Good Dog by Kate Leaver

Author:Kate Leaver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

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We’ve been using dogs as guides for people who live with blindness and low vision for a long time. There is a mural of a blind man being led by a dog found in the ruins of Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city, which dates all the way back to the 1st century AD. There’s a Chinese scroll from the year 1200 in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that also depicts a blind man following a dog.

We know that formal training, something like we now know it, began for guide dogs in the 1780s, at a hospital for the blind in Paris, France. By the year 1819, a man by the name of Johann Wilhelm Klein, the founder of the Institute for the Education of the Blind, included in a book some instructions for training a dog for the specific purpose of guiding the blind.

Modern guide dog training has an especially sad origin story. When soldiers returned home from World War One, some of them had been blinded by poison gas. As a German doctor called Gerhard Stalling was treating veterans for their injuries, he noticed that they enjoyed being around his dog. He had the rather brilliant idea to train other dogs to look after them. He opened a school for guide dogs in Oldenburg, Germany, in 1916. It was such a success that he went on to open more branches across the country. He was then able to oversee the training of 600 dogs a year. A decade later, in 1926, another school opened up in Potsdam, near Berlin, where they trained 12 guide dogs a month.

Around this time, a wealthy woman in America heard about all these German dogs being trained to aid the visually impaired. Dorothy Harrison Eustis was already training dogs for other jobs over in the USA. When she heard about Gerhard Stalling’s school, she was enchanted by the idea of training dogs to help blind people, and she immediately travelled to Potsdam, where she stayed for some months to observe their training methods. She was so impressed by the whole operation that she wrote an article about it (titled ‘The Seeing Eye’) for the American Saturday Evening Post, in November 1927.

An American man with impaired vision, named Morris Frank, read her article and got in touch to ask Dorothy whether she might train a dog for him. He says picking up that newspaper on that day was a decision beyond price for him, because his whole life changed once he got a dog who could see for him. Dorothy agreed and trained up a dog she called Buddy, who travelled back to America and essentially became that country’s first official guide dog.

In 1928, she opened a school in Switzerland, and then the whole notion of training dogs to guide the blind spread to Italy, where another specialised school was opened. The following year Dorothy opened a school in New Jersey, as the practice began to be popular worldwide.

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