[nagdu] Assistance Dogs: Learning New Tricks for Centuries

[Ginger Kutsch]

Assistance Dogs: Learning New Tricks for Centuries

http://www.history.com/news/2011/08/08/assistance-dogs-learning-new-tricks-f
or-centuries/

The History Channel      

 

Yesterday marked the start of the third International Assistance Dog Week,
which pays tribute to all the diligent canines that help people overcome
their disability-related limitations. Find out how the natural alliance
between humans and dogs grew into a worldwide movement with a tremendous
effect on people's lives.

 

Guide dogs in training stroll through Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey.
(Credit: Getty Images)

 

Prehistoric humans began taming wolves at least 15,000 years ago,
transforming dangerous pack predators into loyal companions and creating
specialized dog breeds for different tasks. (In another version of this
story, wolves engineered their own domestication after tasting the bounty of
campsite living.) But when exactly man's best friend became an aide to
people with disabilities and other challenges remains a mystery. The
earliest evidence of such partnerships-a fresco in which a blind man is led
by his dog, discovered amid the ruins of the ancient Roman city
Herculaneum-dates back to the first century A.D. European wood carvings and
Chinese scroll paintings from the Middle Ages depict similar scenes.

 

In the 1750s, the earliest systematic instruction of guide dogs, as helpers
of the visually impaired are known, took place in a Paris hospital for the
blind. Several decades later, a blind Austrian man named Josef Reisinger
trained a spitz and later a poodle so well that others thought he was faking
his disability. Another Austrian, Johann Wilhelm Klein, founder of the
Institute for the Training of the Blind in Vienna, published one of the
first manuals for coaching guide dogs in 1819. He recommended poodles and
shepherds as the breeds most suited to the task and advocated the use of a
special harness paired with a pole.

 

The modern guide dog movement originated in Germany after World War I, which
had left thousands of soldiers blinded, usually by mustard gas. According to
some accounts, a doctor named Gerhard Stalling briefly left his German
shepherd with a visually impaired patient while making the rounds at a
veteran's hospital. Upon his return, he noticed that the dog had become
particularly protective of the young man. Stalling happened to be president
of the German ambulance association, which during the war had trained
hundreds of collies to track down wounded soldiers, carry messages and
perform other duties on the front lines. Around 1916 he tasked the
organization with retraining these dogs and assigning them to blind
veterans. Though Stalling's program shut down within a decade, in 1923 the
German Shepherd Dog Association opened a training center in Potsdam that
produced 4,000 guide dogs for both veterans and civilians by 1930.

 

The school piqued the curiosity of Dorothy Harrison Eustis, a wealthy
American who in the 1920s began breeding and teaching police dogs for the
Swiss army. After visiting Potsdam, observing training exercises there and
following a blind man as he deftly navigated busy streets with his dog at
his side, she described her experiences in an October 1927 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post. Eustis ended her lengthy piece with an impassioned
endorsement of the German guide dog model, writing, "No longer dependent on
a member of the family, a friend or a paid attendant, the blind can once
more take up their normal lives as nearly as possible where they left them
off, and each can begin or go back to a wage-earning occupation, secure in
the knowledge that he can get to and from his work safely and without cost;
that crowds and traffic have no longer any terrors for him and that his
evenings can be spent among friends without responsibility or burden to
them; and last, but far from least, that long, healthful walks are now
possible to exercise off the unhealthy fat of inactivity and so keep the
body strong and fit. Gentlemen, again without reservation, I give you the
shepherd dog."

 

Almost immediately, Eustis received an enthusiastic letter from Morris
Frank, a blind 19-year-old from Tennessee. "Thousands of blind like me abhor
being dependent on others," he wrote. "Help me and I will help them. Train
me and I will bring back my dog and show people here how a blind man can be
absolutely on his own." The following year, Frank traveled to Switzerland
and returned home with a canine companion, Buddy. Mobbed by fascinated
reporters, he sent a one-word telegram to the woman who had helped grant him
his newfound independence: "Success." In 1929 Eustis and Frank founded the
first American guide dog school, which they called The Seeing Eye; five
years later, the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association was founded in
England.

 

In the ensuing decades, training centers cropped up in many countries around
the world, while in the United States additional guide dog schools opened
from coast to coast. Today, assistance dogs help people with a wide range of
challenges, from visual and hearing impairments to epilepsy, autism, anxiety
and post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2009 International Assistance Dog
Week was created to recognize and honor these hardworking animals and their
trainers, as well as to raise awareness of how they have transformed
countless lives.