See Also:

What’s the Matter with Guide Dogs Chapter 1: What Happened at the Airport?
What’s the Matter with Guide Dogs? Chapter 2: Marra and Jats-The Gold Standard
What’s the Matter with Guide Dogs? Chapter 3: The Strange Story of Barley

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.

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 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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

See also:
What’s the Matter with Guide Dogs? (Chapter 1: What Happened at the Airport?)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.