did not make the fear smaller. For Steph, it clarified the terms of the problem: If Jamie was going to learn to navigate the world, he was going to have to do it without the auditory scaffolding that most dogs rely on. And Steph, a first-time dog owner who had just learned her dog was deaf, was going to have to figure out how to provide that scaffolding through other means.
"When they told me he was deaf," Steph recalls, "I was like, 'Oh my god. Am I equipped to have a deaf dog?'" Steph wasn’t so sure. Jamie was terrified. Not simply uncertain, not simply adjusting, but terrified. In a way that was visible throughout his entire body. She had no community of practice to draw on, no prior experience with deaf animals. The doubt was proportionate and real.
“He was really scared of the world… It was really tough at the beginning.” He did not want to leave his crate. He did not want to eat. The crate was the only geography that felt safe, and he retreated into it with the gravity of an animal for whom the world had offered no consistent reason for trust. Despite the difficulty, Steph made the courageous decision to set her doubt aside and learn.
She found the website Deaf Dogs Rock where she discovered a community of those who'd walked this path before. She found trainers who worked specifically with body language and visual communication. She began to understand that training a deaf dog is not fundamentally different from training a hearing one. It simply requires making explicit what is ordinarily left implicit, which meant making herself visible and legible in ways that hearing-dog relationships never demand. "The first thing you have to do," Steph told me, "is train them to look at you. Everything else builds from that."
Jamie is now six years old. He has been with Steph for five years, through her graduate program and her subsequent move to Durham, through a diagnosis of IBD that required months of dietary management and veterinary care and through the slow and uneven work of building a life together from a foundation of fear. He is still a foxhound: still scent-driven in the distinct way of only a dog bred for exactly that purpose, still capable of disappearing entirely into the chemical narrative of a patch of ground with a focus that excludes nearly everything else. He is also, as Steph described to me with conviction in her voice, a completely different dog than the one who refused to leave his crate in 2020. He has opinions now. He has preferences. He pulls toward things rather than away from them. And Steph could not be prouder.
Evolving Tools for Evolving Needs
The equipment Steph used during the first two years of their life together requires contextual care to understand. A prong collar, composed of interlocking metal links fitted with evenly spaced, blunted inward-facing prongs, sits high on the dog’s neck and tightens evenly around the circumference when tension is applied. For many contemporary observers of dog training, the tool carries an immediate and reflexive association with punishment or dominance-based philosophies that behavioral science has increasingly critiqued and moved away from. Yet its outward appearance alone does not tell the full story here. In practice, the collar’s function depends on how, when, and why it is used. For Steph and Jamie, the prong was a structured communication aid during a period of instability. Alongside their trainer, Steph introduced the prong collar to Jamie, not as a symbol of control, but as a temporary scaffold during a phase when safety, for both dog and handler, felt uncertain.
For Jamie, in those early months, the primary obstacle was not behavioral in the conventional sense. It was communicative. The leash was not one channel among many for them; it was the only channel. And on a standard flat collar, the signal that traveled down that channel was too diffuse, too easily ignored in the presence of his fear.
The prong collar, Steph found, offered something different: a more localized, more precise tactile feedback that cut through the distraction in a way that lighter leash pressure on a flat collar did not. The sensation was clearer. More differentiated. For a dog who had to receive everything through touch because sound was unavailable, that clarity mattered.
"I put it on him for the first time," she recalls, "and he kind of locked in. I was like, 'Oh… he understood something about that.'" That moment of recognition, the sense that something had passed between them that had not been able to pass before, was the beginning of everything that followed. Because what followed, from that point, was the walk. And the walk, for Jamie, was the world.
This is the significance of the prong collar that can get lost. For this dog, in this relationship, it was the tool that made walking possible. Not possible in a theoretical sense, but possible in the literal, physical sense of a dog who had been refusing to go outside at all. The fear was real, the shutdown was real, and the prong collar offered something that nothing else had yet managed to offer: a clear, unambiguous signal that could reach Jamie where he was. "That was the tool that got him out of the house," Steph says simply. It is one of the most important takeaways from their story.
In those first walks, the goal was not enrichment. It was not fulfillment, or exploration, as would come to define their relationship years later. The goal was something more foundational: safety. Predictability. The establishment of enough structure that Jamie could begin to tolerate the world outside of the narrow geography of the only place that felt safe. Autonomy would come later. First, there had to be containment. Not as an end in itself, but as the precondition for everything else.
With the prong collar, Jamie could understand what was being asked of him. And with understanding came, gradually, the possibility of existing outside the house and beginning to build a map of the world out of something other than fear. The greater clarity of leash-mediated guidance meant he could move with more assurance and less hesitation. The world was still large and still frightening, but there was now a line running through it that he could read. And reading it, he began to move.
The prong collar was not meant to be permanent, and it wasn't. By year three, something had shifted. Jamie's baseline anxiety had come down. Not dramatically, not all at once, but in the cumulative way of genuine confidence building. Through repeated exposure, walks that ended without catastrophe and the slow accretion of evidence that the world, while unpredictable, was survivable. He was engaging with his surroundings now rather than retreating from it. He was curious. And curiosity, it turned out, was stronger than the prong collar's signal.
The prong collar, which had functioned so effectively during the period of acute fear, had begun to lose its grip on his attention. Not because it had failed, but because it had succeeded: his desire to explore had grown larger than the signal's ability to contain it. "I felt like he was learning to ignore the pressure," Steph explains, "because he wanted to smell things more. His curiosity outweighed the discomfort." The tool that had once been life changing for the pair was now insufficient because Jamie had become more himself: more interested and more confident. The equipment had to change because the dog had changed. And now his desire to engage with the world required more room than existed within their current equipment.
Steph transitioned to a harness and a long lead. Six to eight feet of line and a harness that distributes pressure across Jamie’s chest and shoulders: equipment which gave the anatomy of a scent driven hound given room to work. The longer leash creates a different geometry of the walk: Jamie can range further ahead, arc into his own exploratory radius, follow the scent trails that are, for a foxhound, the primary sensory narrative of any given piece of ground. Steph tells me: “I would say overall, yes, it feels better. I think it feels like it’s a little more suited to, like, who he is. Like, he’s gonna want to sniff. He’s a hound… you know?
And with this transition came a parallel shift in Steph's philosophy of what a walk is for. She began to embrace what she calls "sniff walks": outings where the purpose is not to cover a certain distance at a certain pace, but to allow Jamie to do what his biology equips him to do. "Sometimes what I want out of a walk is not what he wants," she reflects. "I want exercise; he wants to smell everything…I've tried to take on more of the mindset that we're going for ‘sniff walks’. Our relationship is better when I respect that." This is the walk reconceived: not as exercise, not as training, but the place where a human's desire for movement and a foxhound's instinct for chemical recordkeeping are, imperfectly and generously, negotiated.
What the equipment evolution traces, then, is not merely a practical adjustment to a dog's changing needs. It is a record of the relationship itself. The prong collar represents a period of fear and containment and made the world navigable. The harness and long leash is the period of trust and fulfillment, of understanding that the walk is as much Jamie's as it is Steph’s and is perhaps even more. Read this way, Jamie's equipment is an archive, and the archive tells a story of becoming.
Seeing and Being Seen
Without sound, everything migrates into the visual. This is the central adaptation of their relationship: the compensatory shift that makes the entire enterprise possible. Steph has had to become visible to Jamie in ways that most handlers are never required to be. She has had to learn to position herself, to read the angles of his peripheral vision, to understand that Jamie is monitoring her location even when he appears to be entirely absorbed in a scent. A trainer she works with put it in terms she found clarifying: dogs watch their handlers peripherally even when they are not directly facing them, even when every observable signal suggests they are elsewhere in their attention. Jamie, of necessity, has elevated this peripheral tracking to a primary strategy. He keeps Steph within a kind of visual ambient awareness, not always looking directly at her, but always knowing where she is.
"He might be in his own zone," she says, "but he's still making sure I'm there. He'll look back, or catch up to where I am." This is the check-in behavior of a dog who, having ranged to the edge of its radius, recalibrates its position in relation to the one it trusts. The peripheral monitoring is constant and quiet: a survival strategy that has become, over five years, simply the way he moves through the world. A deaf dog who loses track of his handler is, in a meaningful sense, alone in the world in a way that a hearing dog is not: cut off not only from visual guidance but from the vocal recall that might bring him back. He keeps Steph within a kind of ambient visual awareness: not always looking at her directly but always knowing where she is.
The visual attunement moves in both directions. Steph has learned to watch Jamie with a corresponding intensity. She has learned to read his postures, his ear positions and the subtle shifts in weight distribution that communicate what he cannot say. Hand signals have become their vocabulary: directional cues, a gesture for "come," a gesture for "wait," the physical language that substitutes for the voice. However, Steph describes that before hand signals could mean anything and leash cues could be reliably read, Jamie had to understand that Steph was the orienting point: the fixed reference around which the rest of the walk organized itself. Teaching him to look at her was not a preliminary step before the real work began. It was the real work. Everything that followed first required this essential foundation.
"He's very visual," Steph says. "He likes to be able to look at things." His eyes are doing the work that his ears cannot. He watches Steph's posture for information about what is coming. He watches the environment for what she has not yet noticed. "A lot of it is subtler body language," she reflects. "We just kind of have a rhythm… an understanding." The rhythm is real, and it has been built cue by cue, walk by walk, through the patient accumulation of shared experience in the absence of shared sound.
The leash runs through all of this as the tactile complement to the visual. It is the physical line between their bodies that carries what cannot be communicated through sight alone. For Jamie, it is not a constraint so much as a continuous signal: a stream of information about Steph's location, her attention, her intentions. When she stops, he feels it. When she shifts direction, he feels it. When he pulls toward something that interests him and she holds gently, he feels that too. It is the answer to his question: can I check that out?, arriving not as a word but as a sensation. "The leash is how we talk when we're walking," Steph says. It is not how Steph controls Jamie, not how she manages him or restrains him. It is how they communicate: A conversation conducted in tension and release, in the pull of curiosity and the answering give of a person who has learned to distinguish this curiosity from conflict.
A Tether
For some human-dog pairs, the leash may be a scaffold that might one day be set aside as the relationship matures into something more– like the off-leash ease that Allie and Nala have achieved on their long woodland hikes. For Steph and Jamie, no such aspiration exists. The leash is non-negotiable. Permanent. A structural feature of their relationship that does not diminish the accumulation of trust, because its necessity is not a function of trust. It is a communication channel, yes, but it is also, and inseparably, a safety measure.
For Steph and Jamie, there is no recall. He cannot hear a car horn or a shout of warning from across the street. If he got loose, following a scent across a street or through an unfamiliar environment, there would be no way back through sound. No voice to cut through his absorption. "I have a lot of anxiety about him getting out," Steph says quietly. "If he got loose, I don't know how I'd get him back. That's really scary." The leash, for this reason, will never be optional. It will never recede into the background the way it does for some dyads as the relationship matures. "He's always going to be on leash," she says. The pair have still grown together in tangible ways. The long leash is the accommodation- the attempt to give Jamie as much of the freedom of an unleashed dog as is safely possible within the bounds of a tether that cannot, for him, ever be fully released.
The anxiety Steph carries on their walks is not only about deafness. Jamie has struggled with IBD, a chronic gastrointestinal condition that required months of dietary management, veterinary intervention, and the particular kind of vigilance that comes with caring for a dog whose body does not always cooperate. The health struggles added another layer to an already tender caregiving relationship: a dog who could not hear, who could not be recalled, and who had also, at points, been fragile in ways that made his wellbeing feel precarious. The leash, in this context, became threaded with more than one kind of worry. It is the thing that keeps him close when close is the only way Steph knows he is safe. "I've taken on the responsibility that I'm going to keep him safe," she says. The leash is how that responsibility becomes physical. How it travels, in real time, from her hand to his body and back again.
It is a protective infrastructure for their bond. "The leash is a comfort thing for me, for sure," Steph says. "I know where he is, I know he's safe." What this means, practically, is that the leash must carry more meaning than it does for pairs where it is simply one of several communicative tools. Because it will always be there, what it communicates has had to become richer. And the long leash, an upgrade from containment to exploration, is an attempt to give Jamie as much of what the leash-free world would offer while keeping him within the radius of safety. Bounded exploration and measured freedom.
The pulls observed during their session are not evidence of a dog dragging an overwhelmed handler through a neighborhood. They are evidence of an ongoing, active, densely meaningful exchange between two beings who have, deliberately, painstakingly, constructed a language from nothing.
Progress Measured in Confidence
The walk for Steph and Jamie may look, to a casual observer, typical; and sound, to an unsuspecting bystander, awfully quiet. However, these walks are much more than they may seem. They are demanding in the way that the most meaningful things tend to be, requiring sustained attention and a continuous investment of energy. For this pair, what we see today is a walk that represents something close to triumph.
In year one, when Steph was first able to get Jamie out of the house the walks were short: fear-oriented and aimed at return. Other dogs triggered the desire to retreat. Unfamiliarity and confusion sent him inward. Now Jamie pulls toward other dogs. He pulls toward interesting patches of ground with the conviction of an animal who trusts his own curiosity. When another dog appears on the horizon, he leans with something that looks, unmistakably, like eagerness. "Even when he pulls toward another dog," Steph says, "I'm kind of proud of him, like, that's confidence." We sit with that in our conversation for a moment. "Walking used to be really fearful for him… And now he's excited. That's huge."
The confidence has moved in both directions. As Jamie's baseline has risen, Steph's has risen alongside it. The first-time owner who doubted whether she was equipped to have a deaf dog has become, through five years of accumulated practice and attention, someone who trusts herself to read him accurately and respond appropriately. "As he's gotten more confident," she reflects, "I've felt more confident too. I trust him more, and I think he trusts me more."
Progress, for this dyad, may not be visible in the metrics. It won’t appear as a low pull count or minimal tension or the slack leash of a pair who have reached some advanced stage of coordination. It appears in the direction of the pull: toward things, not away from them. It is in the quality of Jamie's attention when he raises his head from a scent and sweeps the sidewalk to locate Steph. It is in the simple, enormous fact that he wants to be outside at all.
In Closing: “Gentility”
When Steph describes the texture of her relationship with Jamie, she returns to a particular word. Gentle. "We're very gentle with each other," she says. It is a simple description that contains, on examination, quite a lot.
Jamie is a soft dog: sensitive in the way of animals who have known fear and learned to trust again slowly. Thus, the gentility is temperamental but also partly earned. And for Steph’s part: she has had to learn to be gentle, not only to Jamie, but to herself. She had to extend patience to herself in those early months when nothing was working, and the doubt was loudest. She was willing to try tools she was uncertain about and revise her approach when they stopped serving their purpose, allowing the relationship to develop at the pace it required rather than the pace she might have preferred.
"It feels very motherly," she says of how she experiences caring for Jamie. "I want him to be safe, but I also want him to thrive." The dual commitment: safety and flourishing, containment and freedom, shapes every decision she makes about their walks. The long leash is both of those things at once: the tether that keeps him safe, and the length that lets him move.
"When he first came to me," Steph says, "he was so shut down.” He was a dog who had organized his entire existence around the avoidance of a world that had given him little reason to trust it. Now? He has opinions. He tells me what he wants. And I listen... That's trust." Steph has redefined the world that once was cruel to him. The tension that once read as fear now reads as curiosity. The pull that once moved away from things now moves toward them. Steph tells me: “I feel pretty grateful that walking be fairly peaceful for us.” This is what five years of patient, attentive, gentle work looks like when it is measured not in obedience but in the direction a dog chooses to move.
The trust was not given. It was built, walk by walk through a language invented from scratch between a woman and a dog who could not hear her. What they have instead: tension that speaks- glances and hand signals that guide and reassure, and the long line that allows freedom with security- is something they made themselves. And Jamie, pulling forward on a Durham sidewalk with his nose full of the world and his head lifting periodically to find Steph's face, is the evidence that it works.
