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: Mara and Jats: The Gold Standard)

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.)

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.

Nine years ago exactly on this day, I took a direct flight from New York to Portland with my brand new guide dog, Marra. She shook a bit in fear on the take-off, but after that, settled right in to her floor space for the rest of the 6 hour flight. When I got off the plane, I had to maneuver my way through the airport (that I knew quite well) get my luggage from baggage claim, find the light rail stop, and take the train a few stops to then walk to a new hotel I had never been to, where I had planned to meet my husband and his guide dog, Sully. It was around midnight, which meant that I could not see at all with any of my remaining vision. We planned the hotel rendezvous where my husband had been presenting at a conference so that I wouldn’t have to go so far at night and so the dogs could meet on neutral territory.

Marra was excited, and a little distracted. She had only known me for 14 days, but it had gone pretty well. She impressed me with her skills of guiding and finding seats and doors and elevators when I had been to guide dog school with her in New York at Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind. It’s common for new guide dogs going home to a new place to be a little nutty as they adjust. So, that is why we made my first totally solo trip alone with her relatively easy. Find the same train I have found a million times before, go a short distance, walk about two blocks. If I got stuck anywhere, my husband said to text him and he would come find me and walk me in. But even though she was excited, Marra guided ok. I remember stopping a couple of times just to calm us both down and collect ourselves. I was dragging a suitcase behind me, but she was fine with that. We went a little bit slow and made a few minor wrong turns when trying to get to the train station. She had not been there before so it was expected. But she guided me there and I got there ok. When she met Sully, they were both very excited at first. We met on the street, and they completely lost it and were jumping around each other in their harnesses. But within minutes, we got them both to heel and went to the room. In the room, we let them off their harnesses and they went crazy, running around the room, rolling around with each other and making growly noises. After about maybe 10 minutes of this, Nik and I had had enough of it and were afraid it was too loud. We told them both to cut it out and they did. That was that. We all went to bed. Nothing of interest really happened the rest of the way home the next day as far as guiding. Marra just guided. I taught her a few new things during the next few weeks, and she settled down some, but that was it. We were a successful guide dog team.

Fast forward to this last weekend. I brought Mia home from a 6 hour flight from New York, where I had spent the last 2 weeks learning to work with her at Guiding Eyes for the Blind. I was nervous about the flight because I was nervous about Mia in general. It was obvious she did not have the same skills and good behavior as my other two GDF dogs. But I wanted to give it a go. My husband also got a new guide dog with me at this time, and he had some of the same reservations. But his dog was so friendly and good natured that it was hard to not fall in love with him. The flight experience with these dogs was totally different.

It started out when we got to JFK in New York. Our driver did not give us a lot of extra time for all the stuff that is required when you are blind traveling with guide dogs, so we had no time margin when we got there. I had to try to follow her and my husband to keep up. My husband was using her as a sighted guide, had his dog and his roll bag. I had my dog and my roll bag and was trying to follow them. My dog was just not guiding. She was weaving and darting all over the place. I had no hands to spare to give her food rewards, a leash correction, or anything, and no time for do overs or stops. I had to keep going or I would lose my guides. I felt like I was just walking into nothing…or chaos. Like think of walking in a super busy airport but with your hands tied behind your back, something is jerking you around and off course that you can’t control, you have very little vision and very little hearing–oh, and you have to hurry and follow people in front of you. While people are walking between you and yelling. And while your guide dog has never been taught to “follow,” one of the most useful commands out there. And then, for the best part? Your dog decides to stop in the middle of JFK and take a shit right on the floor. All I could do was stand there and yell for my husband. I couldn’t believe this is what they thought was acceptable to send a person home with a guide dog. Although our staff person cleaned up the poop for me, she said very casually, “oh all the guide dogs do this when they get here. They are just so overwhelmed! hahaha!” This made me really furious. It came from a person who probably gets complimented all the time for the wonderful work she does for the blind. It came from someone who has never had any experience being scrutinized as a blind person, and a guide dog user by people critical of dogs. I cannot have my dog pooping in the middle of an airport and get away with it. That is not how blind people are treated on average. I cannot just laugh it off.

We were just in time to walk on the plane, and the plane ride was fairly ok. The dogs both did alright, although my husband’s dog was a bit needy for attention. We also had to wait an extra hour at the tarmac for an open gate in Portland, so by the time we got off the plane, the dogs had been sitting there for nearly 8 hours. Our first priority was to get them outside for break time.

If there had been an airport assistant there, I would have used them, but they weren’t there. And as every blind person knows, you can wait up to 45 minutes for an assist. Since I have gotten myself out of this airport countless times before without any trouble whatsoever, we decided to go ourselves. But our dogs were absolutely bananas. Like more bonkers than any dog I had ever had, including my guides and my childhood miniature dachshunds. They were not guiding, they weren’t even walking, really. We thought that getting them outside was maybe the thing that would just let some of their pressure off and get them back to being under control. Right away, my dog darts with all her strength over to a man playing live piano. I did a hard leash correction and in my meanest dog voice, commanded “leave it!” But my dog either does or doesn’t know “leave it” (no one at the school was sure.) So it did not do any good, for my dog. But it freaked the piano player out so much he stopped playing and darted off his piano bench. I have not done such a public and violent leash correction on a guide dog since the early 90s (more on that in another post) but I had not forgotten how embarrassing it is or how much it makes you feel like an asshole. I apologized to the piano player and assured him it was safe to get back to his piano.

We walk through the airport and I think it is going relatively ok. Since Nik’s dog does not know how to follow either, I am playing the part of yelling directions at him. But then he yells, “Lisa, Wait!” And I turn around and a woman is pulling tissues out of her purse and administering first aid to my husband’s head. Cobey, his dog, had just rammed him into a cement block wall. Blood was dripping off of his forehead. I know from experience that Nik is a bleeder. a small cut produces a large amount of blood and it takes 20 or 30 minutes to clot with pressure. I knew it probably looked way worse than the actual cut was. Still, we needed to stop the bleeding, it’s a mess, and the dogs still need to go outside. I asked him what he wanted to do, get to a bathroom? Find a paramedic? What? He said he just wanted to get the dogs outside so maybe he could get a guide dog back and maybe get a cane or something because this wasn’t working.

The woman with the tissues, who was beyond worried about our predicament and could not believe that our guide dogs were actually real, walked with us outside. The dogs both relieved themselves, and we tried to settle them down a bit. But they were still not really guiding. We decided that Nik would wait where he was with both dogs and I would go in to baggage claim to get our bags with a white cane. Then, instead of taking light rail and walking a half mile to our house like we always do, we would take an uber.

So, I went back into the airport, found a few people to help me find the right baggage carousel, and waited until there was almost no more luggage left so I could easily find mine. Since I had a cane and two roll bags, I could not walk back myself without help. So I asked another person to assist me and we walked back to where Nik was standing. Before we got there, the man exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” in alarm. And then explained to me that Nik had more blood running down his face.

Nik looked like an absolute horror show. And people were starting to balk at the sight of us and our black dogs that were busy just wrestling with each other. I can only be thankful it was Halloween season and maybe people might have thought we were doing a prank or a costume or something, but people really stopped wanting to help us. This is a dangerous place to be as a blind person, it starts the alarms of people calling the cops on you. We just wanted to get out of there. Nik had been trying to find out where to catch an uber in the airport while I was gone, and we made our way to ground transportation looking for the ride share pick up area.

But when we got where we thought we were going to be, a van pulled up and some people got out. The driver came back to the van and we asked him if we were in the right place for ride share pick up. He said this was hotel shuttle pick up. He just drove some people in from a hotel. We were asking him about directions to ride share when he said, “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I’ not sure ride share will pick you up based on how you appear right now and with these dogs.”

We knew he was probably right. One dog is iffy with ride share, two are worse. two that are not behaving well is a catastrophe, and add a blind man who looks like he has been ax murdered and you are not getting in anyone’s car. I was so done, though and this man had been pretty nice to us and listened as we explained our crazy situation. I asked him if his airport hotel would take us there and then we could regroup. “You mean you want to get a room?” He asked. The thought of a room with a bathroom and a nice warm bed just a few minutes away was more than I could resist. “yes,” I decided. “We will rent a room.”

“Ok, I am going to run you over there but only you (he points at me) can go into the lobby, ok?” Deal. Anything. Fine. Just please get me out of this airport. So we loaded up and he drove us there, He opened a little side door to a stair well and we put all of our stuff there with Nik and the dogs, then he put me back in the van and drove me around to the front lobby. It was all very clandestine and by that time, I was even laughing a little. I got us a room and the key and then took about three trips to get us and our stuff and our dogs to the room.

Nik washed up and changed his clothes while the dogs went nuts in the room. Mia started barking a lot, so we had to tie them down on separate ends of a couch, both of us sitting with our respective dogs on the floor and talking in soothing tones while petting them gently. They did finally calm down and were quiet. We laugh/cried about the last time I brought a brand new guide dog to a hotel and how different this was and how basically excruciating and confusing this whole guide dog trip had been. Then I slept for almost 17 hours, except for a couple of breaks to take those dogs outside and eat.

And that is the story. It really happened. It’s here so that someday I will look back and laugh at it.

Someday.

But for now, I have FEELINGS and THINGS TO SAY about what is going on with guide dogs and guide dog schools. It’s always a little scary to say anything at all negative about guide dogs, especially when you are at the mercy of the schools and don’t officially own your dog yet. So, I am also going to document my journey with Ms. Mia on instagram (@guidedogmia) so that there is no doubt that she is being well cared for and loved and I am working with her to improve her adjustment and get her skills up.

I am mostly confused by it all, so I don’t claim to have the answers as to “what’s wrong.” I just know something is and I can only speculate on the what and the why. I can only share my own experiences and thoughts and am quite familiar with Nik’s experiences and a bit familiar with many other blind guide dog user’s experience. I don’t know if it is just certain programs or if it has more to do with the passing of time and younger guide dog trainers not having the same skills as the older ones did. I do think that they don’t know a lot about blind folks and how we travel, live and use guide dogs and other navigational and mobility aids. I don’t think there is one “villain” in this story. I think there are many trainers, volunteers, and staff who are nice people who mean well and do the best they can, but are not getting what they need to do a good job. I think the problem is something overarching. Some has always been around and others are new. I don’t even know that I can find the answers.

But I do know that I am not the only one who has had these experiences and I do know that it is incredibly hard for blind guide dog users to speak up. We are almost powerless in this equation of guide dog staff, donors and sponsors and users. We are not the consumer, we are beneficiaries of charity. We are the product and the poster children that are used to raise funds to keep people employed and schools open and dogs produced. We don’t have a lot of say in any sort of accountability for these largely unregulated nonprofits that we depend on to provide guide dogs. Guide dogs that, if not trained correctly, can get us kicked out of housing or public accommodations, get us excluded from getting a job opportunity, and literally get us injured or killed.

I am going to take a few posts in the next few weeks to share my experiences with all my guides and the schools they came from. I invite anyone who has anything they would like to share to feel free to share in the comments or write me privately if you’d rather. I don’t know if any grand conclusions or solutions will come of this, but I do think that people need to start talking about it or it’s only going to get worse. Our airport story is a little dramatic, but we were put in a situation that no blind person should ever be. I will talk about why I think it happened, including what we could have done differently or better as well. But the two experiences I have had getting home from New York (I’ve actually had 3 in total) show the stark differences between the initial training of my guides over the years.

As for Mia, I am still Team Mia and still committed to working with her. I will talk more specifically about her later and what I theorize has made her like she currently is, but she is a nice, sweet and smart dog who I believe has a lot of potential. Although I would have never believed in a million years that our first lessons home would be “house breaking” as she has already had more accidents than any guide dog I’ve ever had in the past *combined.* But we are going to try to work through her adjustment first and then see how far we can take her guiding. She will be loved and cared for no matter what.