German shepherds make good Seeing-Eye dogs.
It's not uncommon to see a proud dog wearing a harness help its blind owner to navigate a crowded store or cross the street. But just 100 years ago, guide dogs were unheard of in the United States. Once they made their mark, however, the practice grew quickly and has expanded to other animals and other disabilities.
Beginnings
The idea of dogs helping the blind is not new. A mural from first-century Rome depicts the relationship, as does a plaque from the Middle Ages. But records don't show an organized effort to train dogs to help blind people until the late 1700s, at the Quinze-Vents hospital for the blind in Paris. Not long after, in 1788, an Austrian man named Josef Riesinger trained a spitz to assist him, and got around so well that people didn't believe he was blind.
An Idea Takes Hold
Despite early inklings of what dogs could do to help the blind, the idea didn't really catch on until around World War I. Many soldiers had been blinded, and after seeing his dog appear to "look after" a blind patient, Gerhard Stalling, a German doctor, decided to work on training dogs for this purpose. He opened the first-ever school for guide dogs in Oldenburg, Germany, and soon it had facilities in nine other cities, training as many as 600 dogs per year.
Stalling's schools closed in 1926, but a training center was open near Berlin, big enough to train 100 dogs at a time. An American, Dorothy Harrison Eustis, who was training dogs for the army in Switzerland, heard about it and visited. After several months there, she wrote an article about it for the "Saturday Evening Post."
Birth of the Seeing Eye
That article reached Morris Frank, a blind American. He wrote to Eustis for help, seeking his own dog, and she agreed. She trained a dog named Buddy, and Frank went to Switzerland to learn interact with his new guide. He promised to publicize guide dogs' abilities when he returned to the United States. When he got to New York in 1928, he showed off Buddy's abilities in front of the news media.
The success of Frank and Buddy inspired Eustis to give $10,000 to Frank to start a school in his home of Nashville, Tennessee, in 1929. They called it the Seeing Eye. In 1931, the school moved to New Jersey, where it remains. Only canine graduates of these schools are Seeing-Eye dogs; others are more properly called dog guides or service dogs.
The Notion Spreads
In 1930, two British women contacted Eustis about training dogs in the U.K. A year later, four guide dogs were the first "graduates" in that country. After that, new training centers and schools started appearing around the world. The American Foundation for the Blind lists 19 schools in the United States today.
Expanding on a Good Idea
Now, dogs aren't the only service animals, and blind people aren't the only ones they help. Animals may alert deaf people to sounds, help people with limited mobility pick things up off the floor, warn an epileptic of a coming seizure, or even just calm anxious nerves. An article in The New York Times Magazine reports of miniature horses, monkeys, parrots, cats, pigs, ferrets, and even an iguana and a duck as service animals.
Tags: guide dogs, help blind, training dogs, United States, aren only, blind people, dogs were