Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Most dogs can serve their role as mankind's best friend just fine, but only a few elite best of the best can substitute for our eyesight. Thankfully, there are heroes dedicated to finding, raising, and training them.
Welcome to the defending Vision podcast, where this blind man shows you exactly how he sees it. Hardship, humor, and keeping a vision alive. Throw on some headphones for the full audio experience.
Welcome back to the show. I am Matthew Cooper. Thank you so much for being here.
I'm extremely excited about the conversation that we're starting today.
Over the past 20 years, I have had five guide dogs. Bluenose, Twyla, Loti, Solly, and now Walker. I cannot imagine those years without these incredible companions. Dog guides and service dogs are raised and trained by incredible organizations around the world.
Most of these are nonprofits that manage to raise the funds so that they can provide these dogs at no cost to the handlers. So if you're ever considering donating or volunteering with one of these organizations, please do. It is a worthwhile cause.
In this conversation, Natalie Ergler and Sydney Fujishiga from Guide Dogs of America, tender loving canines in Sylmar, California, shed a little light on just how much work goes into breeding, raising and training these elite dogs.
In my experience, most people think that any dog that can be trained to sit and lay down could do the job. This is simply not true.
I think all listeners will find this conversation fun and informative.
So without further ado, welcome to the conversation.
Natalie, I'll start with you. And then, Sydney, why don't you just introduce yourself and what you do professionally as far as guide dogs?
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Sure. So, I'm Natalie. I run our breeding program here at Guide Dogs of America, tenderloving canines.
My primary role is to make sure that our breed stock is up to par with industry standard, but also taking into consideration our entire program needs, whether that's our service dog program or our guide dog program, additional to our breeding program. So we also have to breed for breeders as well as breed for our guide and service dog programs. And then I'm also looking at end results as well as that, and trying to better our colony each generation. So that's the gist of what I do.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Awesome. How about you, Sydney?
[00:03:00] Speaker C: All right. I'm Sydney. I am one of the guide dog mobility instructors. So I am the one that trains the dogs when they come in for training. So they're about a year and a half, about 16 months to 18 months old when they come in for training. And I'm the one that teaches them the basics of guide work, how to avoid traffic, how to travel safely from point a to point b.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: Awesome. So how did you each find your way into guide dog work?
Go for it.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: I started with horses, actually. So I went to college for horses, and I took classes on training management, as well as breeding, genetics, and then also barn management.
And I worked at a horse farm, several horse farms, for a long time.
And then I got into it from a part time position as a kennel tech, actually, at another service drug school.
And I worked my way up there. And then I decided that I wanted some more technical stuff with dogs.
And then I was a reproduction veterinary technician, and I was there for a couple years, and then I came here. And so my goal was to help people. When I got into this, I didn't feel like I was helping people when I was in the horse industry, and I really wanted to help people.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Awesome. So what got you into training, Sydney?
[00:04:44] Speaker C: So I started with GDA. I was a puppy raiser. I started back in 2009, and it was kind of just one of those things. Like, my mom was asking me if I wanted to do a senior project.
We knew somebody who was already a puppy raiser, and it sounded like a cool opportunity. So started puppy raising, and then in 2018, there was a job opening here for a kennel tech position. It was the evening kennel tech at the time, and I kind of knew after raising, I think I was on number nine of puppy raising, the 9th puppy. So I think at that point, I was like, this would be a really cool opportunity if I could work here, just kind of get my foot in the door however I could, because I knew I wanted at that point to be a trainer and continue to do more than puppy raising for the organization.
So when that opportunity opened for kennel Tech, I jumped on it and then kind of worked my way up from there because there wasn't any openings for an apprentice yet, so worked in the breeding department for a little bit, and then finally there was an apprenticeship that was open. So I jumped on that, and I was lucky enough to get it. And, yeah, four years later, here we are.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Awesome.
So, Sydney, how would, how do you typically describe to people the work that a guide dog performs for a handler?
[00:06:12] Speaker C: So I would say the guide dog is a mobility tool. It is another mobility tool, just like your cane. It's helping you get, like I said before, from point a to point b safely. They're not like gps. It's kind of like the.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: I have gotten that question before. How does the dog know how to get to the grocery store.
[00:06:34] Speaker C: Exactly. Like, when do they know when to make the turn? When do they know when to cross? You know, that misconception that people think in general that dogs, you just say, okay, type in how to get to Starbucks, and they're just gonna. Right there.
So I, you know, I'm there to educate the public as well. When I'm training the dogs and tell them, no, I'm teaching them that I need to know where I'm going. For the most part, the dog's just making sure I get there safely so that I'm not bumping in to trash cans or the bus stop or signs or people.
I need to be able to listen to my traffic appropriately. So having good o and m skills, orientation, mobility skills before you even get a guide dog is important for our guide dog clients because they're the ones that are initiating, okay, I think it's safe to cross. And the dog's like, yep, it is. Or hold up. No, it's not. So they're just that backup tool for our clients to travel within the world.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: And it can almost, I find, almost be difficult when the dog will start assuming certain routes. Right. They'll say, oh, we're at this corner. We always go here.
[00:07:42] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So if you always have that one route that, you know, at that one corner, you always turn left, and then you go to the grocery store, but today you want to turn right and go to the coffee shop. You know, for some dogs, it's like, wait, why are we.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: This is wrong.
[00:07:56] Speaker C: This is different. Yeah, no, dad, we always go this way. It's like, nobody. We're going the other way now.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Well, and. And. And you make it go. My trick was always that if it was a place with food, that was the route they learned very quickly.
I know Starbucks is that way, and it smells good.
[00:08:15] Speaker C: Exactly, exactly. Or if there's, you know, for some dogs, it's like, oh, it's shade. You know, I know. You sit outside in the shade. I want to go there right now, especially now in California. That's what all the dogs are wanting. Shade.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Awesome. All right, so the question I get all, or I should say, the statement I hear all the time is my dog could be a guide. Uh, natalie, why is it actually necessary to have a particular breeding program to. To get the best dogs for the sort of job?
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Well, we breed for a lot of specific traits. Um, and I can tell you, like, one of the biggest ones for guide work is harness sensitivity.
So if the dog cannot wear a harness, they cannot be a guide. Dog. And we have bred certain lines of dogs for guide work, knowing that their traits in that category are, we call them really high.
It's an estimated breeding value.
And we do both guide and service dogs here at Gea. But I can tell you our guide dog bred and born litters tend not to have any harness sensitivity whatsoever.
We have some service dog lines within our colony, and we tend to get a little bit more harness sensitivity with those types of dogs.
And so that's a big one. I think the other big one is drive.
We've got to have a dog that is food motivated. We have to have a dog that's environmentally sound as well.
You know, car backfiring. Okay. They can react a little bit, but they've got to then move on with their lives.
And so when we're talking about breeding dogs, we want that overall sound dog, and not all of them are that sound, and we want to breed that way.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Sure. Perfect.
So I guess just kind of an overall question, and maybe this is sort of partially to each of you, what's sort of the experience a dog goes through once it's born in the breeding program and then sort of puppyhood to graduation for the breeding center.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: They're handled basically from birth.
The staff usually start to handle them. And then by day three, we're having some volunteers come in.
They start doing stuff like, it's called early neurological stimulations.
And they're used primarily to help with getting the pups, even at day three after birth, used to a tiny bit of stress and saying, hey, you're going to get a little stressed, but you're going to be okay.
So it's just moving them around into different positions that they're not completely comfortable with.
And that does help us build resilience in our dogs and just starting to handle them. Touching their faces, touching their tails, touching their feet, and with different people. I think that's a huge one in here where we bring.
There's probably close to 100 volunteers in and out of this building every week.
And having them see that many different.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: People hear that many people, it really helps immediate socialization. They're not just one or two volunteers all the time.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: We want them getting immediate socialization with as many different people as we possibly can.
And then after that, once they're about four weeks of age, we start our puppy preschool program and socialization program here in our breeding center.
That is usually until about seven or eight weeks. It encompasses everything from more different people. So we have five people every day that do that, and different people then are huggers in the beginning to different surfaces, different sounds, different sites. So I've even dressed up in a. It's a big, huge gingerbread costume. And I'm walking around trying to get them used to different strangers. And I'm sure we have a video of it somewhere.
And it's literally trying to get them so used to the world that when they go out to their razor homes, that they're confident in their razor homes and they're not scared of their own shadows in their razor homes.
I think Sydney probably, she's a puffy razor, so she probably has a little bit more detail on the puppy raiser and then the formal training, so I'll let her take over on that.
[00:13:09] Speaker C: Yeah, well, the puppy raising aspect, it's changed a lot since I've been puppy raising. There's an extensive curriculum that the puppy raisers need to follow.
We have a great staff of support in the canine development that will help the puppy raisers. But there's a lot more benchmarks now, I feel, than before. When I was puppy raising, it was like, okay, here's the puppy. Here's a manual.
Come to a monthly meeting. There's sometimes Saturday obedience classes. Come to those. It's recommended.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: And it was kind of like, don't ruin the dog.
[00:13:41] Speaker C: Yeah, figure it out. Keep it healthy till turning pretty much, right? No, but there was guidance, but now it's much more like, we're giving them tools.
We have a lot of the tools mirror what we use in formal training, so there's much more support. You know, I was joking before, but, you know, we do have a great curriculum now for our puppy raisers to follow to get them to be more confident. Like Natalie was saying, we start out with a lot of exposure, and then as they get older, there is much more things that they're going to experience out in the world. So we need to make sure that the puppies are prepared for that. When they come in for training, they at least have some exposure to that, because even when they come in for training, at that 16 to 18 months, we were putting so much responsibility on the dogs that even though, yes, they may have, you know, been exposed to a bus driving down the street, but now it's like, they're much more aware of that because it's like before I saw it, now I have to worry about where it's going, what it's doing. Like, all of this stuff.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:14:56] Speaker C: So when they come in for training, there's much more emphasis on building that relationship between the dog and the trainer. So we take two weeks in the beginning where we're building that relationship, staying on campus, getting good foundations before we move into different areas, like San Fernando, Burbank, Northridge, Pasadena. And each one of those has its own expectations. You know, we start out in San Fernando, where it's a little bit quieter. Then we move the dogs into Burbank, where it's a little bit more busy, and start doing indoor work. And then we go to Pasadena, where we're learning how to travel with public transportation and the metro, exposing them to all of these things while they're in training, and also hitting all of these benchmarks so that when they get tested, they are a well rounded guide dog. And then they come into class, and our students are traveling to very similar places that the dogs have already been to. So they have that a little bit of familiarity with the area so that when it's in. When they're in class with the students, it's not so overwhelming of this is.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: A new person, you know, and new places. Yeah.
[00:16:07] Speaker C: So if we bring them to those familiar places, then it's one less thing to worry about, because the dog's familiar, but the student may not be. Right. A lot of our students aren't from this area specifically. Even if they're from California, they're not from the Burbank area, the Pasadena area, San Fernando, so.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:26] Speaker C: We understand that the students are now out of their element, so we want to make sure that the dogs are comfortable so that when they go home, the student is now in their element and they're better prepared on how to have the dog now adjust and the roles are different.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, getting two of my dogs in Quebec, Canada, it was a good thing the dog was comfortable with where we were, because I wasn't and nobody spoke English, so I was definitely uncertain of where we were.
Awesome. All right, so going back to sort of the choice of dogs. So what breeds does GDA specifically use? Why? And could other breeds do the job?
[00:17:10] Speaker B: We primarily use Labrador retrievers, a small percentage of golden retrievers. And then I would say we have a good population of the crosses between the two. So it's a hybrid between the lab and the golden. I would say it depends on the year. Sometimes we're a little bit more heavy on the crosses versus the full labs. It just depends on how many we have going.
I would say why? The labs are incredibly food motivated, and we need them to be food motivated.
I think the goldens, you know, they're definitely a hard breed, but they have the sense of their person. I do feel like they're a little bit more in tune with their person, what their needs of their person are.
I think some of the labs are a little bit more kind of doofy and kind of, whoa, we're just doing walking down the road, whereas our goldens kind of have a little bit more in tune with their handler. And when you cross breed the two, sometimes you get the best of both worlds in that way where you get the food motivation, but they're more in tune with their handler.
Yes. Other breeds can do it.
There's another school up in Canada that uses labyrinthes.
I've seen even a Weimaraner with dieting once.
But other breeds can be used. It's just the success of labs and goldens, and the cross between the two are much higher than most other breeds.
Breeds are usually bred for a specific purpose. So, like, even Labradors were bred for duck hunting originally, and so guide dog schools took their food motivation and bred out that kind of prey drive type trait. Most guide dog schools started out with privately bred lines, and they bred towards the less prey drive, and that's why they are so successful.
Whereas, you know, a weimaraner was not bred or guide work necessarily.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Is the food drive just a matter of them a treat in training being useful? Is that just to make that something that motivates them to do what you want?
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:19:42] Speaker C: It makes it easier for training.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:45] Speaker C: Because we're asking the dogs to do a lot and to do a lot of independent thinking. So helping them motivate them in that direction, it's a lot easier with food.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:19:56] Speaker C: So when they are food motivated, it does make our jobs a little less.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Now that seems like a tricky balance with a dog that has to go into a restaurant and not steal somebody's food.
[00:20:09] Speaker C: We do do setups, quote unquote.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:20:12] Speaker C: You know, it should be coming from the handler. It should never be coming from another person giving them food or from the ground or, you know.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:22] Speaker C: It's even food that gets. If I'm trying to give a dog a piece of kibble because they did good, if it falls on the ground, you better not be picking that up because now it, like, fell in the lava and it has to stay there.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: So that's no longer a treat for me.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: It's not a treat anymore. You can't be picking it up off the ground.
So then it's a lot of, it's even more training right. Where you're like, okay, good boy. You didn't pick it off up the ground, you know, even though it technically was yours.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: Now, I don't, as far as I recall, I don't know that GDA does this, but at other programs I've worked with, it was we did food refusal to the point that even from me, they couldn't take it with the harness on.
And so it was, we would actually do exercises where I would try to hand the dog a treat with its harness on and it had to turn its head and then it would take the treat once I removed the harness.
So I've been with programs that were extremely strict on that.
That was very, very hard on those dogs.
[00:21:17] Speaker C: But, yeah, and, you know, with IGDF standards shifting to more positive reinforcement based training, with that comes more food so that it is easier to motivate them.
They'll work for my praise, but in the beginning, it's just a whole lot easier to pair my praise with food to make that transition easier. So, yeah, back, you know, years ago. Yeah, that kind of was, the thing is, like, you do this because I told you, and now we're switching to, you do this because good things happen, not because you're afraid of what could happen.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: I see. Right, right. Okay, that makes sense.
Okay, so, so you've kind of, you know, you've, between the two of you, you've mentioned sort of harness sensitivity, things like that. So, Sydney, when you're getting started with a new dog, how hard is it just to get them to do that initial wear the harness and, I don't know, start actually taking steps walking in that harness with you holding the handle.
[00:22:30] Speaker C: The way we're training now, it's much more easier. So within that two weeks, when we get assigned the dog, we're teaching them how to pull in harness. So basically, there is no teaching of heel walking nicely on a leash. We don't really worry about that because if we have them walking nicely on a leash and we were trying to teach them, hey, walk by my side, it's counterintuitive to then teach them, okay, now pull against this. Now pull me. Right. So in the beginning, we're not focused so much on healing and walking next to me because we don't want to take that drive away from them. We want to teach them that, you know what, pulling in this black thing is a good thing. It's going to get you what you want. And we teach them how to drive to the curb so that, you know, we have a target that we place on the curb and they're taught to every time you touch it with your nose and you're gonna pull against, I'm gonna kind of pull back just a little, and then you're gonna pull against that and get to that target, and good things happen so that eventually I'm able to put the average amount of pressure that we would normally do in training and with what a student will do so that the dog is learning to pull and pull against that pressure that I'm giving.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: Sure. And I guess it's worth saying for folks that don't know, that dog has to pull to keep the harness taut enough that you can actually feel their movements and actually be. Otherwise, it's kind of, you're disconnected from the dog. Yeah. Right.
[00:24:05] Speaker C: You want that feedback.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: The only way to get that feedback, the movement of following your dog, left or right or forward, is you want to feel that pull in a harness. If there's no feedback, no pull.
You're not going to know if your dog's trying to take you laterally or stopping. Really. You won't get that initial like, oh, well.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: And certainly once the dog is adjusted to that, if you let there be slack, they are then going, I don't know what you want. Like, I don't know where you're going anymore.
[00:24:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: So it's a two way street for sure.
[00:24:38] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Now, you mentioned the sort of driving to a curb and the, the reaction from drivers is often interesting because they don't expect you to come right up to the edge.
[00:24:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: They're like, you're going into the street. No, we're gonna stop at just the right time, depending on what kind of.
[00:24:58] Speaker C: Dog you have, too. We have, we call those hang tenors, where they're just kind of speeding into a down curve and they just, right.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: There like nails on the edge.
[00:25:09] Speaker C: And then we have those ones that kind of come to a gradual stop.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I haven't had any of those.
[00:25:16] Speaker C: You get the driving ones.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: Still, like, even with the ones that come to a gradual stop, we still want them to get all the way to that curb edge.
And. And don't even worry about anything else. Just get to that curb, especially in the beginning. Get to that because that's what's gonna get you rewarded.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: Sure.
Thanks for listening to part one of this conversation. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you come back next week for part two. It's just as informative, and you won't want to miss some of the stories they tell.
If you would like to learn more, go to defendingvision.com. and if you enjoyed the show. Rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
