What’s the Matter with Guide Dogs? (Chapter 4 Old School and New School Diverge: Sully and Marra)

After my experience with Barley at Guide Dogs for the Blind in Boring, Oregon, I thought the issue was that particular school just wasn’t putting out high quality dogs. They were putting out too many, too young, too raw and too fast. So, schools are different. Huh. Okay, then let’s go back to where it all began at Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind. It didn’t happen right away, though. I had pushed to get Barley in the window that was 5 months before I gave birth, Nik moved down from Toronto, we started our immigration journey, and he got a job. When Barley was retired early, I lost my window. Although Nik was able to get Sully in 2011, I would not go back to get Marra until 2014. Our experiences the second time at GDF were a bit of a mixed bag. I got a really great dog with the best trainer I had ever had. Nik got Sully, and Sully is a complicated issue.

My third ID card for Marra. I’m getting older still….

But first, a disclaimer about training staff:

I’ve already mentioned some trainers in this series by first name, and now I am going to go deeper and mention a few more. I want to be clear that I do not think these trainers are bad people. They are not the villains in my story. They are mostly hard-working folks that put in long hours and don’t get paid especially well. You don’t major in guide dog training in college. There is no real accreditation that sets universal standards. Most trainers are animal lovers that work their way up from jobs like kennel worker and put in years of apprenticeships. They generally try their best and want to help. Doug, Sioux, Mike, Dan, Kat, and Other Dan have been generally nice to me and seem sincere in wanting to do good work. I do not have issues with them, personally. I mention them only as a means to illustrate my first-hand experiences. What I am trying to bring to light through my story is more of the overall trends of lowering quality in the guide dogs that are being produced today and how there is no real quality assurance at all that is consistent. And that this issue affects us blind handlers the most, although we have the least amount of power to say anything about how it affects our real lives.

Sweet, Sincere, and oh So Very Soft Sully:

I met Sully in my house late at night after Nik took the train home from the airport. Sully was a sweet, squirmy ball of excitement, but Nik was exhausted. His trip home from the airport was more akin to the one I talked about in Chapter 1 of this series, though not quite as bad as no excrement, barking, or blood made any appearance. Still, it was a tough go for them.

Nik and Sully after first meeting at the dorms of GDF.

Nik had asked for Doug to train a dog for him, but Doug was doing more field work now and so a compromise was reached. Nik went to the training center for two weeks and had Dan as a trainer. Doug was going to come to our city in a couple of days and finish off the training with the two of them for an additional week. This was a time period when all the schools were trying different models to reduce the 26-day training period to just a couple of weeks. Nik spent two weeks with Sully and Dan at the center, then Doug was to spend one week with us working with them at home.

Dan was a young, nice guy, very affable and good natured. Very proud to work as a guide dog trainer. Smelled horribly of cigarette smoke to the point where you always knew he was coming from 50 feet away. Dan’s dogs had a reputation of being very well behaved and had a high level of decorum indoors. Sully had impeccable manners. He always sat still, he never begged for food, barked, was incontinent, or chewed up anything. I noticed right off that he was of different stuff than the squirrelly, puppy-like GDB dogs. He would eventually become our business’s honorary receptionist and everyone loved visiting Sully.

Sully, however, was not a very good guide dog. I started noticing things early on. He didn’t get the gist of the job. He was trained with food rewards and was rarely, if ever corrected with a harsh leash correction. He always had this sort of expression of confusion the whole time. Once, we were in Vancouver, BC and he practically gave me a heart attack because he took Nik out on this road where cars had started coming around a corner (he had the right-of- way, but went at a steep angle that drew him into the other lane.) So, cars were coming around from a sort of blind corner, and Nik was trying to straighten Sully out, and Sully was so flustered that he pooped in the middle of the road. The cars were coming, they weren’t going to be able to see them until the last second, and Sully is in a squat with a confused look on his face. I pretty much stopped completely trusting Sully as a guide from that point on.

To be fair, Sully dealt with a lot of situations with aplomb. Here, Sully is guiding Nik who is driving a stroller behind him. Up ahead, the twins and their father race ahead. I remember this day, we all went to a restaurant after one of my kids was in a play. Sully was always polite and well behaved in restaurants, even when we had to figure out a wheelchair lift and had 3 kids running around.

Nik took a lot longer to get that Sully couldn’t guide well. Nik has excellent O&M skills with excellent echolocation. Nik can pretty much walk around without a dog or a cane without too much difficulty if he is familiar with the area. Once, our Christmas Day got snowed in, so my twin’s father, the wheelchair user, was stuck in his house. So we packed up our whole Christmas–all the presents and the food and everything–and walked down to his apartment a few blocks away. Nik was carrying so much stuff, and he walked right down the middle of the snowy street perfectly with no cane and no dog. (There were no cars and it was easier to walk in the street than the sidewalk, as it had been cleared a lot more.) Nik is too skilled for his own good sometimes.

When you have some vision like I do, the guide dog trainers stress that you need to trust and follow the dog even if you can see something coming at you. But when you are totally blind, they just figure they don’t need to worry about you “leading the dog” too much. But Nik did not have a good fix on when Sully was guiding him and when he was guiding Sully. So, even though I could tell that Nik was doing more work than Sully was, I do think it was genuinely hard for Nik to tell.

So, what was Sully’s problem and why did he make it through training? There are many theories.

Sully was puppy raised by a very famous actress. He was sponsored by a big corporation. He was named after a celebrity (Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who famously landed the plane in the Hudson River) and had some ties to related organizations. There was a feeling that Sully couldn’t fail. He was a beautiful golden retriever. People said he looked regal. He was also super empathic and sweet. But he never struck you as being particularly smart. He might have been a great PTSD dog or therapy dog, but maybe he did not have the brains to be a guide dog. Did the pressure to have him succeed get in the way of quality standards? We wondered if Sully was “passed through” when he should have failed because of his famous and high level sponsors.
Was Dan just not a good guide dog trainer? He did well with Sully on the behavior side of things, but not the guiding. In the years after I got Barley, guide dog schools started doing massive staff layoffs. Supposedly it was a cost cutting strategy. Get the older, more experienced trainers out before they rack up the higher salaries and pensions and get new, young trainers in. Guide Dog schools laid off entire training staffs and hired untrained young folks. They were eager and meant well, but they didn’t have the same level of mentorship and apprenticeship that was common in the past. Sully just didn’t get the level of training he needed.
Doug ruined him unintentionally. Doug came from old school leash correction philosophy. If you remember, Doug was the one who would put his hand over mine and show me how hard to yank on the leash. In the few days that Doug came out after Nik had brought Sully home, they worked on street crossings while pulling a stroller. In an attempt to teach Sully to use the curb cuts, Doug did a strong leash correction with Sully. I wasn’t there, but Nik said Sully just dropped to the ground on the road and wouldn’t move. He was crushed in a way we had never seen a dog react to correction before. Since then, Sully seemed to start pulling way out into oncoming traffic in a wide arc instead of crossing the street straight. He took the lesson, but got it wrong. instead of aiming for the often 45 degree angled curb cuts, he thought he was supposed to arc way out into traffic. And he lost a bit of his spirit after that. From then on, Nik–well all of us–completely changed the way we crossed streets to accommodate Sully. We would always cross the street so that Sully was on the outside of Nik and the intersection, so he could not go into traffic. This might have meant we crossed an intersection three ways instead of just one to keep Sully on the outside from the intersection. All of the ways we walked with Sully were a strategy to accommodate his behaviors. When I got Marra, I often walked in front so he would just have to follow her. We walked on certain sides of the street and went certain routes all to accommodate him. Nik was guiding the guide dog.

Sully was a very soft dog. He was the product of the newer philosophy to make dogs easier to handle and to need less leash corrections. Doug came out to work with us again, and I think he saw how sensitive Sully was and how leash corrections did more harm. When talking about the old dogs vs. the new, Doug had said something to the effect that he told them (the breeding staff) that they were going to have just as many problems with the soft dogs than with the former, hardier dogs. He also told Nik that Nik was doing more for Sully than Sully was doing for him and that Sully had pretty much “washed out” which is an expression that trainers use when a dog has just decided “fuck this shit! I am not guiding anymore.”

Sully did enjoy walking with Nik, just not guiding. And Nik loved Sully as we all did and was in denial. It came to a head one day when we had all gone to a Dairy Queen. Nik had to leave early to catch a bus for work and the kids and I were finishing eating. Ten or 15 minutes after Nik left, I started noticing a bunch of people looking out a window and exclaiming things like “what is he doing? Is he blind? Is that a guide dog?” I love it when non-disabled people spend more time gawking than just asking someone if they need help. I quickly gathered up the kids and went outside. Sully and Nik were wandering aimlessly in the parking lot, completely disoriented. Parking lots are hard for blind people, and it was way too big of a job for a dog like Sully. Nik was pissed because he missed his bus, Sully was just sad and confused beyond any kind of usefulness. I put my foot down. I said, “you have to retire this dog. He can’t guide and you cannot get mad at him for not doing something he has demonstrated for years that he cannot do. If you are going to take him places, you must not use him as a guide, you must always have your cane.”

Nik let Sully come with him when Sully wanted to, but shortly after that, Sully started refusing to work sometimes. We would go to my kids’ father’s apartment every night to help him out on alternating days. Nik would call Sully and Sully would pretend to be sleeping and not move, even though his eyes were moving around and his ears perked up. It was hilarious. But he mostly still liked to go to work with Nik during the day. He would go in harness, but he really had very little guide “duties” that he was held to. He retired like this around 7, after about 5 years of trying to work with him and getting trainers out to work with him. He spent the rest of his life just hanging with the fam and going on low-stress walks. He died last year at the age of 13. I still miss him. He was such a sweet dog. But sometimes I think he missed his true calling in life. He should have been a PTSD dog for a veteran or something.

I agree with Doug. What I have observed with the issue of “soft dogs” is that they do not seem as smart as the hardier dogs like Mara and Jats. I don’t pretend to be any type of expert on breeding, so I honestly don’t know if this is a breeding issue or a training issue. But this is what I observe:

Soft dogs don’t seem to roll with mistakes as well as the tougher dogs. This is very important, and I think there is an aspect of this that trainers don’t have enough experience to understand. When you are blind, you WILL make mistakes with your dog, especially in the beginning when you don’t know them so well. It is sometimes hard to tell whether your dog is screwing around or when they are trying to tell you that there is an obstacle in the way. As a blind person, you at times WILL scold your dog when they are being entirely correct in their behavior, and you will praise your dog when they are screwing around. Hopefully it doesn’t happen too often, but it will happen, especially in the beginning. If a dog can’t roll with that and bounce right back to doing what they were doing before, they lose their training and their will to work. A blind person needs a dog who doesn’t take things too personally, will bounce back quickly after a bit of confusion, and who blows you off when you make mistakes. Basically, a confidence in themselves and what they are doing that goes beyond “perform a trick, get a reward/avoid punishment.” The older dogs had this, the newer ones are less likely to. I recently had a conversation with a guide dog trainer about this and she was defending the newer dogs and saying the old dogs were kind of bullies. Well, maybe, but you NEED a confident dog that knows when to say “screw you, I’m right and you’re wrong.” The new dogs are too sensitive and try too hard to please you to do this. Sully was crushed–CRUSHED–any time he didn’t do the thing Nik wanted him to do, even if Nik was wrong. He got confused. He had trouble bouncing back. He did not have the confidence to think on his own. He washed out early largely because of this.
Related to this, newer dogs don’t really do intelligent disobedience like the older dogs did. This is when a dog will refuse a command because it is not safe. Doug used to tell us to tell the dogs to go forward at a street corner when traffic was rushing right in front of us, but they wouldn’t budge. Now, the dogs can’t do this. (I’ll talk more about this when I talk about Mia and Cobey.) They have lost that for the most part. This was a most important skill. Sully literally walked INTO traffic with cars coming at him because he thought this is what Nik wanted him to do. He feared displeasing Nik more than he feared being crushed by a car. He was so overtrained that he lost even basic self preservation. I would take a bully dog over that.
The newer dogs lost the overall context of the job. They are so into pleasing their handlers that they look at each task as an individual trick rather than using strategy and context to understand the over all job. YES, dogs CAN generalize, understand context and strategize. I’ve seen it again and again. All dogs are different and this will be true to varying degrees, but it does seem like the newer dogs don’t do this as well. They get overly distracted by food rewards to the point where they lose the overall gist of their skills in different situations.

I’m not saying that we should go back to severe leash corrections, but I do think there is a compromise, and I think I found it in Marra.

Marra’s Training:

It’s sort of a no-no to pretend that any trainer is better than any other trainer and to ask for a particular trainer, so it has to be done a bit on the down low. A little nameless birdie may have told me when Mike would be up for class and that he was the best trainer. So I asked for him and was lucky enough to get him. I was a bit worried to go back to GDF after Sully. It was now 2014, and two years earlier, the entire GDB training staff–the largest in the country–had been laid off due to cost cutting measures. These folks scattered across the county among the guide dog schools, and several had landed at GDF, including the new training director. I saw from other people’s experiences with guide dogs that GDBs methods were getting spread out everywhere. The right hand leash issue, the squirrelly, young dog issue, the low expectations, the route trained dogs that were dependent on routine memorized routes rather than thinking. This was another issue with Sully. He was very, very routine dependent. He did ok for 5 years mostly because he memorized routes. But he also did not want to deviate from those routes. He would get very stressed to go off a route that he was familiar with and it was a problem. It looked like it didn’t matter where you went, that GDB low-end assembly line philosophy was spreading everywhere.

Mike and Marra and I working in the practice blocks on campus. Mike was tickled that Marra guided me around rain puddles. She understood her job!

I had met Mike briefly in 1993, when other trainers would wander through the dorms occasionally. So the main thing I knew about him was that he had been there for at least 21 years and was not a GDB import. I had an extensive interview with Mike in about June of 2014. We probably talked for about an hour, and it was the most extensive interview I had ever had. Because of my past experiences with Mara, Barley and Sully, I felt like I really had a good grip on what I wanted and didn’t want. I wanted a dog who was well behaved in public like Sully and Mara. I wanted a dog that was not routine dependent like Sully and to an extent, Barley. I wanted a dog who could target things and could be taught to target things easily like Mara and Jats. It was a nice conversation that I thought was incredibly thorough and I felt like I had been heard.

In training, Dan and Nik had had some kind of good natured conflict about Nik going off to a deli on his day off. It was still like that in guide dog school, you couldn’t set foot outside the dorms on your own. Nik eventually went to the deli with Dan following behind, but Dan was probably supposed to have the day off that day or something. I can’t remember the whole deal. So when I got there, I was asked if I was going to go rogue like Nik had. (Had my “mad escape” from GDB– where I ran 50 feet as fast as only a pregnant blind person can–preceded me? Were we now the couple that couldn’t stay put?) I decided to be straight up about it. “You guys know guide dog school is like a benevolent prison, right?” I said. “I admit, I struggle with this. I am never going to trust you completely with myself. I will always have an ID, a credit card and the number of a cab company ready to head. I will always be searching for the escape route and planning my route back to where I can control things. I will always feel smothered, surveiled and like you all need to just get away from me. But in general, my plan is to be compliant and do the training.”

And that is how I got the “little freedoms” I got from Mike. Meaningless little things like that I could go out on my own at night around the several acre campus and practice with my dog on the practice blocks or walk in the now defunct garden that I was barred from 21 years prior. Or that I would be allowed to go explore a mall or walk to a coffee shop when my training partner was on his walks with Mike. It was a bit of freedom theater, but it helped.

Marra was a delight. She was happy to meet me and was engaging and had very little issues in the dorm room. She was relaxed and friendly. I did the same walk with her on leash to a dining room chair that I had done before with Mara. This time, it was still a bit nerve wracking, but I knew it would get better quickly. (The name was total coincidence, by the way. I about fell off my chair when I heard it. In fact, when they told me her name the first time, they said it like Mara. Mara was pronounced like Maura Tierney. Marra was pronounced like Sarah.) The next walk was on a park path with no curbs or obstacles. But Marra stopped at each path and looked up at me, showing me where it was and asking me if we wanted to turn there. I did choose to turn on a few and not turn onto others. “Oh, my goodness!” I exclaimed. “She is showing me the paths and asking if I want to go on any of them. This is almost as good as having a cane!”

“Well, you asked for that, right?” Mike said. Then he explained to me how after our interview, he trained Marra to my requests. I talked a lot with Mike about the training process itself and how he was trying to change with the times but keep the standards high. He talked about how he always had to be a bit more creative than some of the other trainers who were larger in stature and did a lot of strong leash corrections. As a smaller guy, he always had to get the dogs to respond to praise more than they did. When food rewards became a thing, he tried to use them where it made sense but not depend on them entirely. He knew that I did not want food rewards for Marra, so he trained her both with them in the early stages, but then without them after she learned a skill. He asked me to compromise, and use food rewards for a few days, to get her more focused on me than on him. I did that, and then by the end of the first week, we had completely left food rewards behind. When I got home, I used them at first to teach her a few new things, and every once in a while brought them out just for fun, but generally we used them very seldomly. Marra came ready to go with many target words already known. She could target elevators, trash cans, chairs, doors, etc. We even worked with the trainers at their sister program, called America’s Vet Dogs, to do some signaling for when there was a knock at the door.

I would take Marra down to a corridor in the basement and we would work on obedience lessons and then just run around the hallways and play. Here Marra is waiting for me to let her out of her “stay” position down at the end of a hallway. I needed to have time where I was not surveilled.

There were about ten people in the class, but there were 5 trainers. Each trainer had two students and mostly did their own thing with the two students, although some days we would all go to the same place together. I was with a student from Brazil who did not travel independently at all. He could not do street crossings independently. He was a professional in law, I was told, and he had drivers and assistants to do everything for him. I asked Mike how he could qualify for a dog. Mike shrugged. He said they try to select people who will benefit from having the dogs, but sometimes the benefits may be more social than navigational. For my Brazilian partner, it was likely more of a social bridge to acceptance for him. Hmmm, okay. I know that there are serious cultural barriers in some other countries for blind people and maybe that is worth it. But it also seemed like a waste of a trained dog. A person like that might do better with a dog with good obedience skills and decorum, but no guiding skills. (a dog like Sully?) It made me wonder if they trained dogs at different levels specifically for how people will use them. At what point is a dog still a guide dog?

The way they seemed to train dogs at that time was kind of interesting. They seemed to adopt some of the short kennel time of GDB, but still keep training standards high (at least for Marra. I did not see a lot of the other dogs this trip because of the 1:2 ratio thing.) Although I am sure the dogs are well cared for, being in a kennel for months on end is not good for the dogs. It stresses them out. It can be boring, it separates them from people and home life. It IS a prison. Mike indicated that GDF was trying to give the dogs as few transitions as possible and keep them in the kennels as little as possible. Marra went from her dog mother to her puppy raisers, to Mike and the kennels and to me. Her kennel time was low, only about 12-14 weeks. Mike had her the whole time, with his string of about 4 dogs, he was then in 2 classes for the month training with his 4 dogs to their blind handlers, and then he started the process over again. And a very well trained dog came out of that 12-14 weeks, with one trainer doing 4 dogs at a time. Maybe best of all, you trained with the trainer who had been with your dog for the last 12 weeks and knew exactly what they knew. And they could overlap and ease the dog into the new relationship.

The Facilities

This was the same campus I went to in 1993, but the entire dorm building had been remodeled. We all had single rooms now. It was a bit less like a house and more institutional, but overall it was fine. Basic, but fine. We still utilized the practice blocks they had on campus, and took the bus or vans to other locations. We worked in Smithtown, and Huntington mostly, but also went to Queens to do subways and the like. They still had no other “waiting” places, so we stayed in the vans a lot when it wasn’t our turn. With one trainer and two students with close by places to train, we took about 4 walks a day with the dogs. The waiting time was usually never longer than 20 or so minutes.

Level of Custodialism:

It was a little better than in had been in 1993. No longer were we barred from rooms of other classmates and no more separation of genders by wing. I, of course, had a bit more freedom than my classmates, basically because I asked for it and they let me. But you were still stuck there and there was a night babysitter of course, but she pretty much let you be. My training partner highly valued access to alcohol, so it was procured for him but weirdly, they made him drink outside of his room. So sometimes I would see him in the little snack lounge drinking beer and listening to Portuguese music.

Although Mike didn’t really do this, there was still a habit for staff to say that anything you did independently was because you had vision. I highly doubt I had the best vision of the group. In fact, I know I did not. But it was constantly said that I got to do some of the things I got to do, (like work my dog at night on campus without supervision) because I could see. This was funny to me because I am really night blind, and I actually asked to work at night because I knew I would have more of a challenge working at night than during the day. In any case, there were people who could see better than me who did not get these “little freedoms.” But it is probably because they didn’t ask.

I did have to try to back Mike off on standing right there and telling me every little thing. I don’t mind this on the first day or two when you are just getting used to the dog, but by the third day, you really need to work on trusting the dog and trying to see what it feels like when they are telling you things. So, for example, Mike would say “There is a set of four stairs coming up in about 15 feet.” Well, thanks for telling me, now it doesn’t matter what my dog does because I already know what is coming. When I asked him to back off, he did a bit, but seemed surprised I didn’t want all of this visual information. But Mike! I won’t have you with me when I go home! How will I know how it feels when this dog is telling me we’ve hit stairs if I anticipate them now? Again, this comes back to the traditional vs. structured discovery style of O&M. Guide dog trainers are largely not trained in O&M, at most they’ve been to a few CEU classes–likely taught by sighted traditional O&M instructors. They do spent some amount of time with each dog under blindfold, but are never left alone without another sighted trainer with them telling them everything that is ahead of them. They don’t really have a good idea how a lot of us travel.

One thing that was a definite improvement was that upon graduation, I was able to take ownership of my dog. This has been a hard fought for right of blind guide dog owners. I first was able to own my dog when Mara was about 8 years old. They had changed their policies and sent me an email that gave me the option to sign ownership papers. I was at work and I cried. I sent back the email indicating I wanted to sign the papers and got down on the floor with Mara and hugged her. She was really finally mine! Some schools act like it shouldn’t matter, but I’m sorry. It does. Again,why do they vet us so heavily but yet not trust us to own the dogs after we graduate? Do they not trust their own program? With Marra, I was given ownership papers upon graduation, which is how it should be.

There was one thing that really bugged me, though. One of my classmates was a staff member there. She worked in client support services (which is where every single blind staff member who works at guide dog schools is placed.) I thought she was treated horribly. On the one hand, I get that this is her own time and they wanted her to have time to concentrate on her own dog training and be off the clock–which is totally fair. But you would get into a discussion about guide dogs with her and from across the room, a staff member would cut her off and say in a condescending tone “Now, Jane (not her real name), you know you are not allowed to discuss guide dogs with the clients.” She who was on her third or fourth dog couldn’t even tell a story about a past guide dog. And you would ask her a simple question having to do about say, purchasing a new leash (like would I come to you or have to contact the training staff) and they would rush in and be all, “are you asking Jane questions??? She can’t answer any questions!” But the worst thing was that she said she wanted to be promoted but she had a–shall we say–a sighted glass ceiling she could not break through. The next promotion up required that the staff member stay over night with the students occasionally. And they would not let a blind person do that, and she could not get past that requirement. I understand the babysitter thing to an extent. I get why you don’t just let 10 random people have the run of your entire campus alone overnight. But really? a blind person couldn’t babysit us? To GDB’s credit, they had blind people in these roles. It really hit home that these people really do think of us as second class citizens.

Graduation:

Again, graduation at GDF was a reception with only puppy raisers, sponsors and handlers invited. They did have a filmstrip of us that they had taken throughout the training there, and they showed it to us twice. Once before the guest arrived so that they could describe it to us, and then once when the guest arrived we sat through it in silence. I thought it would have been better to describe it to us with the guest there, because it would be good modeling of accessibility and it might have been more interesting for everyone to have some back story. My puppy raisers were a lovely family with children, and they did get to visit with Marra this time. I think it is important to see how much your dog is happy to see the puppy raisers. It shows her past, and that she had a life before you, and that there is some hurt and loss involved during these transitions. That is important to keep in mind and that gets put in your face when you see how excited the dog is to see the raisers and how sad she is when they leave. The family was very respectful about it and I enjoyed meeting them. Overall, the graduation was casual and not very much inspiration porn at all.

Bringing Marra Home:

The main transitional problem Marra had for a couple of weeks when I first brought her home was that she chewed through about 4 leather leashes. And to be fair, I should have mentioned this in my first chapter on our airport trip. She did chew through her leash in the airplane on her way home. So it wasn’t completely uneventful. But think of it this way, I guided her from the airport to the hotel without a leash. She chewed it in half down too short to be useful. I only had the harness to hold on to, so I could not drop the harness handle, do any leash corrections, give her a little nudge, anything. And we still did ok making it to Nik’s hotel, including meeting Sully! This was a good guide dog! She chewed her leash and a couple of shoes in the first few weeks, but that was it. We really had no other problems.

One of my favorite pictures of Sully and Marra, here with two of my children. They always got along.

But she was an energetic, young dog. She would get too excited and pull too hard sometimes. I specifically remember having her down in Pioneer Square in Portland during a Christmas event. So this was in the first couple of months that I had her. There was a lot of excitement and she was sniffing around with her head down and getting on my nerves and so I finally gave her a fairly hard leash correction. And she dropped like a sack of potatoes. Oh! MY! These dogs are soft! I felt bad and I vowed to never do that hard of a correction again, (and I don’t think I really have.) But here is the kicker. Unlike Sully, who would have been useless and sulked for hours, after I squatted down and gave her a few pets, Marra bounced right back to it and was fine. All was forgiven and we moved on in life. I realized both that I did not really have to do very serious leash corrections with her (a small little tug to pay attention was all that was needed when she got distracted.) I also realized that this dog has some wherewithal to get on with it and bounce back. She has confidence.

Mike told me that what we are asking guide dogs to do is easy. The hardest part is to keep them interested and motivated to do it. He had high expectations for the dog and at least understood that blind people are all different and come with a variety of skill sets.

Marra was still not as savvy as Mara. We’ve gotten into a few jams that she just couldn’t figure her way out of in the way that Mara would have. But overall, she has been an excellent guide who came very well trained both as a guide and with good decorum. She came to me healthy mentally and physically and was very “finished off” as far as being ready to hit the ground running as a guide and work right into my life with very little work that I had to do at home. She eventually developed hip issues and leg tremors, but I had many good years with her before she retired.

NIk and I with Sully and Marra walking in Skokie, Illinois. Sully scraped by his last few years of guiding by following Marra a lot. She was fine with that, she preferred to be in front and call the shots. (Oh, and I had a broken foot, that is why I have two different shoes on!)

Marra’s timeline:

Born: April 3, 2013
Puppy raisers: June 2013 to June 2014 (13 months)
In for training: July 2014 to mid October 2014 (14 weeks in kennels)
In class: October 15, 2014 to October 31, 2014 (16 days,age 1 year, 7 months)
Working Guide: November 2014 to October 2023 (9 years)
Retired: October 2023, ~~still living with us as of this writing.~~
Died: November 30, 2023 (10 years, 8 months). Marra suddenly and unexpectedly died just days after this post was written. She died of hemangiosarcoma, a spleen tumor that is hard to diagnose.

Final Impressions:

It’s probably not entirely fair to compare Dan vs. Mike in the context of Sully vs. Marra and how successful they were. The data pool is way too small. And again, I liked Dan, he was a nice person who did seem to take a lot of pride in his job. But he was in my class, too, in 2014 and I watched him with the other students. He was not as experienced as Mike and did not at that time have a real knowledge of how blind people traveled or worked dogs. In every profession, there are younger, less experienced people who need time to learn and grow with the job and should be fostered to do so. What I noticed at this round of GDF, though, was that Mike was holding up an old standard and it was not being held up throughout the rest of the staff. In this way, how can one blame the Dans when they aren’t being given a lot of guidance in how things could be done better? When I was there, another older trainer named Barbara was there. She was soon to retire and she came to visit me a couple of times. She wanted me to meet with John. Remember John from 1993 who called Nik “fat boy?” I was not a fan of John’s back then. But Barbara was very excited and insistent for me to meet with John as he had retired due to Alzheimer’s. He was still on staff as “Head Trainer Emeritus” but I don’t think he had any duties. I agreed to meet John and I brought a picture of our class (as seen in the last chapter of this series.) I don’t know if he remembered me but he seemed to remember Nik. I only visited with him and Barbara for a few minutes, but there was a very wistful, “it ain’t like it used to be” vibe. I hugged him and he said, “back then, we trained good guide dogs. You were trained well, too. You know how to do it and you need to keep it up.” The idea that he seemed to be trying to get across was that he taught us the right way, so no matter what was going on now with the newer guide dogs, I had been trained well and knew how to keep that information alive and pass it on, as well as make sure my own dogs still lived up to it. I felt like I had won the jackpot with Marra as one of the last old school guide dog with one of the last old school trainers. We are still very fond of Doug, who is a very nice man who has been very helpful to us over the years. But Mike is hands-down the best guide dog trainer I have ever worked with.

In our house now we have three dogs. I will talk about our new dogs, Mia and Cobey in the next chapter. But Marra remains the Head Guide Dog Emeritus.

What’s the Matter with Guide Dogs? (Chapter 3: The Strange Story of Barley)

A Brief Interlude on Orientation and Mobility:

In the past, I’ve used the term “low skilled traveler” to describe some blind people’s travel behaviors, and I don’t really like that term because it sounds judgmental and it isn’t meant to be. So, I came up with some new terms:

Minimal travel: the type of travel where a blind person mostly utilizes sighted guides and door to door transportation much of the time. For example, a person might choose to take paratransit from their door to work, then get escorted by the driver into the workplace. This is the type of travel where a blind person does not walk independently much, perhaps only indoors or for short distances like from a car to a building.
route travel: the type of travel where a blind person has memorized a route, most often with the help of an O&M instructor or other sighted person. Whenever possible, they stick to these approved routes.
freestyle travel: the type of travel that is done without having done it before or have been walked through before with a sighted person. Sometimes questions are asked and research is done before-hand, but mostly a person just explores their space with their tools and senses, and figures it out as they go.

These are just rough categories and most blind people do a bit of each of them depending on the circumstances. For example, I was a minimal traveler when I had a broken foot and was on crutches. I depended on ride share and the help of others to walk with me because I had no hands free to use a cane or dog, and no stamina for much else. Now that I am more hearing impaired than I was in my past and have kidney disease that exhausts me, I do more routes that I know than freestyle. But I learned in a freestyle method and still enjoy just going out and exploring when I have the time and energy. My husband, Nik, is very much a freestyle traveler, but even he has routes he memorizes from time to time, albeit often after freestyling the route and teaching it to himself.

There are many reasons why any individual blind person might predominately be one style of traveler and not the others. Other disabilities factor in to how people travel. Different personalities and preferences factor in to how much one might prioritize or not prioritize a certain way of traveling. Finances and the environment in which one lives and travels also plays a part. People have the right to choose how they travel, and there should be no judgment about what one chooses.

That being said, freedom of movement is a fundamental right. And we should all have the opportunity to learn and choose what type of travel is best for us in any different situation. Too many times, people fall into the first or second category not by free choice but by a lack of opportunity to learn and develop the skills to have a full range of choices available to them. A choice is only a choice if all the options are known and available. For many blind people, this is not the case.

I have written about this many times, so I will be brief here. But there are different “philosophies” of non visual travel. The traditional O&M method teaches (in a nutshell) that people who travel with limited or no vision travel with a massive deficit of information that can only be filled by a sighted person, usually an “expert” in orientation and mobility. This expert teaches predefined routes by walking the blind person through it and filling in all the necessary visual information. The sighted person has then “approved” the route for use, and the blind person memorizes the route and does not deviate unnecessarily from it.

Another philosophy is the Structured Discovery method, which was developed by blind people for blind people. This philosophy states that although vision is extremely efficient and convenient for travel, it is not inherently necessary to safely travel. Using other senses and your brain are a safe way to explore the world and move through it. The built environment is set up in a very visual way, which does present real challenges to moving through the world non visually, but if a blind person develops skills like mental mapping, detecting clues via other means and senses, and exploring, they can pretty much go anywhere they want to go. The structured discovery instructor helps the student develop their own detective skills and exploration skills and confidence through a socratic questioning method–that and as a role model as someone who has spent countless hours traveling non visually.

Most “freestylers” come from the structured discovery method. (Nik was more self taught, though, and there are a lot of self-taught “freestyler’s” out there. Or I should say, “informally taught” with help from other blind friends.) I came from a structured discovery program.) And interestingly, most freestylers do not use a guide dog because a cane is such a useful tool in exploring your environment while a dog sort of moves you through it without exploring it. Traditional cane travel still dominates, especially in K-12. And that means that the average blind person is a route traveler most of the time. Based on personal experience? Freestyle travel is a lot more fun and makes for a lot more of an interesting life than does route travel and certainly more than minimal travel. In fact, I have observed that many route travelers are so keyed into their perceived necessity that a sighted “expert” needs to approve their route, that they literally have developed anxiety disorders from this style of teaching and sometimes are too afraid to go “outside of the lines” because they have been so conditioned to the premise that a sighted person needs to approve the route for them first.

Again, I want to reiterate that people have every right to choose how they move through the world. No one should be judged for these choices. However, I would like to see people have more opportunity to learn different methods of travel than route travel. I do think that barring other disabilities, the average blind person can learn the skills to “freestyle” and the average level of blind travel could increase if more people had more opportunities to build these kinds of skills.

And for those totally blind since birth: I do appreciate that there is more involved brain-wise for folks who have never had vision at all and whose brain likely has developed differently because of that. Especially those who are older and came from a time when little blind kids were not given canes and were discouraged from free movement as children. More research is coming out that spatial skills can be developed by congenitally blind kids when they are given the freedom to move and explore and use tools like canes when they are very young. I recognize that being blind from birth does affect travel in a unique way, but I also think that it is 100% possibly for these individuals to develop the skills that allow for a more organic, freestyle type of travel. I’ve seen plenty of folks who have proven that it can be done.

I think this is from my ID card, which I can’t find. It is Barley and I sitting outside on a bench in the North Park blocks at PSU. Barley is a yellow Labrador.

All this is leading to what I started to see at the guide dog schools when I went to get Barley, my second guide dog from Guide Dogs for the Blind.

Why I picked this school:

In the 2 years that my first guide dog, Mara, was in her retirement and died, I had a dying mother, a very sick partner, and eventually twin babies. Getting a new guide dog was not in the picture for me. When my kids were 4 and mostly walking on their own and were very good at stopping at curbs and not rushing out into the street, I started thinking about getting another guide dog. My decision to go to Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB) was entirely about proximity. Their father was a wheelchair user and could care for them at some level and my father was there, and he could…lets say if there was a fire he would get them out and maybe make them some Mac and Cheese for dinner, but that was about it. I felt like between the two of them, my kids wouldn’t die. But I also felt like I should be nearby if the whole thing blew up. GDB had a campus about 30 miles from where I lived. I just thought, “how different can the schools be?” and applied.

Looking back, there were plenty of warning signs I chose to ignore. First, I noticed in Portland that guide dogs kind of had a bad reputation, unlike in the midwest where I had moved from a few years earlier where guide dogs were highly respected. I remember talking to a VR counselor about job interviews and she told me not to take my guide dog because it would hurt my chances. This seemed totally weird to me. Guide dogs are great in interviews. They are ice breakers. They can gracefully follow the interviewer back to the office, they can find your seat elegantly, they will just sit quietly after that. How could that be bad, unless you had the very bad luck of interviewing with a dog hater? But the counselor was like, “no, you will be just fussing with your dog the whole time instead of being interviewed.” I didn’t understand this and passed it away as just VR counselor weirdness.

Then, I was in a mall with Mara and rode up the escalator with her like I had done many times before. And some woman started yelling at me. She said, “I know guide dogs are not supposed to go up escalators!! I’m going to report you to your school!” I told her my school TAUGHT me to go up escalators, but she assumed that I had gone to GDB, and they didn’t allow it. Weird. I thought. But didn’t think too much about it.

Another time, I was asked to walk this young blind high school student and her new GDB dog from a building close to my house to the nearest light rail. She had not had her dog for very long, and her dog was absolutely OFF THE RAILS the entire time I walked her the few blocks to the train. Like, left right behind her crazy all over the place. It full on went Cujo when we attempted to pass a neighborhood dog and she lost complete control of it. I had never seen a guide dog act this bad, even my Mara who did early on have dog distraction issues. At first, I said nothing, thinking I need to give her space to deal with it. But despite her efforts, she could not get him under control. Then I suggested that she might talk to her trainers about it. And she said she had, and they just said this is how it is in the beginning. Then I told her, “this is not how it is in the beginning. It’s not this hard, or it shouldn’t be.” And she said that everyone from GDB says this is pretty typical. And it kind of was. When I had been to advocacy meetings where a lot of GDB dogs were there, they were up and wriggling around much of the time. It could get quite distracting.

Then, when my GDB interviewer came to see me, she wanted to take me for a walk to see my cane skills. I told her I had to drop off my kids down the street to their dad’s house and then we could walk solo. So, I got my kids in their little wagon I had been using. It had two seats facing each other and I pulled it behind me. She told me how I could NOT do that with a guide dog because it wasn’t fair to the dog and they wouldn’t understand how to do it. But this is basically how every blind parent does it! I exclaimed. My other dog could do this and I was even taught how to do this with a grocery cart. I even showed her a picture on the front page of the GDF website that had a mom pulling her kid behind her in a stroller with a guide dog.

The last bit of weirdness was that I got rejected by them at first. Why? because a year prior, I had been visiting Nik in Toronto and we had dinner with a GDB guide dog user. At this dinner, we discussed whether I should move to Toronto. It was all hypothetical. I couldn’t move, I had kids whose father lived in Oregon. It was just a casual conversation. Well, this guide dog user mentioned it to a GDB field rep who told the admissions staff that I was moving to Toronto and hadn’t reported it. It was like a bad game of incestuous, gossipy telephone. And instead of maybe, calling me and asking me about it if they were concerned, they decided to reject me based on third or fourth hand information they heard about a conversation I had at a social gathering a YEAR before I even applied. I got that straightened out, but it did not give me a lot of confidence in this organization.

The twins and I with Barley and her awful stick-up harness handle by the Willamette River in downtown Portland. This was taken on our 1 day off when the kids’ father (wheelchair user, Dwight) brought them down to visit me. We were free to travel around downtown Portland with the dogs on our own if we desired.

In a complete turnaround, I was then asked whether I wanted to participate in a pilot program they were doing. Instead of going to the campus, 4 of the students in the class (who were “the most independent”) were going to stay in the dorms of Portland State University in downtown Portland and do all of our training from there. Did I want to do that?

Absolutely, yes I did! Now I was only 12 miles from my kids. In a dorm in the city! How much jailing could happen there? I mean, if I wanted to, I could just walk to the light rail station and go home. Not that I was planning on it, but just knowing I could made me feel better.

The Training:

I met Barley in my PSU dorm room. She was wiggly and friendly and I loved her instantly. I believe I got her the second day of this 14 day program. I sat on the floor with her and we threw a nylabone around and she crawled into my lab and licked my face. It all seemed not unlike the first meeting I had with Mara. Very cute and exciting and happy. I first started noticing differences when the four students were supposed to meet in the lounge area with our dogs. The dogs did not sit quietly like they had in my last class. They were squirmy and they wrestled with each other and wriggled away and were just like a litter of little puppies. I thought they were just excited on their first day, but I thought it was weird that the instructors said nothing about it.

The second weird thing was the harness and the leash. I was taught not to put the leash around my wrist but to tuck it under my first two fingers of my left hand. I wonder why? It was awkward and felt like I could lose her if I used my left hand for anything. But it soon became clear why. They used the leash as a hand signal for the dog. To get the dog to walk forward, you took the leash in your right hand and gave it a little tug forward, past the dog’s face. You did the same thing for left and right. The leash was the physical sign for the dog to move. I felt a sense of dread. Why? Why not just use your right hand, or you know, WORDS. I have small children, I need a free hand. I can’t be doing this. I asked how I was supposed to hold a kid’s hand or carry groceries, and the trainer said, “have your family members do it.” I live alone! I don’t have family members there all the time for this. This isn’t going to work. I started to make a mental list of things that would have to change.

The harness handle itself was this weird white handle that connected to the harness via a sort of rubbery male connection in female socket thing. it had no give like the metal rings of my old harness, so no gentle tugging to get a dog’s attention. And it stuck up and got stuck EVERYWHERE. Under the restaurant table, in the van, under a desk chair. Everywhere it stuck up obnoxiously and got stuck. So many times I was under the table at the pizzeria wrestling that harness handle out of tight places while Barley pulled desperate to be free.

Then there was the food rewards. Food rewards were a new thing after the strict all food forbidden way I was taught at GDF. But food rewards have taken over guide dog training, so I should talk about the good and the bad here, because there is some of each.

No one likes leash corrections. It is rather abusive. And in the ABA lexicon that is dog training, positive behavioral supports work better and are more pleasant for all. The problems schools were having was that some people, including me and little old ladies and what have you, were not physically strong enough to leash correct a dog in a way that would make the dog care. It also looked very bad from an image standpoint to have blind users jerking violently on their dogs. Schools got calls about blind handlers abusing dogs, when they were doing exactly as they had been taught. So, a couple of things had taken place since I had gotten Mara. Guide dogs were being bred to be smaller and “softer” to control. They had also been switched to food rewards to work.

I was in support of decreasing or even eliminating leash corrections. And a smaller dog was fine with me. (We will get into the issues with “softer” dogs when I talk in the future about Sully.) And I can totally see how food rewards could be used to teach new skills. Where I objected, though, was that I as a guide dog user would have to use food rewards for the long term rest of my life. It’s not practical or doable. You can’t be a professional and wear a pouch of treats all the time and have your hands constantly smelling of dog saliva and again, not have full use of your right hand. For short term or limited uses, fine. But this could not be the only reason a dog works.

Only guide dog users get what I mean when I say this, but guide dogs need to understand and want to do their job. They can’t just do isolated tricks for food. I don’t mean that they understand that I am blind and they are my navigational aid. I mean that they understand that overall, it’s a good thing for them to walk around without me, their handler, falling all over them and making a lot of racket. They get the overall strategy. And they also get that finding things is fun and makes me think they are a wonderful dog. Any dog can learn to stop at a curb and get a treat. A guide dog should eventually realize that stopping at a curb prevents them and their handler from getting smashed by a car. It’s self-preservation with a wide berth.

What happens to some dogs, especially very young dogs, is that they get so into getting the treat, they are not really able to think about anything else. They don’t care about the job or get the overall objective, which is to have a nice walk. They perform for treats. This can be dangerous. I would be with Barley down town and she would not walk up the sidewalk when she reached the curb until she got a treat. So our butts are out in the street and cars are brushing past us and she does not care. She is all about Treat! Treat! Treat! I could go ahead and pull her up the curb, but that is not really a guide dog, is it? It’s a dog who is distracted by treats just as much as they could be distracted by dogs, or an interesting smell on the ground, or a homeless person on the side walk. There is no difference. It is a problem behavior.

So there was the right hand leash issue and the food issue and the squirm issue. The squirm issue in that class was high. And the trainer expectations were low. We would go to restaurants and the dogs would be messing with each other and up and down and walking away and it was constant. And the trainers acted like this was normal. It was hard to eat. You constantly had to retrieve your dog. And when the four of us would be together, like back in the dorms, the dogs were constantly at each other wrestling and playing and growling and barking. And the trainers acted like this was normal. We had a guest that came to visit us in the dorms with a young guide from the Seeing Eye. And the dogs were all nutty except for hers. And she was like, “why are your dogs doing this? This is not how they act in my class.” And I agreed that it hadn’t been my experience at GDF either. And the trainers kind of acted like we weren’t really telling the truth.

The low expectations continued to things like finding things and backchaining, a method of teaching a dog a target. I learned to teach my dog about a particular coffee shop door. I didn’t understand why we had to learn it this way. We had to teach them the door in like 20 steps. First a treat right at the door, then stand a foot away and treat them when they got to the door, then stand 1.5 feet away, etc. etc. until we were about 20 or 30 feet away. The dog at this point is just like, whatever…more treats for me! In the past, the way I did this was to go up to the door, point to it and pat it, Name it something “Coffee shop!” Then tell the dog in a happy excited voice “Good coffee shop! You found the coffee shop! Good girl!” or something like that. Then, you could go like around the corner and do it again, or just the next two or three times you went there, you would do the same thing, depending on how often you went. It took all of 30 seconds each trip. Done. After 3 or so times, you would just round the corner and say, “Find the coffee shop!” and they would find it. And then you would praise them.

I told my trainer this and it was like she didn’t believe me. I also told her that my dog could find bus stops. She took me out to a bus stop and we did the back chaining. And she said, “so I’m just showing you how to do it because you probably won’t use this bus stop too often.” I asked her if she thought it wouldn’t transfer and generalize if I did it a few more times at a few more bus stops. She said that no dog could do that. But they could learn one or two bus stops. I felt like I was being called a liar. Like Mara could, and Jats could. No, not perfectly every time, especially if the bus stops were really different looking. And no, I don’t think they could find the bus stops in a different city that looked different. But in our area, they were distinct. They were hexagonal blue poles with half circle signs. And most of the time, our dogs found them for us if we were in about 1/2 block or so. But they said these guys couldn’t do it.

She kept asking me if I liked the dog. Of course I liked the dog. She was a friendly goof ball. I was just trying to figure out what she knew and didn’t know, and how I could work with her at the same level as my past dog. Was it possible? if so, how? And why didn’t the trainers seem to think the dogs could do anything? Had the “softer” breeding affected their brain power? I’m just trying to figure this out. Either she was so unaccustomed to any questioning she mistook my questions as a criticism of the dog itself, or it felt like a veiled threat. “Don’t you like the dog? Because if you don’t, we can just quit the partnership and remove you from the program. If you don’t want that, then stop asking critical questions.”

Barley and I with one of my sons and their father on the GDB campus on the graduation day right before we went home.

The last few days were spent at the actual training center in Boring, Oregon. We had no air conditioning at the dorms, and one of the students had a health condition that made this hard. We all took a vote, and of course you can’t be a selfish asshole and vote against a sick person who is suffering. But I didn’t want to leave downtown Portland. At the dorms, I noticed that the whole level of training and expectations took a dive. The 4 pilot program participants were indeed much better travelers and more independent than some of the rest of the students. In my first GDF class, I had this idea that to get into the class, you had to be a really good traveler. None of the people in that class had many issues just doing the routes. Now, I was with students who did not know the direction of the door to the dining room they had been in at least 3 times for the last 10 days. I wondered how they would even use a guide dog effectively. I remember that we had an A team and a B team in the dining room, which were alternating days you could take your dog with you to meals because if there were too many dogs, they would get too squirrelly. I thought about the GDF dining room, a third of the size, with all of the dogs and rarely did any make a peep. In the GDB dining room there was constant fussing over unruly dogs. The other thing I found amusing was that one day we were going to practice going through a buffet line with the dogs. This is a difficult thing to do. I did it the way I learned it, holding your plate or tray in front of you while your dog guided by leash on your wrist. But here, we just walked through the line and people got our food for us and carried it to our table. So I couldn’t figure out the point.

The last few days were the toughest. Once, I did take a walk on their nature path (without my dog) and then found myself in a big field. I just started running. Not running away, just enjoying the freedom of the wide open space. But literal alarms had gone off when I left the property, unbeknownst to me. I didn’t know that I literally could not leave the property for a few minutes. Somehow, several staff members came for me. The first was just a kennel worker and she was nice, and just told me that they were looking for me and I should head back, which I did. But the next guy apparently lived in a house close to the field I was running in. At this point, I was walking TOWARD campus. . But instead, he stopped me and yelled at me for 10 minutes about how he deals with blind people all day long and he shouldn’t have to deal with them on his off time and that I just need to be out of his face. It was very pleasant. I kind of felt like saying, “if you hate working with blind people so much that you can barely stand to have one in your line of sight for 10 seconds on your day off, maybe don’t live RIGHT NEXT TO WHERE YOU WORK!” But I didn’t. I went back and then talked to 15 other staff members about how I shouldn’t have gone off and walked a mere 50 feet away from campus. In my head I’m thinking “I AM and adult. This is ridiculous. I did not do anything illegal. I walked on earth. I go all over the place on my own. I have children. I have a job. I AM an adult.” Guide dog school does weird things to you.

Level of Custodialism:

At the dorms at PSU, it was great. On our off time, we could go to the coffee shop or the Chipotle’s in our building. We ate across the street at a dorm cafeteria and could go anytime we wanted during their hours and when we weren’t training. The first few days, we were not supposed to be gone long and were not supposed to take our dogs, but after a couple of days, they said we could go pretty much anywhere we could walk to. They did not make us check in or ask permission or anything. We also paired up with another student often and did routes together and even though one of the two instructors were several feel or up to a half a block behind us, they pretty much let us do what we wanted. I remember once, my classmate and I were a bit lost. But we worked together and figured it out and no one intervened even though I know they were following us and listening to our conversations about it.

But, all was not what it seemed. The two instructors were nice enough, but they lived way out in the country nearer to the school campus and they hated coming all the way in everyday. (Even though normally they would have had to drive to work on campus and then pile us into a van and then drive in.) And they took turns staying overnight. Like all guide dog trainers, they had a million pet dogs at home, so this was a challenge for them. I understood this, but I assumed that if the pilot would have been made permanent, they would not have required this and maybe would have hired some PSU blind student to do it or something. (There was a blind resident manager (aka night time babysitter) at the main campus.) So–and this came to me thirdhand what actually happened–they sort of plotted against us.

The infamous Cheerful Tortoise photo. We were probably a little dumb to agree to this. Can you guess which is the pregnant mom, the Mormon, the fitness nut, and the mild mannered mom? None of us ever got drunk.

We often went to a local bar next door called the Cheerful Tortoise. Here is the group: I was 4 months pregnant by this time. I don’t normally drink much but I was not drinking at all. My other classmates were a Mormon who did not drink, a fitness/body builder guy who might have 1 beer but was loath to put any extra calories in his body, and a professional mom-type who was more of an occasional glass of wine for dinner type. No one got drunk, no one was unruly, no one spent too long at the bar. It was actually the trainers who suggested we all go there, and it was more of an after work hang out thing. We stayed maybe an hour and then left. But the trainer made a really big deal about getting a picture of us all. And then she made a really big deal about getting this picture blown up. We even went to Fedex Office as a travel route to do this. I didn’t get the whole thing at the time, I just went along with it. But apparently she took this photo to the boss and said “Imagine how wasted and dangerous everyone is going to get if we do this program. This was just one night.” So, even though we were all fine and responsible, that was apparently the end of that. I mean, you go through a YEAR of screening for these programs. Doctors visits, references, multiple interviews. Home visits. It’s more work than getting into college. But with all that vetting, we still couldn’t be trusted to be responsible adults who could have a training event near a bar.

The GDB dorm life was hard for me because I was pregnant and they fed us at 8:00am and then at 5:00pm and then you went 15 hours without food. There wasn’t much to do either, or anywhere to go. I was STARVING and dizzy by breakfast. A note about my pregnancy. It never occurred tome to tell them I was pregnant. When I did my medical, I wasn’t pregnant, and then when I was pregnant, it just seemed like what all women do. Do woman not work during pregnancy? I was still working. Do woman not walk during pregnancy? I was still walking several miles. I was only 4 months along by guide dog school. I was just a few miles from my OB if anything happened. It seemed irrelevant to me that it would matter. It didn’t matter. (Besides, I figured the field rep from Toronto could fill them in. Heh.) This pregnancy was easy for me because it was just one baby compared to twins. And Nik and I were straightening out our immigration stuff, and I knew he would be on parental leave by November, before the baby was born and two parents would be able to be in the house. So, nothing was said to me at the time of class about it, but it came back to bite me in the ass later. More custodialism to come!

Facilities:

The PSU dorm was fabulous. It had its own bathroom and kitchenette, but that hardly matters. The GDB facilities were pretty. nice. Not as nice (I’ve heard) as their campus in San Rafael, CA but nothing to complain about. At that time, the room we had at the GDB dorm was shared, but it was sectioned off by closets so we really only shared the toilet shower room, we each had our own sink in our room. There was two “lounge areas” that we also stayed in. One was in downtown Portland with some tables and chairs and the other was in Gresham. It had booths. We did spend some time in these and that is where we also interacted with the other students in our class. The PSU students did not have to spend very long driving in vans because we just spent time walking downtown. I thought we got a lot of walking time in this way. I did ask to go do train platforms, and I was surprised at how little they knew about them. There was really no training at all. We just stood there for a few minutes and talked about them. When Barley got on the train, she just stood there. I had to direct her to a seat and show her how to sit down under the seat. Another surprise for me after Mara.

Graduation:

I found graduation at GDB to be major cringy and awful. Barley’s puppy raisers were a very nice family and I enjoyed meeting them, and I talked to the daughter on the phone. But they have this big open-to-the-public graduation that was just over the top bad. I get that it’s a fund raising tool, and I don’t mind doing my part to fund raise. But I don’t think that fundraising should be at the expense of blind people’s civil rights. What I mean is, we deal with many misconceptions about us that cause people to discriminate against us. Instead of trying to dispel some of those misconceptions, GDB perpetuates them by painting a pitiful picture of blind people before their lives are dramatically changed with a guide dog that gives them back their dignity. I call total bullshit on that and I think the message is harmful. I will sit here and write a whole blog post and do a whole speech about how guide dogs can be great and are very helpful and do improve my life. But they do not give me dignity and I was not a pitiful, dependent thing without them. I have just as much dignity with a cane, even if it does take me longer to walk down a street. The way I move is not what gives me dignity.

So after wasting an entire day going through painful rehearsals. We then had to sit through a video showing our pitifulness. Then they took our dogs and canes away. They “sighted guided” us up on stage while our puppy raisers came to the stage with our dogs. Then there was a ceremonial handing over of the dogs, further rubbing in this image of how dependent we are until we get the dogs. The dogs are confused and like WTF? and you have to settle them down while you stand there and try to say something nice about your puppy raisers and thank everyone. Major points and encouragement for sob stories. One student said something like “I am not the same person I was 14 days ago” and she was on her third dog. I asked her if she really felt that way, and she said she didn’t know what to say so they gave her a prewritten speech. And I don’t know how many times they said “you’ll all need tissues after you hear our students’ stories.” I swear I was going to make my story as brief, deadpan and boring as humanly possible. I will thank people and talk about the good that guide dogs do. I am not your inspiration porn.

Other highlights include a couple of people’s dogs barking constantly and no one acting like they noticed. And a demo of a guide dog working but they used a sighted person to do it. Like, they don’t even believe in their own dogs.

Here is the weirdest thing that happened at graduation, though. I had two four year olds at home, and a quadriplegic in a power chair as a very frequent visitor and that I visited often. I told them this. Then the puppy raiser daughter tells me on the phone the night before that Barley got kicked out of her school and she said Barley doesn’t like kids. We just laughed it off. Then when I met the rest of the family on graduation day and they were really surprised to find out I had kids (and was visibly pregnant.) They said they told the school that Barley isn’t great around kids and didn’t seem to like kids. They thought she would go to a childless person. Weird, I thought.

Then, I got back to my dorm room and my roommate is there with a room full of people. Her guide dog’s puppy raisers. Her dog is excited running around to all the little kids and….to the teenager using a power wheelchair. Her dog was completely comfortable with this kids’ big-ass full tilt-in-space wheelchair with head rest and everything and loves the kids. Later, I find my trainer and I’m all, “hmm, so my family says Barley doesn’t like kids and I have kids and a member in a wheelchair and (roommate’s) dog was raised with kids and a kid in a wheelchair!” She goes, “hmmm, it’s as if you got the wrong dog.” and changed the subject.

(A couple of weeks later, I got what was supposed to be an 8×10 picture in the mail of me and the puppy raisers and Barley. They sent the wrong picture. It was of my roommate.)

What Happened with Barley:

I went home with Barley a little confused, but mostly happy. I did really like her and we had bonded in the dorms. After two weeks of me questioning how she (and all the dogs) were not as well trained as the GDF dogs, I was told that it is a difference in philosophy. Barley was very young when I got her and maybe had about 40 hours of training. GDB was a big school that put out a lot of dogs. They get them out fast and young with the very basics. Then people can work with them and customize them how they want to. The dogs are raw and need to be finished off. It’s better that the blind person do it, so we taught you how to train them. Ok, I could buy that. I don’t know if I agreed with that philosophy because blind people take off two weeks of work or school or life and you have to go back to work. It shouldn’t be such a reduction of function and such a mess of a dog to deal with every time you get a new dog. But, alright. Here I am. I’ll do it. When we left the school, Barley could basically guide with food rewards. She did not need too much correction and she did not know too many words that Mara had come to me knowing. But I was game to work with her and it never crossed my mind to end my time with her.

When I got home with the kids, all hell broke loose. My kids were not that bad, but they were four and I did have to back them off of just kind of smothering her with pets and attention. Then I bought her a crate so she had a place to go that they were not allowed to touch. But Barley was just unhappy in my house. She ripped up the carpet, she chewed on her paws and ate through her hair. She ate through multiple cushions in her kennel. She seemed constantly agitated and she never seemed to settle down and relax. At first I thought she would get over it in a few days, but it pretty much kept going on. She knocked my four year old down the stairs, not on purpose but just because she wanted to get away from him. He hadn’t done anything to provoke her. He was just dancing around the top of the stairs. I asked for advice, and was told to keep her on a leash. I thought that was ridiculous for a guide dog, but I did it. But it is really hard to function with a dog who is unhappy and doesn’t settle around your wrist all the time. About 2 months in, with no improvements, I decided to return her.

I was terribly sad. I was crying. And the woman who came to get her was completely unsympathetic and blamed the entire thing on me not telling them I was pregnant and not being able to handle a dog when I’m pregnant. I really did not think that factored in all that much, except that if she didn’t like my 4 year olds, what would she think of a baby who might actually hurt her by pulling her hair or something? That woman was one of the the most condescending woman I have ever dealt with and made an already hard event more horrible. Guide dog schools seem to always blame the handler and never think it is anything they could have done. They gave me a dog with a known problem with children. But yeah. The problem is that I am pregnant.

I called the next day to see how she was, and was coldly told that I could not ask about her anymore because I gave her up and had nothing to do with her. I was hoping maybe she could be placed with someone who didn’t have kids. But I knew that I might never find out what became of this dog I had loved and worked with and spent countless hours with for over ten weeks. Thankfully, about three or four weeks later, her puppy raisers told me that they had taken her back. She had been recareered.

Why? I asked.

“They said she barked too much,” said the puppy raiser.

I had never heard her bark, and she hadn’t either. Barley lived a good, happy life at her puppy raisers farm home. She died a little bit ago.

(I don’t have quite as clear of a time line on Barley. She lived with her raisers until she was a little over a year old. She was in training for 3 months. She was my youngest dog, at 1 year 5 months when I got her.)

This is a nice picture of Barley and my dad in my back yard.I don’t have too many pictures of her at home.

Overall Impressions:

I learned that all guide dog schools are not the same. I also learned that people have very little to compare to except some word of mouth because there are no hard and fast stats out there to show any quality indicators. I wanted to know things like: How many hours are these dogs in training for? What is the drop out rate before matching? What is the recidivism rate? What is a list of behaviors and commands/tasks that a dog should be expected to have upon graduation? What rights does a person have in regards to owning/returning the dog? It felt like, because we are the recipients of charity, we are not allowed to question. We are not allowed to complain. We are not allowed to have an opinion. Our job is to be grateful and be a ray of sunshine and have a tissue handy for our pitiful little tears.

But I also started to see a trend of trainers that just don’t have very high expectations for the dogs or the blind people handling them. The dogs seem to be trained for a very low-middle level traveler, a route traveler whose dog will only walk straight to the curb and avoid obstacles. They will learn routes and that’s about it. It all of the sudden was cruel to expect more from a dog, like that they could handle when you pulled a suitcase or a stroller, or that they might have to freestyle it and use more of an over-all cognitive, problem solving approach to mobility rather than just do some tricks for food. I thought at the time this was just a GDB thing. But something would happen soon that would spread the GDB philosophy all over the country.

What’s the Matter with Guide Dogs? (Chapter 2: Mara and Jats, The Gold Standard)

To understand why I am concerned about what is happening with guide dogs now, you have to have some understanding of what my experiences have been in the past. I have now been to guide dog training 4 different times and 3 different schools. I’m going to review these experiences one by one to enable a little compare and contrast each school, but also to look at changing trends over time.

My ID card from GDF for Mara, my first guide dog. From 1993, this is just a laminated card with a law statement on it with a glued in photo of Mara and I.

My first experience with the guide dog life as a blind person was 30 years ago, when I got my first guide, Mara, from Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind (GDF) in 1993. This is also where I met my husband, and where he got his first guide, Jats. Thirty years ago is a long time to remember things, but since this was our first guides and the experience was such a huge one in our lives, I actually remember quite a lot of it. I have also looked up some information using old records, pictures and journals.

Why I picked GDF:

I actually sort of approached this like I was choosing a college. I wrote to every school and got information. I threw out the ones that were too patronizing and custodial at the get go. For example, Guide Dogs for the Blind said that I needed to find a volunteer (perhaps a Boy Scout) to walk with me up to a mile a day for the three months preceding my class to get me in shape. I already walked probably 3-5 miles a day just walking to my college classes on UNL east campus from my apartment on 51st and Vine Street in Lincoln, Nebraska. I then called each school and interviewed them. I also called and interviewed people who had dogs from the schools and listened to other word of mouth. One couple said good things about their school but everyone else said their house was full of dog piss and shit stains. So that was out. No one said anything bad about GDF. I ended up applying to two schools, Guiding Eyes for the Blind (GEB) and GDF. Guiding Eyes sent a rep out to visit me, which I found annoying but I complied. I remember him saying my apartment was so clean, and I was like…where must you go to think this is that clean? GDF sent out no one, and that made me happy. I had a telephone interview.

The Training:

Back then, the training lasted 26 or so, days. We didn’t even get our dogs until the third day. What I remember most about the training was how thorough and tedious it was. Every single thing you did had a procedure to it. The first thing I had to do after meeting my dog was to walk down a hallway and sit in a chair. It took FOREVER! And I wondered if I would ever get up from that chair. But my dog was nice and clean and beautiful, happy and friendly. I fell in love with her right away.

There was a lot of downtime at this school. There were ten students in the class and two instructors. John was the director of training and was obviously the boss. Doug was new, just off of his apprenticeship and this was his first class. The class was divided in half, so a 5:1 ratio. Nik and I were assigned to Doug. The first few days we stayed at the campus and trained on their training blocks. Then we would pile into two vans (a John van and a Doug van) and go off to different places every day. The tasks spiraled out from simple to more and more complex. The commands used and the procedures were consistent among all of us and were explained in detail. There was a way to open a door, get in a car, ride an escalator, take your dog out to the bathroom, use the leash, etc.

These dogs used no food rewards. In fact, except for their meals, any food was strictly prohibited. All work was done with commands and tone of voice. There were some hand gestures, too. And leash corrections. Lots of leash corrections. A leash correction uses a choke chain and you do a sharp, quick jerk on the leash that snaps the collar around the neck of the dog. The dogs were 70-80 pound labradors and had super strong neck muscles. I was constantly being told my leash corrections were too wimpy. Doug, who was probably 6 foot something, would hold his hand over mine and yank HARD, snapping the leash quickly and tightly. Mara would immediately respond to his corrections, and only sometimes respond to mine. Not every misbehavior needed a severe leash correction like that. You could do just a little tug to get the dog’s attention, or even just a small shake of the harness handle would do it. But if your dog was off the rails, you would-in one movement-drop the harness handle and yank quickly and strongly back with your wrist on the leash. This dropped handle and snap would definitely get the dog’s attention.

Everything was done with the left hand. The leash went around your left wrist and you held the harness with your left hand. Your right hand was always free. If you dropped the harness, even accidentally, you would still have the dog’s leash around your wrist. Leash corrections were taught as a last resort. The first resort was the tone of your voice and lots and lots of praise and pets. Then you might move to a stern voice and a little leash tug, then you would go all out leash correction. The dogs were big and strong.

The dogs were also taught to guide without harness. The first few days, we went around in the building with our dogs guiding us on leash only. The commands used were consistent whether your dog was in harness or not. Leash guiding was not something you would do for long periods or all the time, it was more of an indoor thing or a “just to the mailbox” thing. So the dogs had some context for when they were off leash and not working vs. guiding on leash. You held the leash close to the dog’s neck when guiding on leash. Nik loved this, I never gave it much thought until this year.

But they were wicked smart, too, and they liked to guide. They did intelligent disobedience very well. This is when the dog overrides a command of a blind person because the command could put you in harms way. They were not all that sensitive in that if you scolded them, they recovered quickly and moved on. They all could find things–or “target”–already when we got them, and this seemed like magic. They were great and helping you find the door outside, because they always were glad to go outside. I thought this would be great if I was ever in a fire. They found curbs, of course. But also chairs, doors, elevators, stairs and “left/right” which is when they find a path you are looking for on the left or right. We moved from walking on little park paths to going to subways and walking on sidewalks in Queens.

The expectations for the decorum and manners of these dogs was super high. My dog barked one time, when a random person on a tour came into my room suddenly. I had trainers come running in concern and asking why she barked and what was the matter because it was so rare. I was scared she would get into trouble, but because the circumstances were so weird (a total stranger busting into my room) they let it go. But these dogs never barked. They never fought with each other. They laid almost perfectly still under you at meals and at our class meetings, never bothering any of the other dogs. They would get on the bus and go right under the seat without you even doing a thing. They were not perfect and made mistakes, but in general, this is how they came to you at training.

This is our class picture.I am at the far right and Nik is 6th from left. John and Doug and hiding behind us and the house behind us is the dorm we stayed at. Right in front of the driveway in the foreground was a strip of grass and a fence where I would do my zoo animal style pacing.

The Facilities:

I have laughed at people who only go to the schools with the nicest resort-like facilities rather than worrying about the quality of the dogs, but I have seen how facilities can play a part, so I will talk briefly about them. The GDF dorm facility at that time was like living in a large house. There was a living room when you walked in the front door, there was a dining and kitchen there, a basement with sort of a rec room in it and a TV, and two wings with 3 bedrooms each. They were divided into a mens and woman’s wing, and we each had a roommate. Each bedroom had a bathroom and a door to the outside where you took your dog out. The grounds had a couple of practice city blocks, a small dog run, and a garden. There was also a kennel and an administration building. The facilities were perfectly acceptable but not fancy. It felt a lot like a house. The two vans were just like Chevy passenger vans and we spent a lot of time in them. There was no other facility that we spent time in. When we were out, we either stayed in the vans or just outside of them in folding lawn chairs, or we had arrangements to stay in nearby buildings, mostly church basements with church volunteers who would bring us snacks.

The Level of Custodialism:

The custodialism back then was rather high. We were not allowed in each other’s rooms or in the case of gender, in each other’s wings. The overnight babysitter was nosy and lurked around, getting on Nik’s and my case for being up later than about 10pm, even if we were just sitting quietly talking in the basement. We were not allowed to use our canes at all, even in the first few days when we didn’t have dogs. Nik was moved the last few days to John’s van because they thought we were too close. (I admit, Nik and I spent a lot of time together probably making googl-y eyes at each other and being annoying, but we showed up for every training thing we were required to, listened and did what we were told, did not have a sexual relationship–cuz no privacy whatsoever!–and did not go into each other’s rooms or interfere with each other’s roommates. We were exceptionally good kids.) When I say there was no privacy, I mean it. Once I jumped out of the van and headed for the shower because I was hot and sweaty and thought we were done till dinner. It turned out there was something we were supposed to do in the living room that I hadn’t heard about. I stepped out of the shower and a male trainer was banging on my bathroom door–I don’t even think our bedroom or bathrooms had locks–and was telling me to get down there already, even if I was naked. John started calling Nik a “fat boy” and upsetting him with little insults about his weight and his accent. A classmate of ours brought his dog back to retire with its puppy raisers, and I have never seen a more brutal scene than them taking the dog from him harshly and unceremoniously from the van when he arrived from the airport, never to be seen again. That was what made me decide that I would NEVER give my dogs back to these people. We were not allowed to go out of the house without permission. and we really never got permission. It was one of my first experiences with feeling really jailed and like the walls were closing in on me. I used to do stuff that probably looked batshit. I would put on headphones, listen to music and ASL sign the lyrics, while pacing back and forth in the front yard area by the fence in a kind of trance, trying not to jump the fence and make a run for it.

On the other side of that, though, was that after the first few days of individual training walks, we started going out as larger and larger groups. So, with that 5:1 ratio, we were able to have some time and space to ourselves to figure out how to trust the dogs and learn their mistakes. The trainers would be “around” but all ten of us were going on routes by ourselves with just each other to check in with and the trainers might come around and ask how things were going every 10 or 15 minutes or so. I walked a lot more by myself this training than I ever would again. I think that was great for really building trust with the dog.

Initial Problems:

Every guide dog comes home with some adjustment issues. There are always a few problems to work out. A couple of things stand out from my experience with Mara. The first was that she threw up all the time the first few weeks. She threw up in Target, in the mall, in the movie theater, in my house, on the street, everywhere. In the first couple of weeks, once a day at least, she would throw up. The vet couldn’t find anything wrong with her. She had not changed foods. It could have been anxiety, the water, an allergy, who knows? After a while, this problem took care of itself and she stopped throwing up.

I also had a bit of an issue with my apartment building. I lived in a big complex where there were several buildings surrounded by idiosyncratic parking lots. There was no way to tell her where to go to get out! They never taught us to walk from your door to the street through a bunch of mishapen parking, cars and buildings. I could do it with a cane, but was trying to follow all of the rules and procedures so had no idea how to do it with a dog. I ended up just teaching her a path with my cane. Which is when I decided that canes and dogs can make great combinations and their whole cane prohibition was bunk.

The other problem she had that we dealt with a lot in the first year were dog distractions. If she would see a dog on the street, she would slide off the cracker. She was actually, at times, hard to control. Again, I had to work hard to do leash corrections that were strong enough for her to care about them. I would say it took us maybe a good year to eliminate most of her issues with dog distractions. She only wanted to play, but it would throw me off course. It was also embarrassing to have to be that violent with her to correct her that strongly. People would think I was a terrible person. But I was doing what I was taught.

Graduation:

GDF did not have an official graduation ceremony. We had a day near the end where we met in a reception-type event at the house with our guide dog raisers and sponsors. It was very casual and light food was served. The dogs did not attend with us, which was a bit weird. I absolutely do not mind meeting with puppy raisers and thanking them, and I understand the need to show sponsors the end product of their contribution as well and show gratitude. Although meeting new people is a bit awkward, I felt like this event was fine. We had an exit interview with the CEO.

I believe this was the picture they sent to the puppy raisers. I’m sitting on a bench with Mara outside.

Guiding with Mara and Jats:

Both Nik and I will say objectively that Mara and Jats were the hands-down best guides. They had wonderful decorum. Despite their couple of weak spots, they hardly ever needed correction. They did not need to be told a lot of information to know what to do, and they were very keen on the context of the situation and generalizing from one situation to another. They learned how to find bus stops and classrooms after only 2 or 3 lessons. They were sharp until the end. They were friendly but not over sensitive. They understood their job and liked to do it. We had so many adventures with them and went to so many places and travels. Yes, they made mistakes, but mostly we were able to travel anywhere we wanted to go with them.

Nik and Jats in the “living room” of the dorms at GDF.

Mara’s timeline:

From the best that I can put together today (it might be a bit off…):

Born: September 15, 1991. From what I recall, puppies stayed with their mothers at the school’s puppy center for about 9-12 weeks.
Puppy raisers: November 1991 to February 1993. Puppy raisers attended obedience camp at the school every Saturday and had assignments throughout the week.
In for training/kennel: February-June 1993. Her trainer was Tim. He had her the whole time until class. She spent about 3.5-4 months in the kennels.
On class: June 1993. She was 1 year 9 months when I got her.
Working Guide: July-1993 to about September 2002. 9 years, 2 months, although modified schedule in 2002. Retired due to hip/orthopedic issues.
Died: June 4th, 2004. 12 years, 9 months. Euthanized due to uncontrollable hip joint pain and lack of joint function.

Overall Impressions:

Although I found out I do not enjoy the constraints of guide dog training, this was the most thorough, complete and organized training I had ever had. There were some annoying aspects of it, like when we would have to sit around FOREVER to “learn” how to assemble and disassemble the harness when I could do it by feel immediately in 2 seconds. some others couldn’t, which is often caused by blind folks never getting opportunities to do anything mechanical with their hands their whole lives. I understand that all people are different, but some things were taught at the lowest common denominator. If you said anything, they would say “oh well, you can see. Other’s can’t.” While I do understand that usable vision does give me some advantages, blindness does not make you a bad mechanical person, lack of opportunity does. Nik, who is totally blind, could also figure out the harness in seconds. So that got old. But overall, the training was concise, consistent across dogs and trainers, the dogs could do a LOT of things and there were very high expectations of the dogs. No one balked at the idea of pulling a stroller or grocery cart behind you. In fact, that is where I learned to do it. No one excused the dog’s bad manners or squirrelly behavior. Expectations were very high for the blind handler and the guide dog to work together at a high level and be very presentable doing it. Even though I have made modifications, mostly in vastly decreasing leash corrections, this training was the basis of all of my guide dog work for the rest of my life.