That's Dora -- my first Seeing Eye dog -- off duty during a stroll on the beach. She retired at age twelve.
The average working life for a Seeing Eye® dog is 7-8 years. Hanni turned ten in February. I was supposed to head back to the Seeing Eye next month to train with a new dog, but I postponed the trip. I can’t let Hanni go.
I had a hard time letting my first Seeing Eye dog retire, too. Dora worked until she was twelve. I know now that it wasn’t fair to keep her working so long — she needed a break. I don’t want to make the same mistake with Hanni, but I’m just not ready to train with a new dog. Not yet.
When I finally do let poor Hanni retire and enjoy her senior years, we’ll have three options:
- I can bring Hanni back too the Seeing Eye, and they’ll find someone to adopt her, or
- we can find a friend who wants to adopt her, or
- we can keep her as a pet, and when I bring my new Seeing Eye dog home we’d have two dogs.
Hanni is healthy. She is good in traffic, and still knows her lefts from her rights. Her tail still wags when I grab her harness off its hook and call her to go outside. But Hanni can’t keep a good pace anymore. Long walks make her tired. Most of her time at home is spent sleeping. As much as I try to avoid thinking about it, it’s time for Hanni to retire.
As if to remind me, an email from the Seeing Eye arrived in my “in box” this week. Subject matter: Seeing Eye grads invited to participate in study
The Seeing Eye has agreed to distribute information about upcoming research into the factors contributing to early retirement of service and working dogs.
The study is being conducted by the University of Pennsylvania. The research team at Penn Veterinary School is seeking the help of owners of service and working dogs. Specifically, they are looking for people whose current guide or service dogs are from The Seeing Eye, Guiding Eyes for the Blind, or Canine Companions for Independence, and are interested in participating in this important study.
Participants will be asked to complete online (web based) surveys about their dogs’ recent health, behavior and activities twice yearly for a period of 2-3 years. You may also be asked to comb some hair samples from your dog’s fur and return them to Penn Vet School in prepaid envelopes. These samples will be analyzed for the stress hormone cortisol.
Send dog fur via U.S. Mail? It sounds so…well..so voodoo! They had me right there. I wanted to sign up just for that. Hanni is so close to retirement, though, they couldn’t possibly want her as part of the study, would they? Yes, they would.
The researchers wish to collect data on working guide and service dogs of all ages regardless of their current health status or proximity to retirement.
I think I’ll sign up. If you happen to be a guide dog user, and you think you’d like to participate, too, you can go to the survey to provide your name and email address (as well as the name, breed and age of your dog) to indicate your willingness to be considered for the study.
HI, Beth,
I can understand how hard it is to let a great dog go!
It’s good for Hanni that you recognize the signs of aging in her.
Everyone handles this significant challenge differently.
What’s hard is to put our own emotions aside and make the dog’s best interest our priority.
I can say this because i’ve been through 6 Seeing Eye matches. It never gets easier, but I hope I learn something every time I go through it.
There are some great resources on this topic on my web site at
http://www.guidebrookproductions.com
Click on “Life transitions,” and follow the nested links. You’ll find info on the physical and mental aging of dogs, retirement, adoption after retirement, etc.
I hope you find it helpful.
Thanks for the link, Lolly — I’m going to check it out.
Interesting they’ll be analyzing the dog hair for the stress hormone cortisol. Never thought about it, but makes sense that Seeing Eye dogs could get stressed out.
Hi Beth
Its always an interesting topic and I can only imagine how difficult it must be to make that decision to retire a dog.
Not even a year after I got O.J, he hurt his leg while working and had to have three xrays. Nothing showed up and after some medication and a week of rest he was fine. I was so worried while waiting on the xray results, knowing that if his leg was weakened significantly it might affect his work. I imagined him having to retire and had no idea how i would cope. Like I said I was worrying about nothing, and he is happy and healthy now. I’m sure retirement is much easier to deal with if it is a gradual process rather than a sudden one.
I hope I realise when is the right time for O.J, and he can have a healthy retirement, but hopefully it is a long time away.
Jenny, Interesting to hear you say “Retirement is much easier to deal with if it is a gradual process rather than a sudden one.” When I was training with Hanni there was a woman in our class whose 7-year-old dog had died *very* suddenly, can’t remember the cause of death now but definitely remember the woman. She was kind of in shock, going through the grief process while trying to train with a brand new dog, needless to say this was very difficult for her.
Both of the Seeing Eye dogs I’ve worked with have worked past their tenth birthday, I feel very fortunate in that regard, a lucky woman.
Hi Beth,
I completely understand what you’re going through. Retirement is not an easy decision. My first guide dog, Willow, just retired about two weeks ago (at age nine and a half) for a similar reason – slowed pace. Mentally she still wanted to work, but physically she just couldn’t keep up with me well any more. It was an incredibly difficult decision to make and one that I probably should have made sooner than I did – I kept putting off her retirement date, because I wasn’t ready. But in the end, I made peace with the fact that it was the right thing to do for both of us.
Good luck with Hanni. Being aware of her tiredness now will hopefully help make the decision of when is the right time to retire her easier to identify.
The decision of what to do with the dog afterward is tough too. I couldn’t bare the thought of letting Willow go to a complete stranger, if I’d returned her to her school. So, I didn’t even consider that option. For now Willow is staying with me as my pet. We’ll see how it goes when I bring home my next guide dog (hopefully this summer), but luckily I have family and friends that are interested in adopting her if she needs a new home.
Thanks for the news about Willow. I’ll be interested to hear how things go once you bring the new dog home. My husband Mike is more than willing to take Hanni on as his owndog, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to devote myself to a new Seeing Eye dog if Hanni is still around. I’m not sure how Hanni would feel about me leaving her behind every day, either, gallivanting out the door with a new pup. Hmmm.
Didn’t you have some woman who wanted to adopt Hanni when she retired? If that’s falling through, you know she is welcome to move in with her cousin Wolfie!!
Been missing you lately Beth–good posting today.
Yes, a woman in northern Wisconsin put dibs on my Seeing Eye dog back when Hanni was only two or three years old. Kay reads my blog from time to time and I am half-expecting her to write in response to this post. Others have also offered to takeHanni – the one you’d be most interested in knowing about, Siobhan, is our dear friend Brad. Our friends Steven and Nancy in Urbana also said they’d love to have her, but they work a lot and are not at home much. Hanni is so used to being around people, she is with me just about 24/7, I think it’d be best for her to live somewhere where people are around most of the day.
And recently a woman I work with at Easter Seals Headquarters here in Chicago asked what Hanni’s plans are – Karen is single and retiring this year, her beloved dog died almost ten years ago and she is still so heartsick about it that she hasn’t wanted to go through that sort of greif process again, hasn’t gotten another dog. She says she’d take Hanni, though!
I’d like to honor Kay’s position in line –she was the very first to ask for Hanni, after all. But Tomahawk, Wisconsin is so far away – I might never get to visit her there.
Good to know if all falls through Hanni has a home with Wolfie. After all, she already knows a good vet up there — I’ll spare my blog readers the details!
Great Post Beth. It’s another one of life’s hard hurdles to navigate. We have two dogs(not seeting eye dogs) but watching them age has it’s own challenges. Our fifteen year old dog falls when she gets up from lying down, but take her to the park and she’ll still run like the wind.
Mary Jo
pizza hut deals…
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