Congenital deafness in dogs and cats: the pigment genes, the BAER test, and what is actually available in India

Signs of Congenital sensorineural deafness

The 9 signs to watch for are listed below. Any one of them is a reason to consult your nearby vet; none of them is a diagnosis.

• Sleeps through noise that wakes the rest of the household
• Does not turn towards a clap, a whistle or its own name
• Startles hard, sometimes snapping, when touched while asleep
• Harder to rouse than its littermates and wakes later
• Barks or miaows at an unusual pitch or volume
• Plays rougher than littermates and ignores a yelp
• Runs the wrong way when called from out of sight
• Watches your face and hands constantly for direction
• A white or merle puppy that reads as stubborn rather than untrained

Breeds on this site that document this condition

Each breed page below carries the figure for this condition with its denominator and its source. The 10 breeds listed are the ones on this site that document it, not a ranking of risk.

What congenital deafness is, and why pigment decides it

Congenital sensorineural deafness is a failure of the cochlea that happens in the first weeks after birth, while the ear canal is still closed, and it happens because the inner ear runs short of pigment cells. The deafness usually results from the degeneration of part of the blood supply to the cochlea, the stria vascularis, after which the sensory nerve cells of the cochlea die and permanent deafness results. That single mechanism is why this condition tracks coat colour rather than breed, and why a page organised as a breed list tells you less than a page organised around pigment.

The cells that go missing are melanocytes, the same cells that put colour into a coat. Not all of their functions are known, but one role is to maintain high potassium concentrations in the fluid, the endolymph, surrounding the hair cells of the cochlea; these pigment cells are critical for survival of the stria, and the stria is critical for survival of the hair cells. The cause of the vascular degeneration itself is still not known.

An animal bred hard for an absence of pigment is therefore bred, incidentally, for an absence of the cell that keeps its cochlea alive. The catalogue agrees. Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals files the dog white spotting locus, OMIA:000214-9615, under two categories at the same time, Pigmentation phene and Hearing / vestibular / ear phene, and records that the absence of pigment is caused by the absence of skin melanocytes rather than by any failure in the biochemical reactions required for pigment synthesis.

Congenital does not mean inherited

Congenital means present from birth, and the two are not the same thing. Congenital deafness in dogs can be acquired, caused by intrauterine infections, ototoxic drugs, liver disorders or other toxic exposures before or soon after birth, or it can be inherited. It is usually impossible to tell which, unless a clear problem has already been observed in the breed or carefully planned breedings are performed.

Breadth matters more than any single breed here. Congenital deafness has been reported for more than 100 dog breeds, with the list growing at a regular rate, and it can potentially appear in any breed but especially in those with white pigmentation of skin and hair. Strain adds a point worth reading twice, which is that deafness may have been long established in a breed but kept hidden from outsiders to protect reputations.

The common form that has nothing to do with pigment

One well-described canine deafness runs on a completely different mechanism. In the Doberman, which carries neither the merle nor the piebald gene, the deafness results from direct loss of cochlear hair cells without any effect on the stria vascularis, arrives with vestibular signs including head tilt and circling, is usually bilateral, and is transmitted by a simple autosomal recessive mechanism. A similar pathology has been described for the Shropshire Terrier, a breed that may no longer be in existence.

Age-related and acquired deafness is a separate problem again. Deafness may occur later in life from toxicities, infections, injuries or ageing, and most of those forms do not have a genetic cause in animals, so they do not present a concern in breeding decisions. The exception now recognised is an adult-onset hereditary deafness in Border Collies and Rhodesian Ridgebacks. Every one of the three pages ranking above this one in India writes mainly about that acquired, elderly form, which is a different disease from the one an owner buying a white puppy needs to understand.

The two genes that do most of this in dogs, and the cat's separate one

Two pigmentation genes in particular are often associated with deafness in dogs, the merle gene and the piebald gene, and not all breeds carrying them have been reported to be affected. The cat does not use either. Knowing which of the three your animal carries is what lets you reason about its risk instead of looking up a breed name.

The merle gene is the one seen in the Collie, the Shetland Sheepdog, the Dappled Dachshund, the Harlequin Great Dane, the American Foxhound, the Old English Sheepdog and the Norwegian Dunkerhound among others. The piebald gene is the one behind the Bull Terrier, the Samoyed, the Greyhound, the Great Pyrenees, the Sealyham Terrier, the Beagle, the Bulldog, the Dalmatian and the English Setter.

Piebald is a series, not a switch

Piebald is a recessive allele of the S gene, where the dominant allele is expressed as a solid colour, and three recessive alleles are recognised, Irish spotting, piebald and extreme white piebald, displaying increasing amounts of white in that order. The Dalmatian is homozygous for extreme white piebald, the far end of that series, which is the reason it sits at the top of every prevalence table.

Merle behaves differently because it is dominant. The merle allele M is dominant, so a dog carrying one copy shows the pattern, which is the pattern buyers pay for. That matters for the arithmetic of breeding, which the merle-to-merle section below works through, and it is why merle deafness is a breeding decision rather than a carrier-testing problem.

The cat runs on its own gene, and the DNA test does not test hearing

In cats the trait is dominant white, carried at the KIT locus, and the UC Davis Veterinary Genetics Laboratory sells a DNA test for it with three alleles, N for normal or non-white, DW for dominant white and Ws for white spotting, inherited as an autosomal dominant. The laboratory's own wording separates the two genotypes carefully. A cat with N/DW will be white and may have some degree of hearing impairment, while a cat with DW/DW will be white and is likely to have some degree of hearing impairment.

Read that as two different facts. The DNA test tells you what the cat will pass on and roughly how worried to be; it does not tell you whether this cat hears, which is what a buyer actually wants to know. The test is priced at 53 US dollars for one test per animal with a turnaround of at least 15 business days, and that is a United States price on a United States page, not an Indian one. Deafness in blue-eyed white cats is old news rather than new science, and was first mentioned in Darwin's Origin of Species.

Blue eyes are a signal, not the cause

A blue iris is an absence of pigment in the iris, and it travels with pigment-associated deafness without being, in and of itself, an indication of deafness or of the presence of a deafness gene; in several breeds, the Dalmatian, the English Setter, the English Cocker Spaniel and the Bull Terrier, blue-eyed dogs are nonetheless statistically more likely to be deaf. The Dalmatian data puts a number on how tightly the two travel together. Across 8955 BAER-tested UK Dalmatian puppies the genetic correlation between congenital sensorineural deafness and blue irises was plus 0.6, and the correlation with a pigmented head patch was minus 0.86, both large in magnitude and significantly different from zero.

A minus 0.86 correlation with a patch of colour on the head is the clearest single statement of this whole page. More pigment, more hearing. The same pattern turns up in the Dogo Argentino, where dogs without a patch had a significantly higher deafness prevalence than patched dogs. It turns up in people too, as Waardenburg syndrome, which presents with deafness, a stripe of white in the hair and beard, blue or differently coloured eyes and no pigment behind the retina.

One deaf ear or two, the split almost no page publishes

Most congenitally deaf dogs are deaf in one ear only, and a dog with one working ear behaves like a dog that hears. In the largest published series, 8955 Dalmatian puppies screened in the United Kingdom between July 1992 and February 2019, 1201 puppies (13.4 percent) had unilateral deafness and 397 (4.4 percent) had bilateral deafness, for an overall prevalence of 17.8 percent. That ratio, not the headline percentage, is the fact that changes what an owner and a breeder should do.

Take the two counts in that series and divide them. Of the 1,598 puppies affected, 1,201 were deaf in one ear only, which is roughly three in every four; that division is Bonbeno's arithmetic on the paper's own published counts of 1201 and 397, not a figure the paper prints. Three in four affected Dalmatian puppies, then, went home looking like normal puppies to anybody who did not test them.

Strain states the consequence plainly. Recognition of affected cases is often difficult, because unilaterally deaf dogs appear to hear normally unless a special test, the brainstem auditory evoked response, is performed. And a unilaterally deaf dog can be as great a genetic risk for transmission of deafness to its offspring as a bilaterally deaf dog. Those two sentences together are why an untested breeding population stays where it is generation after generation.

The breed table, with the number tested on every row

Strain's own BAER records are published breed by breed with the denominator attached, which is what makes them usable. The rows below are taken from that table and each one has been arithmetic-checked, with the hearing, unilateral and bilateral counts summing to the number tested. Breeds Strain marks with an asterisk have insufficient numbers of animals tested at this time for percentages to be meaningful, and that caveat is his, not an editorial softening.

Two rows in that table are the argument of this whole page, and they are the two Bull Terrier rows. Same breed, same registry, same test, same laboratory. White dogs came out at 20.4 percent deaf in 362 tested and coloured dogs at 1.3 percent in 313 tested, a fifteen-fold difference produced by nothing but pigment. The English Cocker Spaniel repeats it at a smaller scale, 5.6 percent in 1,510 parti-coloured dogs against 1.4 percent in 69 solid-coloured dogs, though the solid-colour denominator there is too small to lean on.

The same breed in five countries gives five answers

Prevalence is a property of a population, not of a breed, and the Dalmatian proves it. Strain's US series and four European ones disagree by more than ten percentage points on the same dog, and publishing only one of them, which is what every ranking page does, gives a reader a number that does not describe their animal.

The European figures cluster near 17 or 18 percent and the American series sits ten points above them, and Strain notes the direction himself, that rates are lower in Europe. The UK series also shows the number moving. Lewis and colleagues found significant improving phenotypic and genetic trends across 27 years of screening, likely as the result of selection against deafness, equivalent to avoiding breeding with the 4 to 5 percent of animals with the highest genetic risk. Heritability was approximately 0.3 and significantly greater than zero. Screening works, in other words, and it works slowly.

One more disagreement is worth printing rather than smoothing. Strain's narrative page says that in the Dalmatian 8 percent of all dogs in the US are bilaterally deaf and 22 percent are unilaterally deaf, while his own data table on the neighbouring page gives 7.3 percent and 20.8 percent for 6,249 dogs George M. Strain. The table carries the denominator, so this page uses the table.

How it is diagnosed, and why only the BAER test settles it

To find out whether an animal is deaf in one ear, book a brainstem auditory evoked response test, because nothing you can do at home separates one working ear from two. The BAER detects electrical activity in the cochlea and auditory pathways in the brain in much the same way an EKG detects electrical activity of the heart, and the response from an ear that is deaf is an essentially flat line.

The waveform is a series of peaks numbered with Roman numerals, where peak I is produced by the cochlear nerve and the later peaks are produced within the brain. Because the response amplitude is so small, the machine averages the responses to many clicks to unmask them from the other electrical activity present on the scalp.

The procedure is less alarming than it sounds. The response is collected through extremely small electrodes placed under the skin of the scalp, one in front of each ear, one at the top of the head and one between the shoulders, with the click delivered by a foam insert earphone. It is rare for a dog to show any evidence of pain from the placement of the electrodes, and if anything the dog objects to the gentle restraint and to the irritation of wires hanging in front of its face. Each ear is tested individually, the test is usually complete in 10 to 15 minutes, and sedation or anaesthesia are usually not necessary unless the animal becomes extremely agitated. You go home with a printout of the recorded waveform.

Why the clap test does not work

An Indian veterinary paper states the reason as cleanly as any source anywhere. Diagnosis of deafness by behavioural means is unreliable, because it is difficult to identify unilateral deafness or partial hearing loss by this technique; dogs with normal hearing may not respond because of situational anxiety, or may stop responding once accustomed to the stimulus; and partially hearing-impaired or deaf dogs may respond by detecting the stimulus through other senses, from visual cues, vibration or even air movement.

That last clause is the one that fools owners. A deaf puppy feels you walk across a concrete floor, sees the shadow move, and turns around. Clap behind a deaf dog on a tiled Indian floor and you will usually get a response, to the air and the vibration rather than to the sound.

When to test, and what the test cannot tell you

Testing is done young because the condition is fully expressed young. In the UK kitten study hearing was assessed at a median age of 10 weeks with a range of 6 to 21 weeks. Breed schemes test whole litters before they go to their new homes, which is the only arrangement under which a breeder learns anything useful.

A BAER result is a hearing measurement and nothing more. It does not tell you the genotype, it does not tell you the mode of inheritance, and in a dog with an inflamed or blocked ear canal it can be measuring a conductive problem rather than an inherited one. The Madras Veterinary College series found that BAER traces from ears with severe otitis externa had prolonged latencies of all waves and a lower wave I to wave V amplitude ratio than mildly affected or normal ears, while the inter-peak latencies were unaffected, and concluded that BAER can be a useful diagnostic tool to assess hearing impairment due to conductive deafness in otitis externa. Treat a BAER result as one input your veterinarian reads alongside an ear examination.

What a BAER appointment costs where a price is published

No Indian institution publishes a BAER price that Bonbeno could find, and this page is not going to invent one. The one clearly published fee in the sources opened for this page is American. The UC Davis veterinary teaching hospital runs a bi-monthly hearing test clinic for healthy dogs and prints the fee as 167 US dollars for the hearing test plus 34 US dollars for the examination and sedation, 201 US dollars in total. That is a US price at a US teaching hospital and it is reported here as a US price, not converted into an Indian expectation.

What the UC Davis clinic includes is a fair description of what a proper appointment looks like anywhere. The items on its published list are set out below.

• Brief physical examination by a clinician to assess general health and suitability for sedation
• Short sedation for the hearing test procedure, reversed before the animal goes home
• Ear examination to assess the ear canal and the eardrum
• The BAER test itself, each ear separately
• A printout of the hearing test waveforms for the owner to keep
• A record of the visit sent to the primary care veterinarian

Note the third item. An ear examination before the hearing test is what stops a wax plug being recorded as inherited deafness, and it is the step an owner should confirm is happening wherever they get the test done.

The white cat and the blue eye, where three studies disagree

A solid white cat is the animal at risk here, and a solid white cat with two blue eyes is the animal most at risk. In the largest client-owned series, 132 solid white purebred kittens tested in the United Kingdom, congenital sensorineural deafness was diagnosed in 40 of them, 30.3 percent, made up of 19 unilateral (14.4 percent) and 21 bilateral (15.9 percent) cases, and it was diagnosed in none of the 61 coloured littermates tested alongside them.

That control group is the part to notice. Sixty-one coloured kittens from the same fifty litters, the same breeders and the same test, and not one of them was deaf. Coat colour, not pedigree, is doing the work.

Iris colour then splits the white kittens again. Prevalence was 22.2 percent in white kittens with no blue iris, 44.4 percent in those with one blue iris and 50 percent in those with two, and a kitten with at least one blue iris was 3.2 times more likely to be affected. An earlier German series of 84 client-owned pure-breed white cats across 10 registered breeds found an overall prevalence of 20.2 percent, 9 cats (10.7 percent) bilaterally deaf and 8 (9.5 percent) unilaterally deaf, with deafness status associated with iris colour at P equals .04 and no association with sex at P equals .85.

The study that contradicts the blue-eye rule

A Polish series of 72 client-owned purebred white cats from six breeds, examined between 2007 and 2021, found an overall prevalence of 16.7 percent with a 95 percent confidence interval of 8.9 to 23.3 percent, unilateral deafness at 11.1 percent being more common than bilateral at 5.6 percent. It found no association between sex and deafness at P equals .46, and, against the other two studies, no association between blue irises and deafness at P equals .91. Its authors draw the practical conclusion rather than the tidy one, which is that in order to eliminate the condition it is necessary to examine and diagnose white cats with blue irises as well as those with irises of any other colour.

Three studies, three prevalences, 16.7 percent of 72, 20.2 percent of 84 and 30.3 percent of 132, and a disagreement about whether the blue eye predicts anything Mari L, Freeman J, Van Dijk J. Every page that prints one of those numbers as the figure for white cats is choosing a population and not telling you. The honest reading is that somewhere between one in six and one in three solid white pedigree cats is deaf in at least one ear, that blue eyes raise the odds in most populations studied, and that no eye colour clears a white cat of the need for a test.

Breed by breed, and a misprint worth knowing about

The UK study is the only one of the three that publishes a usable per-breed breakdown, and the spread across breeds is wider than the spread between studies.

The Persian row matters most to Indian readers, because the Persian is the pedigree cat this country actually keeps, and the Persian row is also where the paper contradicts itself. Its abstract states that deafness was diagnosed in 2 of 12 (8.3 percent) Persian kittens, but 2 of 12 is 16.7 percent, and the paper's own Table 2 and its discussion both give 1 of 12, at 8.3 percent. The table and the discussion agree with each other and with the arithmetic, so this page publishes 1 of 12. A second, smaller slip sits in the discussion, which prints 46.9 percent for the Turkish Vankedisi group its abstract and table both give as 7 of 15, which is 46.7 percent.

Two other things follow from that table. The Turkish Vankedisi is the all-white Turkish Van, a different animal from the Turkish Angora that Indian sellers usually mean, and the 46.7 percent belongs to the Van rather than to the Angora. And the highest-risk breeds in the table are not the ones marketed as white breeds at all; the Norwegian Forest cat and the Maine Coon are, which is why coat colour on the individual kitten beats breed reputation every time.

What the cat sources do not say

One claim circulates widely enough to be worth testing, which is that an odd-eyed white cat is deaf specifically on its blue side. Bonbeno could not confirm it. Across the saved full texts of all three cat prevalence studies and Strain's feline review, the strings odd-eyed and ipsilateral return zero occurrences, so none of these sources reports which ear an odd-eyed cat loses Strain GM. Hearing disorders in cats. What they do report is the association with having a blue iris at all, and the fact that one of the three found no such association. Treat the blue-side story as folklore until someone measures it, and test both ears regardless.

Merle to merle, the one harm on this page that is entirely avoidable

Breeding one merle dog to another merle dog produces, on average, 25 percent double merles, and those dogs usually have a solid white coat and blue irises, are often deaf and blind, and may be sterile. Everything else on this page is a risk to be measured. This one is a decision somebody makes, and in India it is being made for coat colour.

The genetics are simple enough to check on paper. The merle allele M is dominant, so a heterozygous dog Mm shows the pattern that buyers pay for, and when two Mm dogs are bred a quarter of the litter is expected to be MM. The deafness in this case is neither dominant nor recessive; it is linked to a dominant gene that disrupts pigmentation and, as a secondary effect, produces deaf dogs.

The measured numbers come from a single study that genotyped what it tested. Strain and colleagues BAER-tested 153 privately owned merle dogs of different breeds and genotyped each one at the SILV pigment locus as heterozygous or homozygous. Across all merles, 4.6 percent were unilaterally deaf and 4.6 percent bilaterally deaf, and there was a significant association between hearing status and heterozygous versus homozygous genotype.

Read the bilateral column. A single merle runs at 0.9 percent bilaterally deaf and a double merle at 15 percent, which is roughly sixteen times the risk of total deafness, produced deliberately by one breeding decision. The study found no significant association with eye colour or sex, which is worth saying because it cuts against the assumption that a blue-eyed merle is the one to worry about.

One limitation belongs in the same paragraph as those percentages. The published abstract gives the genotype-specific rates but does not state how many of the 153 dogs were homozygous, so the 10 percent and 15 percent figures rest on a subgroup whose size the abstract does not print. The direction and the significance test are solid; the precision of those two numbers is not, and no page should quote them to one decimal place.

Strain also places merle deafness in context rather than at the top of the danger list. Deafness prevalence in merle dogs was greater than in some breeds homozygous for the piebald gene, such as the English Cocker Spaniel, but comparable to or lower than that in the Dalmatian and the white Bull Terrier. A single merle puppy is not a high-risk animal. A double merle is.

Two versions of the same sentence, one of them stronger

Strain's text on double merles appears in two places and the two do not quite match. The Louisiana State University page says such dogs usually have a solid white coat and blue irises, are often deaf and/or blind, and may be sterile, and that when two dogs heterozygous with merle (Mm) are bred, 25 percent will end up with the MM genotype. The Orthopedic Foundation for Animals page, which reproduces the same article by permission, says such dogs are sterile, and describes the cross more loosely as when two dogs with merle are bred. The looser version matters, because a reader who takes it literally would conclude that a double merle cannot reproduce, and would drop a precaution the author's own page does not drop. Where two versions of one source disagree, this page prints both.

The breeds where this bites hardest in India are the ones sold in merle at a premium, among them the Australian Shepherd, the Shetland Sheepdog, the Rough Collie, the Great Dane in harlequin, the French Bulldog and the Catahoula Leopard Dog. Strain's own list of merle breeds names the Collie, the Shetland Sheepdog, the Dappled Dachshund, the Harlequin Great Dane, the American Foxhound, the Old English Sheepdog and the Norwegian Dunkerhound among others.

BAER in India, who actually has the machine, and what the law does not say

BAER testing is done in India, at Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, and it is very hard to find evidence of it anywhere else. Two TANUVAS campuses have published brainstem auditory evoked response work on dogs, Madras Veterinary College in Chennai on twenty five dogs and the Veterinary College and Research Institute at Orathanadu on twelve. The equipment and the trained people exist in this country. Access for an ordinary owner with a white puppy is a different question, and the answer is worse.

Take the two Indian records one at a time, because they are the whole documented base. The Madras Veterinary College study performed BAER on twenty five dogs with varying degrees of otitis externa and reported that ears with severe disease showed prolonged latencies of all waves and a lower wave I to wave V amplitude ratio; all six authors are at Madras Veterinary College, TANUVAS, Chennai 600 007, and the paper appeared in the Indian Journal of Animal Research. The Orathanadu study assessed twelve dogs over twelve months from November 2016 to November 2017 on what it calls a modern computerized BAER system, reported mean wave latencies for two groups of six, and found all of them free from deafness.

The Orathanadu paper's opening line says who the Indian demand actually comes from. Deafness evaluation is described there as important for dogs and puppies that are to be deployed as detective dogs and sniffer dogs by security agencies, and equally important for breeding purposes, as it helps to identify and exclude deaf animals from specific breeding programmes. Working-dog procurement, in other words, and not the pet trade. That is a fair description of who gets tested in India today.

The international directory lists no Indian site at all

Strain's LSU list of BAER testing sites is the reference directory for this test worldwide, arranged by US state and then by country. Bonbeno read it in full on 27 September 2026, as 32,326 characters of extracted text. The string India occurs in it exactly once, and that occurrence is the word Indiana, inside the entry for a veterinary centre in Fishers, Indiana. Chennai occurs zero times. Argentina, Australia, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and New Zealand all have country entries, and Japan is the only Asian country with one. An Indian owner searching that directory finds nothing, which is why so many Indian breeders believe the test does not exist here.

Why the literature search says India has no work on this, and why it is wrong

Run the search properly and India looks empty. On 27 September 2026 the Europe PMC REST API returned hitCount 0 for deafness or BAER or brainstem auditory evoked, combined with dog or dogs or canine, combined with India in the title and abstract, and hitCount 0 for the same clinical terms combined with an Indian author affiliation. The cat version of the query returned 0 as well. The instrument was working: the Labrador control, hip dysplasia combined with Labrador in the title and abstract, returned hitCount 110 of on-topic canine papers in the same session.

Now widen it by one term and the trap becomes visible. Brainstem auditory evoked with an Indian affiliation, without the species filter, returns 70 records, and every one of the first fourteen is human medicine, from physiology and neurology departments at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, AIIMS Gorakhpur, Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute in Lucknow, NIMHANS in Bengaluru, IGIMS Patna and Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College in Kolkata. Counting affiliation strings across the fifty records the API returned, New Delhi appears in five, Bangalore in five and Karnataka in four, alongside Lucknow in four, Varanasi in three, Patna in three and Chennai in two. India has a deep human BAER literature spread across a dozen cities and, on that index, no veterinary one at all. The machine a deaf puppy needs is in the same country, and almost always in the wrong building.

The two Indian canine BAER papers are real and neither is in that index. One is in the Indian Journal of Animal Research and one is in the Journal of Entomology and Zoology Studies, and Europe PMC indexes neither. The absence is an indexing artefact, not an absence of Indian capability, and any page that reports zero Indian research on canine deafness from a database search alone is reporting the database rather than the country.

Capability is not the same as a service you can book

Published research does not mean an open clinic. The TANUVAS Directorate of Clinics page that lists what its veterinary teaching hospitals offer small-animal clients names cardiology, dermatology, internal medicine, ophthalmology, orthopaedic surgery and immunisation among its specialties, and the strings BAER, auditory, neurology and electro return zero occurrences across its 13,121 characters. So the university publishes BAER research and does not advertise BAER as a client-facing service. The practical route for an Indian owner is to ask a veterinary college's clinical medicine department directly, by name, rather than to look for a listed service or to ask a general practice.

No Indian institution publishes a BAER price in rupees that Bonbeno could find, and no rupee figure is invented here. For scale, the only clearly published fee in the sources opened for this page is American, 201 US dollars in total at the UC Davis teaching hospital, and that is a US teaching-hospital price reported as one. Budget for the journey rather than for a fee, because the facilities are concentrated in veterinary schools and, on the published record, in one state.

The Rules name eleven defects and deafness is not one of them

India's breeding law is silent here, and the silence is checkable. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules 2017, notified as G.S.R. 496(E) from New Delhi on 23 May 2017 by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, run to fourteen pages and extract to 51,953 characters, in which deaf occurs zero times, BAER occurs zero times and merle occurs zero times; the word hearing occurs exactly once and not in a clinical sense. The genetic-defect testing clause does name hip dysplasia and progressive retinal atrophy, each once, so the drafters knew how to name an inherited defect and did not name this one.

That is a gap rather than a permission. Nothing in Indian law stops a breeder producing a double merle litter, requires a BAER result before a white puppy is sold, or obliges anyone to disclose a known deaf sire. The buyer's own diligence is the only control that exists, which is the argument for the breeder checks guide rather than for trusting a registration paper.

The far more common Indian reason a dog stops responding

Most Indian dogs that stop responding to their names are not congenitally deaf. They have ears. Otitis externa in dogs in India is common enough for Madras Veterinary College to have assembled a series of twenty five dogs carrying varying degrees of it, and in a humid climate with a long monsoon an ear canal stays wet for months at a time. Otitis causes conductive hearing loss by blocking the canal rather than by killing cochlear hair cells, and measuring exactly that is what the Chennai series set out to do. Conductive loss is a treatable problem and congenital sensorineural deafness is not. Before concluding that an adult dog has gone deaf, have the ear canals examined, especially after a monsoon.

Living with a deaf dog or cat, and the one Indian risk that is different

Living with a deaf animal works, and it works because deaf animals are naturally more visually attentive to humans, which makes them amenable to training through gesture. Gesture communication, including canine obedience training signals and American Sign Language signs, has been found to be effective in deaf dogs, and owners of deaf cats may with patience be able to train their pets with the same system. The management, not the diagnosis, is where an owner's work actually is.

Start by separating the two situations, because they need different amounts of effort. A cat with unilateral deafness or partial hearing loss requires no specific management, except that one with suspected hereditary deafness should not be used for breeding. The same logic holds for dogs; a unilaterally deaf dog can make a good pet but should not be bred. Bilateral deafness is the situation that changes a household.

Hand signals, from the source that wrote them down

Strain's chapter on living with a deaf dog or cat sets out a signal for each common command, most of them borrowed from American Sign Language so that the vocabulary is consistent and teachable to anyone else in the house. A selection is reproduced below.

Two practical notes about that table. Pick one signal per command and never vary it, because a deaf animal has no tone of voice to disambiguate a sloppy gesture. And teach the whole household the same set, including domestic staff, because a deaf dog that reads one person's hands and nobody else's is a dog that is only trained a third of the day.

Getting attention without sound

The practical problem with a bilaterally deaf animal is not obedience, it is the moment before obedience, when you need it to look at you. The methods that work are listed below.

• Stamp or tap the floor. Hard Indian flooring, tile, stone or polished concrete, carries a footfall as vibration better than carpet does, which is one thing that works in your favour here
• Use a torch or a room light. A flash across the floor in front of the animal, never into its eyes; some deaf cats with outdoor access have been trained to return to flashing porch lights
• Approach in the animal's line of sight, never from behind a sleeping dog, because the danger to infants and toddlers from reflex bites or scratches inflicted when a deaf animal is startled has to be kept in mind
• Wake by touch on the shoulder or rump, the same spot every time, so the contact becomes predictable rather than alarming
• Teach a check-in, rewarding the animal every time it looks at you unprompted, because the whole system depends on it choosing to watch you

The safety calculation is genuinely different in India

Impairment or loss of auditory function is at best an inconvenience, but it can be life-threatening due to undetected dangers such as motor vehicles and predators. That sentence was written about a country with pavements. An Indian street adds unsignalled two-wheeler traffic from behind, reversing vehicles that use a horn instead of a mirror, and free-roaming dogs that announce themselves by growling first. Every one of those warnings is auditory, and a bilaterally deaf dog receives none of them.

The conclusion follows without needing to be softened. A bilaterally deaf dog is an on-lead dog outside a secured compound, permanently, and a bilaterally deaf cat is an indoor cat. Strain's guidance for cats is that the primary concern is protection from undetected dangers such as motor vehicles or predators, and that these cats should preferably be kept as indoor pets, since it can be difficult, although not impossible, to constrain cats with yard fencing. A deaf cat in a secured Indian flat lives an entirely normal life. A deaf cat with balcony access does not.

If you are buying rather than already living with one

The Dalmatian Club of America's current position, reproduced by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, is the clearest breeder standard published for any breed on this page. It asks breeders to ensure that the BAER hearing status of all breeding candidates and their progeny is considered prior to breeding, to disclose the puppy's BAER hearing result to the buyer, and it states that a bilaterally deaf puppy must never be used for breeding and must be spayed or neutered at the appropriate age. Any breeder anywhere, including in India, can meet that standard, and the second clause is the one to hold them to. Ask for the result, in writing, for the individual puppy.