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History - Guide dog

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Guide-dog history

The first special relationship between a dog and a blind person is  lost in the mists of time, but perhaps the earliest known example is  depicted in a first-century AD mural in the buried ruins of Roman  Heculaneum. From the Middle Ages, too, a wooden plaque survives  showing a dog leading a blind man with a leash.

However, the first systematic attempt to train dogs to aid blind  people came around 1780 at 'Les Quinze-Vingts' hospital for the blind  in Paris. Shortly afterwards, in 1788, Josef Riesinger, a blind sieve- maker from Vienna, trained a spitz so well that people often doubted  that he was blind.

Then, in 1819, Johann Wilhelm Klein, founder of the Institute for the  Education of the Blind (Blinden-Erziehungs-Institut) in Vienna,  mentioned the concept of the guide dog in his book on educating blind  people (Lehrbuch zum Unterricht der Blinden). Unfortunately, no  records exist of his ideas ever actually having been realised.  Nevertheless, a Swiss man, Jakob Birrer, wrote in 1847 about his  experiences of being guided over a period of five years by a dog he  himself had specially trained.

The modern guide dog story, however, begins during the First World  War, when thousands of soldiers were returning from the Front  blinded, often by poison gas. A German doctor, Dr Gerhard Stalling,  had the idea of training dogs en masse to help those affected. While  walking with a patient one day through the hospital grounds, he was  called away urgently and left his dog with the patient as company.  When he returned, he got the distinct impression from the way the dog  was behaving that it was looking after the blind patient.

Dr Stalling started to explore ways of training dogs to become  reliable guides and in August 1916 opened the world's first guide dog  school for the blind in Oldenburg. The school grew and new branches  opened in Bonn, Breslau, Dresden, Essen, Freiburg, Hamburg,  Magdeburg, Münster and Hannover, turning out up to 600 dogs a year.  According to some accounts, these schools provided dogs not only to  ex-servicemen, but also to blind people in Britain, France, Spain,  Italy, the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union.

Sadly, the venture had to shut down in 1926, but by that time another  large guide dog training centre had opened in Potsdam, near Berlin,  which was proving to be highly successful. Its work broke new ground  in the training of guide dogs and it was capable of accommodating  around 100 dogs at a time and providing up to 12 fully-trained guide  dogs a month. In its first 18 years, the school trained over 2,500  dogs, with a rejection rate of just 6%.

Around this time, a wealthy American woman, Dorothy Harrison Eustis,  was already training dogs for the army, police and customs service in  Switzerland. It was Dorothy Eustis's energy and expertise that was to  properly launch the guide dog movement internationally. Having heard  about the Potsdam centre, Eustis was curious to study its methods,  and spent several months there. She came away so impressed that she  wrote an article about it for the Saturday Evening Post in America in  October 1927.

One man, a blind American called Morris Frank, heard about the  article and bought a copy of the magazine. He later said that the  five cents it cost him "bought an article that was worth more than a  million dollars to me. It changed my life". He wrote to Eustis,  telling her that he would very much like to help introduce guide dogs  to the United States.

Taking up the challenge, Dorothy Eustis trained a dog, Buddy, and  brought Frank over to Switzerland to learn how to work with him.  Frank went back to the States with what many believe to be America's  first guide dog, however it has now been established that an Italian  Guide Dog organisation Sculola Nazionale Cani Guida per Ciechi was  established in 1928.

The success of this experience encouraged Eustis to set up guide dog  schools of her own at Vevey in Switzerland in 1928 and shortly  afterwards in the United States. She called them 'L'Oeil qui Voit',  or The Seeing Eye (the name comes from the the Old Testament of the  Bible - 'the hearing ear and the seeing eye', Proverbs, XX, 12), and  they were the first guide dog schools in the modern sense.

In 1930, two British women, Muriel Crooke and Rosamund Bond, heard  about The Seeing Eye and contacted Dorothy Eustis, who sent over one  of her trainers. In 1931, the first four British guide dogs completed  their training and three years later The Guide Dogs for the Blind  Association was founded.

Since then, guide dog schools have opened all round the world, and  more open their doors every decade. Thousands of people have had  their lives transformed by guide dogs and the organisations that  provide them. The commitment of the people who work for these  organisations is as deep today as it ever was, and the heirs of  Dorothy Eustis's legacy continue to work for the increased mobility,  dignity and independence of blind and partially-sighted people the  world over. The movement goes on.