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OAKLAND — Some 65 guide-dogs-in-training, accompanied by about 150 human handlers, volunteers and staff, descended on the Oakland International Airport Saturday for special instruction in how to navigate the complexities of airports and air travel.
Negotiating the ticket check-in and security screenings, traversing crowded terminals, boarding and disembarking planes can all be quite stressful for dogs, especially if that situation is new to them, said Chris Benninger, the CEO of Guide Dogs for the Blind. That’s why it’s so important to give the pups exposure to airport environments at a young age, between 5 and 13 months, she said.
“They are at a very impressionable age right now,” Benninger said. “If you start exposing them to new experiences early on in life, they will be pretty calm, cool and collected when they see that later in life.”
The outing is just one of many for the dogs, who will each undergo a rigorous, 18-month training program before they graduate, beginning when the pups are just 3 days old, she said. The training begins with socialization in the first eight to 10 months, along with exposure to different types of surfaces, such as carpet and wood, linoleum and gravel, Benninger said. From there, volunteer “puppy raisers” teach the canines house skills, including letting their handlers know when they need to go to bathroom, refraining from barking or jumping on counters and couches, and walking appropriately on a leash without pulling, she said.
Puppy raiser Rachelle Park, of San Ramon, is working on basic commands with her guide-dog-in-training, Kelsa, a yellow lab who is 7-months-old. Park has been teaching Kelsa how to sit and stay, heel and halt in the same place every time.
Park never had a dog as a pet before participating in the puppy raising program, but after sending her daughter off to college and finding out about the program through a friend, she thought she’d give it a try, she said. She attends weekly meetings on how to best train her dog with positive reinforcement.
“It’s been really fun,” Park said, “and it’s been a really rewarding experience knowing the difference the dogs make in people’s lives.”
After spending a year with their puppy raisers, the dogs come back to Guide Dogs for the Blind’s facilities for an intensive, 12-week training regime with the organization’s staff to learn specific guide-dog skills, Benninger said. It’s the most difficult part of the process because the dogs have to learn how to intelligently disobey their handlers if following their handler’s command would put the handler in danger.
“That is what makes guide work the most complicated of all service work,” she said. “With guide work, you can’t walk someone into traffic once. You just can’t.”
Only 42 percent of the pups graduate to fully-fledged guide dogs, Benninger said. It’s not that the dogs aren’t well behaved or intelligent enough. But guide dogs need to be in an echelon above the rest, completely focused on their handlers and the task at hand and never led astray by distractions, she said. Those that don’t make the cut will often be retrained into different types of service or work, whether that’s accompanying people with diabetes, for example, or sniffing for drugs or bombs. Or they are adopted as pets.
“It takes the best of the best of the best” to be a guide dog, Benninger said.
The product of all that work has been life-changing, said Michele Carson, a Tracy resident who was born with congenital cataracts. Though the cataracts were removed, she later suffered from glaucoma, she said, and has had 40 surgeries on her eyes, resulting in varying levels of vision and impairment. In 2014, when she first received her guide dog, Rhiannon, a golden Labrador Retriever, Carson was classified as visually impaired, but over the last five years, she has lost more and more of her sight.
As her sight has diminished, Rhiannon’s assistance has increased, because the dog is completely attuned to her needs, she said. And having Rhiannon at her side has enabled her to take more trips on her own when previously, she required someone to accompany her.
“I can go on the bus by myself and cross busy streets without worrying, because I know she’s got me,” Carson said. “And when I fly to Orange County, she gets me through check-in, security, all the way to the gate without assistance because she knows what to do.”
Carson added, “It’s given me the freedom of not having to depend on someone else. We’re a team.”
