Guide Dogs See Straight to the Heart

Although she sees very poorly, Jeanmarie Tall-Bonnell had never really considered getting a guide dog. She’s afraid of dogs, she explained. Then she moved to Los Angeles.

“I decided I was more afraid of L.A. than dogs,” she said, reaching down to give an affectionate pat to Thatcher, the yellow Lab who has been her eyes since 1993.

Tall-Bonnell, who now lives in San Francisco, was among the 1,000 owners of guide dogs and their friends who turned out June 8 for the annual open house at the Guide Dogs of America facility in Sylmar.

It was a typical June day, the kind that moves bottled water by the crate. But Tall-Bonnell found a choice spot, a picnic table cooled by several big trees. She stood there, Thatcher patiently poised by her side, and chatted with guild friends, including Sharlene Ornelas of San Diego.

Also partially sighted, Ornelas has used a dog for 20 years. In fact, she’s had seven guide dogs in that time.

What made her go through the demanding process of learning how to use a dog to enhance her mobility? “I got tired of trees hitting me in the face,” she said.

If you are trying to walk in an unseen world using only a cane, plotting your course with a motion Ornelas compared to a “zigzag sewing-machine stitch,” the most you can hope for is avoidance. But a dog actively processes visual information, and a trained dog can make intelligent decisions based on what it sees.

“The dog clears a space 3 feet wide and 6 feet high,” she said.

Ornelas has had Whistler, her golden retriever, for two years. The stereotypical guide dog is a German shepherd, the breed favored when the technique was developed following World War I. But today, as trainer Chuck Jordan explained, most guide dogs are retrievers, 70% of them Labradors.

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Shepherds are intelligent dogs--quick learners and good at making the discretionary calls that steer their owners through a world full of curbs, cars and uncovered manholes.

But many of the blind are older and have diabetes or other disorders that require them to husband their energy. Shepherds are strong, active dogs bred to chase sheep all day and night. They’re more dog than many blind people can, or care to, deal with.

“It’s not that Labs are better than shepherds,” said Jordan. “They’re more versatile, and they fit into more lifestyles.”

Jordan is one of six trainers at the school. As he pointed out, certain breeds are obviously better suited to this work than others. No Akitas, originally bred to hunt bear, need apply.

But the specific breed of the dog is far less important to the process than the fit between dog and owner, Jordan said. Trainers work as hard at making the right match as they would brokering a marriage.

The school trains dogs for four to six months. To be chosen for training, a dog has to be post-puppy. Most dogs aren’t ready until they are 16 to 18 months old. “They need to be mature enough to handle the pressure,” Jordan said. “There’s a lot of responsibility to being a guide dog.”

Before their education begins, the dogs are screened for general health and physical defects. Hip dysplasia, for instance, is common in larger breeds.

The dogs must also pass a special stress test. “They can’t be too sound reactive,” said Jordan, explaining why some dogs wash out when a gun is fired as part of the entrance exam. The testers also evaluate how the dog responds when an umbrella is unexpectedly popped open in front of its face. An animal that becomes aggressive or requires 20 minutes to calm down should find another line of work.

“And if there’s no reaction, that’s as bad as a dog that overreacts,” Jordan said.

The first thing that guide dogs have to learn is the work commands: “forward,” “left,” “right,” “hop up” and the rest. “Dogs understand the tones and inflections in your voice more than the English words,” Jordan said. Since dogs aren’t fussy about diction, you could say “ground” or “clown” instead of the standard command “down,” and the dog will understand as long as you gave it the usual inflection.

The dogs are taught to respond to commands by the standard method, used by most professional trainers, of command, correct and praise. A dog that moves forward on “forward” is fussed over as if it were a brain surgeon, Jordan said.

Food is not used as a reward, in part because in hottest Sylmar many dogs have little appetite.

Predictably, the dogs spend hours learning how to go around obstacles. They are also taught to stop any time they encounter a difference in height. “It doesn’t matter if it’s 3 inches or 1,000 feet,” Jordan said. The dog must stop so the blind person doesn’t stumble.

One effective way to teach that lesson is to allow the pooch to experience the consequences of failure. When a dog fails to stop at a change of height, the trainer stumbles onto the animal as a blind person might.

“The reality is,” Jordan said, “when you have 240 pounds of blob fall on you, the next time you come to a curb, you’re very serious about stopping at it.”

Learning to stop at an open manhole or other change of height, even when the owner has commanded “forward,” is a critical facet of training, known as intelligent disobedience. Harnessed to and led by their masters, the dogs learn to do remarkable things. They can be trained to find elevators, for instance, or empty seats on a bus.

“Some of these dogs are really smart,” Jordan said. “They’ll go to the handicapped seats right behind the driver, and, if there’s somebody there, they’ll stare at them until they leave.”

After the dogs finish training with the staff, they spend four weeks training with their new owners. None of the human/dog training is in the protected atmosphere of the school. It’s out in the real world, including the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

Last year, the center matched and trained 39 such teams, as the people and their animal assistants are appropriately called. The school has almost a two-year waiting list for dogs.

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The people who live with these animals say they are much more than canes with beating hearts. “I know wherever I go and whatever I do, I’m not all alone,” said Ornelas.

One unexpected benefit: The animals are people magnets, attracting friendly strangers who are much more likely to exchange pleasantries with a blind person accompanied by a dog than with a person tapping down the street alone.

Asked if there were any negatives to having a guide dog, Ornelas thought for a moment and said, with tears in her eyes, “There’s one thing I don’t like. They don’t last forever.” She has had to retire or put down six dogs, and it has always been wrenching.

In the past, Guide Dogs of America encouraged clients to begin thinking at once about their next dog. But a couple of years ago, Jordan said, the school realized that clients may need counseling after losing a guide dog, and they almost always need time to grieve.