History of Guide Dogs
History of Guide Dogs
Depicted on the walls of the Roman Herculeaum when it stood, and now buried in its ruins but not lost in time, guide dogs have been leading the blind since the first century AD. A depiction of a blind man being led by a guide dog attached to a leash was found on a mural among the ruins. Skip forward many centuries to the 1700’s when a blind Parisian trained a spitz to serve as his guide dog companion. In the 1800’s, guide dogs for the blind were mentioned in books in both Vienna and Switzerland. It was during the first World War that the idea of guide dogs began to be explored fully. This occurred with the opening of a proper guide dog school in Germany in 1916, followed by openings of multiple guide dog centers throughout Germany, which eventually trained over 2,500 guide dogs for the blind.
At this point, ladies and gentlemen, meet Dorothy Lieb Harrison Wood Eustis. No summation of the history of guide dogs would be complete without her. If you can’t remember her name, that’s okay, you’ll remember her legacy. If guide dogs have a patron saint, it is Dorothy Eustis.
Her story within guide dog history is quite straightforward yet quite extraordinary. Exposed to the idea of practical genetics from her first husband, Walter Wood, Dorothy took the selective breeding concepts he had applied to cattle and began applying it to guide dogs for the blind. She was inspired to selectively breed guide dogs by her intelligent and loyal German shepherd, Hans. A series of marriages and subsequent moves to Pennsylvania, Switzerland and Germany, gave her the contacts needed to begin supplying European police units and the Swiss Army with a superior breed of German shepherd guide dogs for the blind from her Fortunate Fields kennel.
In 1927, Dorothy wrote an article about guide dogs called “The Seeing Eye” for the publication The Saturday Evening Post. By good fortune, a blind man named Morris Frank was made aware of the article about seeing-eye dogs and consequently traveled to Germany to work with Eustis who provided him with his own guide dog, Buddy. When Mr. Frank returned to his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee he was greeted with much anticipation and as a result, other blind persons were anxious to acquire a guide dog for themselves.
Returning to the United States from Germany, it was in 1929 that Ms. Eustis established and became President of the Seeing Eye, Inc. This was a training school for guide dogs which began in Nashville and eventually settled in New Jersey in 1932. Ms. Eustis required no outside funding for the Seeing Eye, funding most of it with her own fortune. She wanted to supply guide dogs to those who were skilled, mature, and independent enough to receive all the benefits a guide dog could offer, and sale of guide dogs was restricted to anyone who did not meet these requirements. Ms. Eustis died in 1946 in New York, New York. Her Seeing Eye foundation had successfully provided the blind with more than 1,300 guide dogs over the course of its history.
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