Calamity the dog can perform incredible tricks – but her owner Amanda Fuller had to teach them all through touch because her pet can’t hear or see.
Two-year-old Calamity was born deaf and she became blind when she was only a one-year-old puppy.
She bumped her head when she was playing and it eventually caused her retina to detach, leaving her unable to see out of her right eye. Less than a year later, she also lost vision in her left eye.
Calamity lives in Maryland, U.S., with canine friend Keller, who is also deaf and has some vision problems.
Both dogs are double merle, which means that when two merle dogs are bred together, there is a 25% chance of each puppy born to them being a double merle as they inherit the merle gene twice.
This means the coat is predominantly white and they have a high chance of being deaf, blind or both because they lack pigment.
Despite her impairments, on December 16, Calamity was filmed performing some impressive tricks together with her owner Amanda Fuller, 27.
In a video that has since gone viral with almost 500,000 views, Calamity is seen doing spins, shaking hands, jumping into Amanda’s arms and even walking with her paws on top of her owner’s feet.
Amanda said: ‘Calamity has been learning tricks since birth and we work on new ones all the time.
‘Sometimes we figure things out that I never thought were possible, like off-leash rally obedience.’
Amanda adds that training can be tricky but once you figure out a way to do it, it is not necessarily harder from training a seeing and hearing one.
Amanda said: ‘Training a deafblind dog is different, but not much harder.
‘She learns things in the same way all dogs do, we just have to give our cues in a different way.
‘Our cues are all given through touch, so unlike a seeing or hearing dog, I can’t give a cue through verbal or hand signals.
‘Calamity still has a lot of potential to learn many new tricks, and we work on that every day.’
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