Sara Laufer rests peacefully tonight. She’s earned it. After a long day’s drive from her home in Davis to her mother’s place in Studio City, a full night of undisturbed sleep is a just reward. Through her blissful haze, she feels the wet nose of her hearing service dog, Bogie, nudging her. At first repeatedly, and then incessantly, he ushers her out of her sluggish fog. She starts to smell smoke as she recognizes Bogie’s snout pushing under her neck over and over. Her eyes flutter open, and in the glow of the streetlight from outside her window she sees Bogie, her sixty-seven-pound golden retriever, breathing heavily on her. Noticing that she’s finally awake, he starts to bark loudly enough for her to feel the vibrations in her hair.

Laufer sits up to find Bogie resting his paws on the windowsill of their room. He bounds over to her, nudges her, and returns to the windowsill again. She follows him to the window and notices smoke billowing into the street. Her heart jumps into her throat when she sees flames engulfing the second floor of the house next door. Laufer hastily grabs Bogie’s leash and her cochlear implant processor, yelling at him to come with her into her mother’s room. As she switches on the implant, the scream of sirens pierces her ears.

Bogie is one of over eight hundred canine graduates of the Hearing Dog Program (HDP), formerly with the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SF/SPCA) for almost thirty years. The program trained and placed dogs with people who were hard of hearing and expressed an interest in canine aid throughout California and Nevada. It was one of only a handful of programs like it throughout the country, and was internationally respected. The program was terminated the Monday after a weekend of celebration for the SF/SPCA last spring, citing inefficiency and lack of funding as the main causes of termination.

While Tom Oliver, administrative assistant for the HDP, prepares for another week of work, he and his colleagues are unexpectedly summoned to a meeting. They enter the HDP Training Center to discover SF/SPCA President Jan McHugh-Smith and Vice President Dori Villalon waiting for them. It’s not until Oliver sees Alice Jordan, director of human resources, that he knows that something is wrong. “We have closed the program,” announces McHugh-Smith. For the next few moments, Oliver is speechless, but hardly surprised. In the past few weeks, the program had been asked to consolidate their focus from all of Nevada and California to just the Bay Area. McHugh-Smith tells the group that each person is to be met with individually to discuss their future. After a brief discussion and a few questions from the incredulous staff, Oliver storms out of the room and into his private office. Upset, disappointed and still slightly in disbelief, he sits down at his computer in an attempt to get some work done when a human resources assistant comes into his office to watch over him. He sees another assistant escort his co-worker upstairs. He doesn’t understand what’s happening until program director Glenn Martyn appears in Oliver’s doorway and says, “It’s been nice working with you.”

Martyn stands in front of a crowd of about twenty at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. His four-year-old dog, Runner, rescued from a shelter in Sacramento, stands at his side, alert and ready as Martyn speaks. Through entertaining anecdotes and Runner’s demonstrations, Martyn explains what the little-known hearing service dog does and how important he or she can be. With a remote, he triggers a ringing telephone on a table across the room. Runner bounds over to Martyn, dancing on his hind legs as he paws at his knees, getting Martyn’s attention, and then zips over to the phone, letting him know where the noise is coming from. He runs back and forth until Martyn finally follows him to the phone. The crowd tonight is inquisitive and interested in what Martyn and Runner represent: the reopening of the HDP, independent of the SF/SPCA.

Martha Hoffman, former trainer for the old HDP and head trainer for the new, explains that any dog with the right temperament can be trained to be a service dog. Generally, this means a slightly smaller dog breed, known for sociability and “toned-down natural instincts”—poodles, some terriers, pugs, French bulldogs, or papillons. As with the old program, many of the dogs accepted into the program will be rescued from shelters in the Fresno area, where there is a large population of small dogs. In the past, the HDP has also gotten canines from other rescue organizations, from private parties and even from Guide Dogs for the Blind as “career change” dogs, and hopes to continue this trend when the new program is fully up and running.

Today, Maggie accompanies Hoffman to an event benefiting the new program. She dons her orange service vest: a sign to the world that she’s on the job. She sits in Hoffman’s lap, snorting into the air as Hoffman pets just the right spots. Maggie has been trained as a hearing dog, and performs as Runner does, as a demo dog for the program. After getting all of her energy out this morning, zooming around the yard, jumping from couch to couch and onto Hoffman’s newly cleaned clothes, Hoffman places the vest on and Maggie immediately calms down. “They learn that when you put the hearing dog vest on, that you’re going to expect more of them.”

Since Laufer’s mother’s chemotherapy last year, her hearing hasn’t been normal, and she is still asleep as Laufer throws open the door and turns on all the lights, shouting for her to wake up. Bogie runs to the bed and nudges her as Laufer grabs her shoulder. As she pulls her mother up and warns her of the danger just thirty feet from her window, Bogie proceeds to lick her mother’s face. “He seemed to know that she needed both succor and alerting,” Laufer recalls. All three of them run out of the house and into the chaos of the street. They watch nervously as firefighters pull hoses from the hydrant to the unoccupied burning building.

For a few minutes, the fire threatens the house she grew up in, the house her mother has lived in for forty-six years. But the hazard abates and after a while, the firefighters inform them that the blaze is under control and give them permission to return home. After asking if they had heard the fire, Laufer explains Bogie’s performance. Everyone is impressed. “He is a miracle and a joy and a gift, and I am grateful everyday to and for him—not just for waking me up during a terrifying fire, but for his love and friendship each moment, and his usual signal responses that keep me connected to the hearing world,” Laufer says. “With every wag of Bogie’s tail, my heart lifts and is joined ever more permanently to his soul.”