Better than match.com

Whitney and I had a ball at the Hamilton Branch of the Madison Public Librarylast Friday, and as always, the kids in the audience had some marvelous questions. My favorite one was

Whitney are becoming a good team.

this: “Your book says your Seeing Eye dog goes with you everywhere. Does she go in the shower with you, too?”

We’re heading to Champaign this Thursday To speak to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois, and it’ll be interesting to find out if the kids in that college class read their texts as carefully as the little girl at that library in Madison did!

I plan on telling the college class what it’s been like transitioning to a new Seeing Eye dog, then going over some of the qualifications necessary to become a guide dog instructor. Most guide dog schools require instructors to have a college degree and then do an apprenticeship, and apprenticeships can last as long as four years. If I do a decent job explaining how complicated it can be to train dogs, train people, and then make a perfect match between the human and canine, the college kids might appreciate why the apprenticeships last so long.

Once apprentices finish their training and become full-time Seeing Eye Instructors, they’re assigned a string (a group) of dogs and given four months to train that string. Throughout the training, instructors pay close attention to each dog’s pace and pull, and they make careful notes about how each dog deals with distractions, what their energy level is, and all sorts of other characteristics. And then? We blind students fly in from all over North America to be matched — and trained — with a new dog.

Seeing Eye instructors have to be as good at evaluating people as they are evaluating dogs. Our instructors review our applications before we arrive on campus and then ask us tons more questions when we get there. Instructors take us on “Juno” walks (they hold the front of the harness to guide us through all sorts of scenarios to get an idea of how fast we like to walk and how strong of a pull we’ll want from our dog) and then combine all of this information with what they know about their string of dogs, talk it over with fellow instructors and the team supervisor, mix in a little bit of gut instinct, and voila! A match is formed.

Each Seeing Eye instructor trains more dogs than they’ll need for a class. If a dog has a pace, pull, or energy level that doesn’t match with a blind person in the current class, that dog remains on campus with daily walks and care, and perhaps more training, until the next class arrives. My first dog was one of those Seeing Eye dogs who went through a second round of training before she was matched with me. Back in 1991, the Seeing Eye knew that the dog they matched me with would be landing in the home of a very unique five-year-old boy named Gus, and that the dog would be in the hands of a woman who had never had a dog before. They must have figured Pandora would need all the extra training she could get!

Hanni was the perfect dog for everything going on during her years with me, Harper took a blow to save me from getting hit by a car on State Street. My fourth dog had big paws to fill, and it’s taken me a while to warm up to Whitney. Lately, though, I’m finally finding myself falling in love again.

My two-year-old Golden/Labrador Retriever cross is a hard worker who loves to play as much as she loves to work. Her curiosity gets her in trouble sometimes, but when she guides me down busy Chicago streets, she is directed, determined, and driven. The only time she lollygags? When she realizes we’re heading back home. She wants to go, go, go

Whitney’s confidence is contagious, and she’s smart enough to know when to bend the rules without getting in trouble. Hmm. Whitney and I just might make a perfect match after all.