[Blind-Rollers] Non-guide service dogs

Thu Aug 13 15:58:15 UTC 2020

The message below reminded me of another problem my head around the same time that I was looking for a dog guide school for my wheelchair user.
I had a client with posttraumatic stress disorder. He was a good cane user and did not want a dog guide for mobility purposes.  I began looking around for dogs train specifically for PTSD. Unfortunately, most of the trainers with whom I spoke were focusing on veterans. This is a very necessary service and I appreciate it but my client was not a veteran and still had to deal with his extra disabilities.
In addition, I had another client in a wheelchair who didn’t want a dog to guide her but to open doors, pick things up off the floor, and do other things that a dog would do for a sighted person in a wheelchair. She was satisfied to sweep her cane around and find her ramps and drop offs but she had an illness that made her very frail and unable to do things for herself. She could transfer independently from her chair to her bed or two other places where she needed to sit but was not going to get down on the floor and use a consistent search pattern to find things.  She struggled to open and close doors and had just enough vision to want lights but struggled to stand up long enough to turn the light switch on and off. I have seen service dogs do this for people who cannot do these things for themselves but who are cited and expected to navigate visually.
My client would be perfectly capable of navigating non-visually with a cane.  My other client who needed a PTSD service dog also was good with his cane and didn’t necessarily need a mobility aid.
To add a further point, one of the dog trainers told me that you can only teach your dog so much and just like you and me, they get overloaded. I cannot be in orientation and mobility instructor and continue to be good at my job if I start working as an accountant on the side. Such a job would be too demanding and I wouldn’t keep up with my orientation and mobility skills.  Likewise a dog whose job is to guide for you shouldn’t be asked to do 100 other tasks in the meantime. One or two here or there is usually a good idea because it gives your dog something to do when you aren’t working a whole lot. But the dog trying to explain that just like humans, there’s only so much one person or one animal can do for a living.
This started me on the hunt for non-blindness service trainers.  I learned that this is an extraordinarily biased and prejudiced field. The minute they learned that my clients were blind, they wanted to pack them off to the Seeing Eye or someplace like that to get dog guides. I tried very carefully and hundreds of ways to illustrate that a dog guide would not perform the tasks necessary to the disabilities that my clients head and that it was these disabilities rather than their blindness that the dog needed to serve.
My PTSD client needs to stay calm while traveling so that a guide dog doesn’t react to his emotions and stop working properly. A PTSD dog would not be asked to guide him and could give him the attention he needs so that he can calm down and problem solve with his cane. The schools simply could not understand or chose not to understand.  Once school official happened to be a blind person. I’m not sure how she ended up working with dogs trained to help non-blindness disabilities because she tried to tell me I didn’t know anything about blindness. I explained that I am blind and that while not everybody certified as orientation and mobility instructors with the designation NOMC is necessarily blind, it does mean that they know a great deal about blindness even when they are not.  I found doors slamming closed all over the country in some of the most popular names that you here when you do a web search for service dogs. The minute they heard blind they simply did not want to hear anymore. Naturally I turned it to the guide dog schools thinking if they knew that this or that institution would be more receptive, the guy dog schools might know about it. Of course they didn’t because they only work with blindness travel and don’t concern themselves with the services provided by dogs to non-blind users.  I thought this would be right up the alley of the national Federation of the blind. Something we could take on as extremely discriminatory but the nature of my clients didn’t lend it self to the complaint. The gentleman with posttraumatic stress disorder was too emotionally beaten down to try to fight. The other lady was simply to physically frail and just gave up. I can’t bring it to the NFB if clients are not interested in pushing because it isn’t really my fight. That doesn’t stop me from being angry about it and it doesn’t stop me from resenting the dog trainers who turn their nose up at my clients who have non-blindness disabilities and need all of the same things that sighted people with these disabilities need. Blindness does not make cerebral palsy go away. Blindness does not make PTSD go away.  Blindness does not make medical disabilities go away. If we had that kind of power, everyone would be blind.

Thanks for letting me vent about something of which you folks all know so much better than I do. Just remember that we are a Federation and when needed, we shouldn’t be afraid to help the end user kick a little butt.  When it’s your turn to be the end-user, please don’t feel alone. Prejudice doesn’t stop just because it’s against the law.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 13, 2020, at 9:43 AM, maureen Pranghofer via Blind-Rollers <blind-rollers at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Becky
> I went down the road several years ago and at that time Southeast Guidedog
> in Florida was doing it but only to graduates of that school. Since then I'd
> heard that Paws with a Cause and Leader Dog were doing it but that was
> several years ago.
> Maureen
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Blind-Rollers <blind-rollers-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Becky
> Frankeberger via Blind-Rollers
> Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2020 9:23 AM
> To: 'Blind wheelchair users list' <blind-rollers at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: Becky Frankeberger <b.butterfly at comcast.net>
> Subject: [Blind-Rollers] Guiding wheelchairs
> 
> Are there any schools flexible enough to train a dog for a wheelchair user
> who is totally blind. I am asking for my friend and maybe myself for the
> future.
> 
> 
> 
> Warmly,
> 
> Becky 
> 
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