Can Luna Find Your Door With It All Boarded Up?

A photo on Mike’s Monday’s with Mike post this week left friends asking me whether or not Seeing Eye dog Luna has a hard time finding the front door to our apartment building now. Glass doors and windows have been boarded up ever since looters broke into two businesses on the first floor Saturday night.

Our front door is being held open in this shot, but it, too, is covered by wood.

Luna has had a lot to deal with since coming home to Chicago with me from the Seeing Eye school at the end of January, 2020. My broken wrist, sheltering in place, Mike hospitalized with COVID 19, social distancing, us wearing masks, and now…the lootings. She’s been riding the storms magnificently, though; she hasn’t forgotten her lefts and rights, still stops at corners during walks and guides us safely around physical obstacles in our way. And now, with so many neighborhood buildings boarded up and storefronts all looking alike, can she find our door?

Yes.

Luna and I take two long walks a day around the neighborhood, I always wear a mask, and she always guides me right to our boarded-up front door when our walks are over. I’m not so sure she detects it visually, though. My guess is she does it by smell. An article in Wired last year about how difficult its been to come up with a robot with olfactory skills points out how many years ”humans have prized dogs for their tracking abilities” and how “police and armed forces have long used them to sniff out bombs, drugs, and bodies.” Humans rely on vision to navigate the world, the article says, but a dog is motivated by scent. More from the article:

All this adds up to a revelation not just about dogs but about the physical world itself. Smell, it appears, is sometimes the best way of detecting and discriminating between otherwise hidden things out in the world

So while I can’t see the door, and I can’t differentiate one boarded-up building from another by my sense of touch, Luna sniffs it out and leads me to the right door handle every time.

And once we get home, thanks to the bravery and hard work of our condo staff and our terrific condo board president throughout these trials, she and I and Mike can feel safe and sound.

PS: Guide dogs are not trained to stay six feet away from others, and the Seeing Eye has developed anew infogram with suggestions on how to help us social distance and stay safe. Check it out and feel free to share with others — thanks.