Guiding the Way

Spend some time on The Seeing Eye’s main campus, which sits on 60 bucolic acres in Washington Valley, and you might notice a few things seem out of place. Stuffed animals are abandoned on sidewalks, there’s caution tape strung around, and low-hanging branches sweep sidewalks. But these aren’t maintenance issues. It’s all there by thoughtful design and plays an important part in The Seeing Eye’s approach to training guide dogs.

Seeing eye dogs are trained to safely guide their handlers around obstacles and navigate street crossings. They’re taught to ignore a command that might injure their handlers, so won’t move forward into traffic or walk into things that hang across sidewalks. 

“We teach our dogs intelligent disobedience,” says Karen Leies, President and CEO of The Seeing Eye. “Even if their human is telling them to move forward, if the dog sees it's not safe, the dog will not do it.” 

Morristown, home to The Seeing Eye’s downtown training center, plays an integral part in all this training. It offers many of the scenarios The Seeing Eye’s students and graduates encounter in their daily lives. “It’s the perfect place to train our dogs and instruct our individuals,” she says. “There’s traffic, there are stores and restaurants, there are buses and a train station. There are even country roads.”

Future Facing

In January, The Seeing Eye kicked off a strategic planning process. One part of the plan is examining how advances in technology, like Meta glasses, can complement their work. 

“Meta glasses and other AI-supportive technology are life-changing for people who are blind and low vision, whether or not they have a dog,” Leies says. “But when they do have a dog, we have to work to keep people safe and keep the dog safe and also maximize the benefit of the technology.”

Imagine, for instance, you are blind or low vision and are standing in front of your open fridge wearing Meta glasses. “You can pull something out and say ‘Meta, what am I holding?’ and it will tell you that you have a can of Coke,” Leies says. 

It’s an exciting new level of independence for a person who is blind or low vision. “We have a board member who is a graduate of the school and commutes to work through Newark Penn Station,” Leies says. “If the dog stops because there’s something it can’t negotiate around, normally he would have to ask someone around him what is going on. Now, he can just ask the Meta glasses what they see around him. It’s a tool that adds to the person’s independence.”

The Seeing Eye is working to implement a carefully considered training program. 

“The relationship between the person and the dog needs to stay sacrosanct,” Leies says. “The dog is their partner and their primary source of information, but if they’re getting information from another source, like Meta glasses, it can be confusing. We’re looking to maintain best-in-class instruction and relevance in this new era of technology.”

Removing Barriers

The second part of January’s strategic plan, Leies says, revolves around answering the question: What do our graduates need from us most? “We try to be their voice and advocate in terms of barriers to service or barriers to access,” she says.

While federal and state laws guarantee that people with service dogs can be accompanied by their dogs in all aspects of their lives, that’s not always how it happens. “It’s a big challenge for us, especially since people have gotten comfortable taking emotional support animals, which may not be properly trained, with them everywhere,” Leies says. “Also, people tend to overestimate the capacity or training of their pets.”

This becomes a problem when service dogs are denied entrance to businesses because of the bad behavior of other non-service dogs, Leies says. For instance, a seeing eye dog has been taught how to walk down the aisle and to sit under their handler’s seat during the flight. But if another dog on the plane doesn’t have this training, it might misbehave on the plane. “It can have a domino effect,” Leies says. “Dogs that aren’t well trained can impact a business’ desire to allow people with service animals to travel or enter a business,” she says. 

In fact, The Seeing Eye recently completed a report on how well each U.S. state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico protect the rights of people who work with service dogs. It reported that over a 12-month period, 54 percent of service dog handlers were denied access to rideshares and taxis, and nearly 40 percent reported encountering other access barriers.

While Morristown remains a great partner and advocate for seeing eye dogs, outside of the local area “we still have to work to educate the general public and make everyone allies for The Seeing Eye and other real service dogs.”

Puppy Power

The Seeing Eye has made more than 18,000 matches between dogs and blind people since 1929. A huge part of this success is thanks to volunteer puppy raisers. The organization breeds about 500 service dogs each year, and each of those dogs needs a home to be raised in for its first year of life.

“Puppy raisers come from all walks of life,” says Loreli Stochaj, who has raised 12 Seeing Eye puppies and is Club Leader of the Morris Paws 4 A Cause Puppy Club. “If you can welcome a puppy into your home, you can be a puppy raiser.”

The Seeing Eye puppy raisers are foster families for the dogs, starting when they’re about seven- or eight-weeks old. Puppy raisers have three main jobs, Stochaj says. “You have to give this puppy a lot of love, teach it basic obedience, and expose it to as much of the world as you can,” she says. This could mean bringing the puppy with you to the library, the grocery store, to concerts, or anywhere else you might go as you navigate your day. 

Puppy clubs are there to support you every step of the way. Clubs typically hold weekly meetings for puppy raisers to trade tips, discuss issues, work on training, and socialize the puppies. 

At about 13 to 16 months, the dogs start their formal training with The Seeing Eye. “The hardest part of puppy raising if giving them back,” Stochaj says. “It’s always sad, but you know these dogs are going to help someone who needs them so much, so it’s also a good feeling. You’re helping to change someone’s life.”

Learn more about The Seeing Eye at seeingeye.org.