Training to be a Leader Dog
When the puppy is a year old, he goes to the Leader Dogs for the Blind facility in Michigan for testing and training. Then the real work begins.
The dog has to learn to notice obstacles in his owner's path and guide him around them. He has to understand traffic and when it's safe to cross a street. He learns to find the door in a building, and find an empty chair for his owner in a waiting room. Training is done with repetition and praise. It takes a good, obedient dog to learn these skills, but one of the most important skills is disobedience!
Leader Dogs Learn to Disobey
A guide dog must learn "intelligent disobedience" to keep his owner from harm. It's the last and most difficult thing a guide dog is taught, but one of the most critical. A guide dog will disobey the command "Go right" if going right would cause his owner to fall into a hole. Leader Dogs are trained for all kinds of scenarios that would cause them to have to disobey. But they can't be trained for everything, and sometimes dogs make these decisions on their own.
Len and his Leader Dog, Mikey, a large Yellow Lab, live in a senior home in Wisconsin and walk to a coffee shop every morning. One morning, at the first intersection, Mikey stopped as usual. Len listened for traffic, heard none, and gave the command "Forward." Mikey sat down. Len gave the command several more times, and even tugged on his chain. Mikey stepped in front of Len so he could not walk into the street. Mikey then turned around and took Len home.
Back in the senior home lobby, Len mentioned to the maintenance man that something was wrong with his dog. He wasn't working. The man said, "He shouldn't be working. The fog is so thick out there you can't see three feet in front of your face."
Mikey was never "fog trained" as that would be impossible to do. But he determined on his own that it wasn't safe to cross the street.
Training People to Trust their Guide Dog
It's not easy at first for a blind person to put their trust in an animal. Imagine how unnerving it would be to go out in a strange city blindfolded, trusting that a dog you just met will keep you safe. The training at Leader Dogs for the Blind is a 26-day course, in which the trained dog is paired with an untrained person. While the dog knows exactly what to do, the person has to learn how to use and trust the Leader Dog.
When Len first got Mikey, during their training, it was Len who wouldn't cross the street. Len could hear traffic but Mikey pulled to go forward. The trainer told Len that Mikey knows what he's doing. Trust him. Len since learned how true that is. Len says, "The more you believe in your dog, that he's not going to let you get hurt, the stronger you will be as a team."
"There is no way to know how many times Mikey has saved my life," Len says. Mikey, like every Leader Dog, quietly guides his owner away from danger each day. Being blind, the owner often doesn't know what the danger was he avoided.
"I don’t have a handicap," Len says. "I have an inconvenience that's cured by the love of a dog."
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