I couldn’t decide whether to make this a part of my guide dog series or not. (What’s the Matter With Guide Dogs? (Chapter 1: What happened at the airport?) It’s just a progress update to try to get myself writing again. But it may help if you know the background that I’ve written about in that series.
I’ve now had my guide dog, Mia, for just shy of 9 months. She will turn 3 next month, and Nik’s guide dog, Cobey, turned 3 in June. Although there has been a lot of progress, they are nowhere near where I would expect to have a dog that has been with us this long and who are 3 years old. Still, there have been lots of improvements.
I will start with Cobey, briefly because he is not my dog and so I can’t say I have a detailed knowledge of how he is doing, especially since Nik and I are now temporarily living in separate cities. Cobey remains a very loving dog and loves attention. I do think his desperate need for attention and to be touching a human at all times has gotten somewhat calmer. As far as guiding, 2 main things seemed to help a lot. The first was—except for meals, of course—discontinuing all food and food rewards. Food aggression has been an issue, in that although we usually have always fed our dogs together with their own bowls, Cobey was way too aggressive towards us and the other dogs when we did this so we had to start feeding them separately. Which is not that big of deal. But he couldn’t guide with rewards. He could do ‘tricks’ like the stop at the curb trick and stop at the stairs trick, but he lost his shit about everything else if there was food around. He was literally so focused on Nik and the food pouch that he would run into things (or run Nik into things) If I had food for Mia and Nik didn’t, his attention was entirely on me and he would ignore Nik entirely. Nik cut him down on food rewards gradaully over about 7 days or so and then cut him off.
It was a changed dog. It wasn’t instant, it took several days before he stopped looking for food. But he started paying attention to Nik more and actually started to figure out the job of guiding. Since Nik will actually smash into things if Cobey doesn’t go around them, you started seeing him thinking ahead about obstacles in front of him. The other thing that helped tremendously was for Nik to stop using his body position and hand signals when crossing streets and to just use words at intersections. Before, when Nik would go up to an intersection and not be exactly aligned, Cobey would use where Nik’s hand signals went and where his body position was to cue him into what angle to cross the street at. By just stopping and doing nothing with his hands or body and just saying “forward” when the time is right, Cobey figured out the intersection for himself without following where Nik’s body went. It solved 100% of Nik’s intersection issues in just a few days. Now, Cobey just uses his little dog brain and aims for the other curb with perfect crossings. I have seen Nik be all askew at an intersection, walk out at a 45-degree angle, and Cobey just correctly straightens and walks to the opposite curb. The less Nik points with his hands, the better Cobey does. And yes, he understands English. Now, the main issue they are working on seems to be that Cobey walks incredibly slow. My best guess is that he has finally learned the overall job and is concentrating on it, and maybe as he gets more comfortable he will speed up? But I’m not totally sure what is up with that.
So, Mia! Where to begin. I know there is talk about how it takes a year to get a new guide dog fully adjusted. I call bullshit on that. It should not take that long. I would say the most adjustment should be in the first 2-3 weeks, but then by 3 months, all should be fairly well and adjusted. At least that has been my past experience and the experience of many others. What I am doing now with Mia is an anomaly and really the only reason I am able to do it is because I am in the unique situation I am in now, where my kids are mostly grown, and I am stuck in another city recovering from my transplant. Basically, my responsibilities here are to take care of my health and recovery and to work with Mia, with a small amount of assistance to family and business administration issues. If I would have had to come home and start a 9-5 on Monday morning, there is no way I could have kept Mia and do what I am doing, which is to retrain her from scratch.
I mean, that isn’t totally accurate. It is not quite like I am training a new puppy that has no inkling of guiding at all. She has good obedience and sometimes I can see that something clicks with her that she has learned before, or she half knows to do something, but not quite in the way that makes practical sense. The other side of that is that I still can tell that she has been damaged for lack of a better word. One of the main things we have been working on is just simply bonding and for her to see value in our relationship, because she largely doesn’t care too much about people except when they feed her. She is in to DOGS.
Her bond with Cobey is one of the strongest I have seen. I don’t know if or how much time they ever spent together when they were kenneled, but since then, Cobey had her entire attention and interest. To the point where Cobey would come and hide from her at times. When Cobey left here in June, I grew concerned that I had set her back again with yet another thing she loved that was taken away. She did not spend much time with me voluntarily when Cobey was here. And when he left, she hid under my bed for much of the next week. She would come out for food and walks if I got down on the floor and coaxed her, but that was it. I spent a lot of time those first couple of weeks just laying on the floor and reaching way under the bed to pet the tip of her tail or a paw that I could reach. Slowly, she has come out more over the last few weeks and will now readily voluntarily sit with me and engage with me. Although it was not totally in the plans for my transplant logistics to be like this, I think us being alone in the apartment together was the best thing that could have happened to us. She is still very into other dogs and I try to give her dog time in appropriate places like our apartment’s dog run where there is never more than one or two other dogs. But now, she is being more personable with me and also with other people. Some of my relatives came the other day and she was all in to visiting them and getting pets from them. In the past, she might come for a second and have a sniff, but then she would revert to playing with Cobey.
Our transition to Omaha for my transplant was not ideal for a new guide dog but I don’t think it was that devastating either. A few months after I got Marra, I broke my foot and was on crutches for two months. I was actually fairly stationary in my house because its almost impossible to go anywhere when you are blind and on crutches with no hand for a cane or dog. I asked my trainer, Mike, if I should worry that Marra would forget everything in her training and he said not to worry about it. I started using her again when I had a walking cast, so I was still walking a bit oddly and slowly. It was a nonevent. She just picked up where she left off. So, I figured Mia could handle a few weeks off. She had 2 changes of location. She went from Oregon to a hotel where she stayed for 17 days, and then to the apartment where she has been ever since. After about the first 24 hours, when they figure out that they have their food and water and outside time and a place to sleep, neither dog seemed too phased by the change in location.
From December 21-February 2, I was in the hospital a total of 23 days. And when I was home, I could not use Mia. So that was the biggest break from work she had. However, her main caretaker, Nik, was a trained guide dog handler who also graduated from the same school. He did bring her to see me a few times in the hospital. Although I had a short 3 day hospitalization in early April and a weekend trip to visit my dying father where she stayed with Nik, she has been with me and we have done at least some kind of work on guiding consistently. In early February, it was just short walks around the apartment building outside and I had to use a support cane, too. But we built up over time. Starting in about mid March, I started using her as a guide dog to places I actually had to go, like doctor and lab appointments, plus additional walking. Because Cobey couldn’t deal with Mia getting treats without going cuckoo bananas, I often had to not use treats when he was with us and then walk by myself with treats without Cobey later in the day to work on guiding specifically. My point being, although not ideal, she had less time off guiding than Marra did when I broke my foot. I don’t really think our 43-day break, when she was still with me or another guide dog user, was responsible for the issues she has guiding, although I recognize that it did stall any progress we would have made during that time.
The first thing I noticed about Mia is that she can have decorum and stay nicely seated like on a bus or in a restaurant if I take a zero tolerance approach. She still gets up every time a waitress or nurse comes toward her—not to greet them, but to get away from them often. We are still working on that. But generally, I was a hard ass both in Portland last winter and here when I started taking her to the med center with me. I insisted on good behavior on the bus, in the waiting room, etc. It took a lot of just constantly having to be on top of it and not get distracted or set it aside, but she did develop good behavior. What happens sometimes is you get distracted with something and you let stuff go. Once, I was not paying attention at the coffee counter and a barista had offered her a “pup cup” of whipped cream. She put her front paws up on the counter. Absolutely unacceptable (as was the pup cup, but I don’t blame Mia for that one.) Lo and behold, I went to a completely different coffee shop later on and the first thing Mia does is jump up and put her front paws on the counter. So, then, we spend the next two weeks orchestrating trips to get coffee with her in a heel/sit position. She is doing good with it now, but with this dog, you have to be vigilant. In the past, except for rare occasions, my dogs were already doing this when I brought them home, so I never really thought too terribly much about decorum and manners. You could get distracted to the point of forgetting they were there. But overall, Mia’s decorum has been much improved.
The other biggest improvement is targeting behavior. This dog can target with about 3 lessons. Remember when the trainers told me she could find a chair in months and months? No, I’d say about 3 visits and she has it. She can also generalize. She brought with her from Portland (even with 43-day break!) targeting trashcans and pedestrian signals. I had her back to doing those in about 1-2 lessons each. Except for the bus (??) she can also find chairs and it did not take months and months. Pretty much anything new that I taught her she learns quickly. I do start a new skill with treats, but since she has bonded with me more this summer, she is doing more and more things without treats and with just praise.
Another vast improvement is a category I will call “finesse.” This is stuff like how gracefully your dog can get through doors or into a car or bus or under chairs or all the tight spots that you must maneuver with a dog. At first, she was a complete klutz. I was all…has no one taught you how to walk through a doorway? Most guide dogs stay on your left like it’s a religion. To walk to your right side is practically sacrilegious. Mia thought it was a good idea to walk behind me to my right side and get all tangled up. At first, I thought, did they teach you a different way to get through doors where you walk to the right? But this is definitely something I remember asking her trainer about and I demonstrated how I did it and Kat said I was correct in how I was doing it. Also, to me it seemed more like more of an “ADHD” thing than a method she was taught. She did it most when she was interested in something else, and she is often interested in something else. My way of teaching her when she got all tangled up was to just stand there and give the heel command and wait for her to get with it. She did not like not moving, so she was motivated to get in position for us to move again. “Finesse” is still something that is a work in progress. The other thing that helped was moving her back to the traditional harness instead of the unifly. I still like the unifly, but she can’t get so twisted up in the harness with connections to both shoulders. When I use the unifly and she is twisting herself into a pretzel by pulling my left hand behind me and pulling to the right, the unifly handle just gets twisted, too and gets all loose and my settings get undone. I have more control over her craziness with the traditional handle. Getting into cars or on the bus, sitting down in restaurants without a big production, etc. But there has been a lot of improvement in this area.
What are our biggest challenges today? I hate to say it, but it is the most basic of guiding. Walking without hitting me into obstacles, stopping at curbs, Going left and right. Guiding properly on leash, walking a suitable speed. It’s wild what she doesn’t know. I mean, even Barley did a decent job with basic guiding. Ok, a couple of these she does well with food but screws them up without food (left and right, stopping at curbs), and others it seems like no matter what, she doesn’t get them. (Obstacles, straight lines, not going at curbs until I say so.)
Once a week, we do a walk I call Treacherous Tuesday. Tuesday is trash day around here, and so everyone has their dumpsters and trashcans blocking the sidewalks. In addition, the neighborhood is old and has bumpy, crappy sidewalks with lots of overgrown bushes and trees. Treacherous Tuesday is no fun, but it is an excellent time to work on obstacles. She does not naturally stop for things like large bumps in the sidewalk, tree roots, or even trashcans. I’ve had to teach her all these things. There are days now that she does beautifully, and days when—well, when I was on blood thinners for a few months—I had a ton of bruises because of her. It’s not that she doesn’t know how to do it, she does. She just doesn’t care. She gets distracted by smells and is constantly thinking about other things. Every guide dog gets distracted at times. You may remember my trainer, Mike, saying what we are teaching them to do is easy. It’s keeping them interested in doing it which is hard. It is hard to keep Mia interested in her job for very long. Even with treats, she doesn’t care if I run into obstacles. She goes around them with enough room for herself but not me. This isn’t just a brush, this is a full on crash. And she doesn’t care about the crash. It’s not a deterrent. Recently, I found out that she does not care about fireworks, either. She was sniffing the ground happily while in Omaha, 4 bazillion people were lighting loud fireworks all around her. She did not even flinch. So, making big crashing noises when you run into a trash can doesn’t even merit an ear perk. She doesn’t care. It makes it hard to teach her to understand her job. She is still doing tricks for food.
The other thing she does is when she does stop for an obstacle, she is sort of clueless as to what to do next. So she stops, I give her praise and/or a treat. Then I would say “forward” or with my GDF dogs I would say, “find the way!” And if they physically could, even if it meant going off curb for a bit, they would find the safest way. They would always default away from the street, but if that was blocked they would take you to the street curb and you would step down and then they would hug the curb until you got past the obstacle and then take you back to the curb to go back up. Mia and Cobey just stand there, confused. So, you kind of have to map it out for yourself with your feet or whatever, and they almost end up trailing behind you while you do this. I’m working on teaching her “find the way” and sometimes she will do it now, but sometimes she still just stands there, confused. She can generalize between 8 thousand different kinds of trashcans, but she can’t figure out how to walk around a single barricade on the sidewalk. It’s strange.
The curb stopping (or going) thing is bizarre. She does most of the time stop at curbs. She does it very well when treats are involved. But she does not get that then you must wait. She is doing a California stop. She stops for a quarter of a second, and then pulls to keep going. It does not matter if car after car is careening inches from her, if I don’t hold her back, she will pull you forward. So, that is something we have been working on a lot. I have to say “to the curb!” And then when I get there, I have to tell her to stay. This all goes back to that whole thing of intelligent disobedience. It made me think that the trainers don’t really understand what it is. The one I asked about how they train it started describing something that was NOT it, it was just stopping for moving obstacles. Which—good skill—but NOT intelligent disobedience.
The last thing I will talk about that we are working on is guiding while off leash. Nik always went crazy over this skill and I never gave it much thought, until I had a dog that was not trained this way. So when she heels, she walks behind/beside you. I guess that is what sighted people train their pet dogs to do. In pretty much no circumstance is a blind person going to use a guide dog like that, so I don’t get why they do it. How do they think we live? To take my dog out at my apartment, I go maybe 20 feet down a hallway, then I find a door and go through a stairwell area, then I open an outside door, walk a few feet and go down a short flight of stairs. Then walk a short distance and she can do her thing. Do they really expect me to put on her harness 4-5 times a day to do that, then take it off when she goes, then put it back on to do a walk that takes maybe 30 seconds tops? That’s stupid and no blind person does that. You take your dog out on the leash. But here is what kind of stuff can happen. I take my dog out, there is a truck parked along the road. I pay little attention to it. I don’t realize that it has a metal ramp coming out of the side of it and going across the sidewalk. Mia does not stop and goes right over it. I….do not. Any other dog I had (probably even Barley and Sully) would have stopped for that ramp, even if just on leash. They would stop for curbs, obstacles, etc. I even had to teach her to stop for the up and down stairs when going out. And what if there was a fire and you have to get out right away? Are you going to have to grab the harness? I get that guiding on leash is not ideal and should not be used for more than very short trips, but I cannot think of a single circumstance when this separate heel beside you and not guide is useful. Even if you go sighted guide, I was taught to always use my cane because you are still responsible for yourself. So if I drop the harness and go sighted guide, I would very much still expect my dog to stop for stairs and obstacles.
The last, last (really this time) thing I will talk about with Mia is what I call her “Toddler Temper Tantrum Mode.” And I say this with some loving amusement. It doesn’t happen every day, but there are times when Mia has an absolute shit fit when she doesn’t want to do something and refuses kind of dramatically to do it. This is stuff like getting on the bus or when she is not yet ready to go inside or when I want to go home but she wants to keep walking or when she wants to go home but I want to keep walking or really anything she really doesn’t want to do. She digs in, lunges backwards on her haunches, rides up on her back legs and has a tantrum. This has happened less and less, but it just happened the other day. I was doing errands with my sister in her car so it was a lot of getting in and out of the car. The first few times were fine, but then it was like she was sick of being in that car and not getting to walk too much. So she refuses to get in. She rears back, won’t budge and just stares at me. Thankfully, she is only 55 pounds because I had to lift her into the car. I find it funny in a way because it definitely is communication from a dog with her own mind, but I wish it was used more in an intelligent disobedience way rather than an oppositional defiance way.
People ask me why I don’t give Mia back. It’s a bit complicated with my situation right now. And also, I have the time, I have the dog. I should try to make the best of it. But she is almost 3 years old. By the time she is workable and trustworthy as a guide, she will be like when dogs are usually peaking and then starting to decline with age. People also ask me why I don’t call the school and have a trainer come out. I have thought about that, and it isn’t that I hate them or think that they have no useful information. But, I have literally almost trained her from scratch now with mostly my GDF ways (although I have utilized what GEB ways she knows that have always worked for her.) So, now I am afraid that it would just throw a wrench into all the work that I have done and be more of a set back than a help. I have put hours and hours and days and months in doing nothing but training this dog, and I have seen a big improvement. And again, she learned fast new skills that I teach her that they didn’t. She does much worse with things she is purportedly already supposed to know. I don’t trust that having them come out will not reset my work to the beginning again. Nik wants me to give it a year and then if I can’t competently use her in novel situations then she is not a working guide dog and I should give her up. I would only give her up if she went back to her puppy raisers, I could not set her to yet another strange situation. Not after all this bonding I’ve done with her and all her attachment issues. But it would still be hard. Besides the hours and hours I have put in walking and training her, I’ve also put hours and hours in sitting next to her, petting her, playing ball with her, playing like a dog with her (because that is largely what she responded to at first. She didn’t really respond much to petting, but she liked you to aggressively roll around on the floor and fight over a ball or bone or something). It would be a shame to give her up now. Besides, she is so smart and learns new stuff so fast. It is a shame that she was seemingly shelved for so long and transitioned so many times. I feel like if her transitions were kept to a minimum along with her kennel time and she would have had all the training Marra and Mara had in 3-4 months and been less than 2 years old when I got her, she would have been a great guide dog with a lot of good guiding years in her career. I feel like her trajectory was somewhat sabotaged by bad planning and bad training, and that wasn’t her fault. Nor mine. But we’ve decided to work together and we’ve both stuck it out. Although I have had fears that she had or would wash out, she really hasn’t. She keeps trying and thus so do I.
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