[nagdu] owner training

Sat Dec 10 22:16:24 UTC 2011

Matt,

Hi, and welcome. My name is Tami (Tammy, in case you're using JAWS), and 
I am working my 5.5 year-old owner-trained poodle guide. I learned a lot 
of what I know from Julie, as well as other owner-trainers on this list 
and elsewhere. I had been training animals since I was a kid on the 
ranch, so believed I had the requisite skills, patience, etc. to train a 
guide dog, supposing I ended up with a dog with "the right stuff." I'd 
known I would be wanting a guide dog for blindness since I was a kid, 
too, so I had learned everything about them I could and would often 
entertain myself by trying to figure out how one would train a guide dog 
to handle this or that situation in my daily travels when I grew up and 
moved to the big city, then the bigger city and all that. /smile/ I 
wasn't actively planning to train my own -- certainly not my first guide 
dog -- at the time, but I love training and problem solving, and guide 
dog is tops for that! I would also find myself thinking the guide dog 
angle through when I became a cane user. I had ended up back in the 
sticks then due to health problems and the need to be closer to family. 
So I ended up teaching myself cane O&M because it was that or stay home 
and wait for someone to get out to me to help me. Ha! When my 
then-husband and I ended up moving to a bigger city in central Oregon, I 
got to teach myself a whole lot of new stuff in an unfamiliar 
environment with much less residual vision. But I would manage to wonder 
about the guide dog angle there, too. Couldn't help myself! /lol/ Then I 
split from my husband, came over here to the metro area, and still ended 
up teaching myself bigger and better O&M skills with the cane here... I 
took lessons from the state O&M instructors, but they seemed determined 
to spend months teaching me to walk around the block or around straight 
hallways in a building... Good grief! So I stopped wasting the time and 
just learned how to handle my real life travels and O&M on my own 
because who needs the fuss and insults? /lol/ I had also been badly 
injured, which brought on a new onset of fibromyalgia; the worst 
injuries were to my arms and hands, so using a cane was causing a lot of 
problems... But I ended up too sick to go to guide dog school.

So I ended up with a 7-month-old poodle pup, who did end up having "the 
right stuff" in spades... So off we went, she learning quickly to leash 
guide or nudge guide even on walks around and then to a neighborhood dog 
park where she could run while I walked on the turfy grass without 
having to use the cane to rebuild fitness and balance. Whew! So now 
she's a working guide. Cool.

She was a blank slate at 7 months, having been pack-raised on a small 
acreage with a lot of breeding poodles and labs as well as other pups 
and older pups. They'd had some huge litters that year, so that's why 
they ended up with this older pup needing a home with me. /smile/ 
Anyway, I needed to start from the ground up and discovered that one 
disadvantage to a pup that age is that she had already developed 
independence and self-determination... /lol/ This is great in her guide 
work, but I had some interesting times learning to work with her poodly 
brains and temperament to achieve the desired results for house manners 
and basic obedience and everything. But she was brilliant! I'd done most 
of my dog training and interaction with cattle dogs on the ranch, so 
this poodle beast was a constant surprise. Still, she learned fast, 
fast. I figured out that if I went with what I'd read about how poodles 
are a lot like Arabian horses in temperament and manner and how you work 
with them, things went swimmingly. /lol/ My last Arabian was perfect 
practice for this wild poodle child of mine. I did my own PR around my 
neighborhood for exposure to some of the working environments I hoped to 
have her bring me into one day, and that hair-trigger nervous system 
caused a lot of laughs until she learned to self-manage and not levitate 
every time something surprised her or interested her... Yikes! She never 
did anything horrible, but she did learn how fun it is to be a clown and 
get everybody laughing. She also learned how much people would gush when 
she did settle down, so that helped. Hard to convince your pup she's 
being a total monster when everybody is cracking up and egging her on... 
Or telling her she's a good dog while you're telling her she needs to do 
something else in order to earn the title good dog. Sheesh! It was a 
hoot in a way, but I'm more the nerd in the corner type than the class 
clown type, so that stretched my comfort level. Until I realized I was 
just the geeky sidekick in her act. /lol/

Anyway, that's us.

I think that finding the right late subadult or young adult dog in the 
18 to 24 month range would be a good way to go. Certainly, it would 
bring you to having a guide dog much more quickly than if you start with 
a pup. Mitzi learned fast, but she didn't really have the maturity to 
take over the work until she was 24 months. So that was 19 months from 
puppy to guide dog. Worth it, but.. I had a hard time not pushing her 
too far too fast just so I could have the guide dog I really wanted and 
needed. /smile/

Okay, I'm turning this into a novel. Just taking a rambling style to 
give you some idea of my experience, at least on the surface. I'll see 
what more other owner-trainers or people in the know tell you to see if 
I can fill in any real information blanks.

Tami

On 12/09/2011 06:32 AM, Matt Diemert wrote:
> Julie,
> Facinating insight thus far.
> I have actually worked three guides, my first for 10 years, my second for 2
> months, and my third for three years.
> I think, I was contemplating looking for an adult dog, by that I was
> thinking somewhere between 18 and 24 months? Very good point about some sort
> of return clause for the first few weeks.
> I'm a very good cain traveler, so I feel comfortable with the idea of
> orienting a dog to doing things like stopping at down and up curbs, and
> navigating around obsticles.
> I assume that after choosing a dog and becoming familiar with his or her
> ways, that obedience sit, stay come, down and up would be a proper starting
> point?
> Regards:
> Matt D.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
> Of Cindy Ray
> Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 9:23 AM
> To: NAGDU Mailing List, the National Association of Guide Dog Users
> Subject: Re: [nagdu] owner training
>
> Actually, Julie, I find this interesting and would like to know more about
> it myself. I doubt I would ever actually train a dog to guide because I
> don't feel motivated to do that, but it would carry over into enhancing the
> training a dog already has or, for that matter, training another dog just to
> be livable and fun. Hope that doesn't trivialize what you are doing and
> saying because I don't mean it to.
>
> Cindy
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nagdu mailing list
> nagdu at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nagdu_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nagdu:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nagdu_nfbnet.org/mcdiemert%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nagdu mailing list
> nagdu at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nagdu_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nagdu:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nagdu_nfbnet.org/tamara.8024%40comcast.net
>