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Posted by: Kirsten on 2010-05-19, 17:59:36
What you're talking about aren't disadvantages but potential concerns. There is a difference. The disadvantages of guide dog training are that it is labor and time intensive, much more so than cane training. Guide dogs only have a working life of around 8 years and then you have to start all over again with a new dog while you're desperately missing the dog that has come to feel like part of your body and soul. Guide dogs can become ill and unable to work, which rarely happens to a cane, and they are costly to maintain because they require food, veterinary care, equipment, exercise, and time. Guide dogs need care throughout the day which means you must fit your life around their schedule as much as they do around yours, making sure they eat and toilet on schedule so they maintain reliability in not toileting inappropriately or being made to feel uncomfortable holding it when they really need to go. There are ways training and placement can go wrong, but these are exceptions, not the norm. What are some potential problems with guide dogs? 1. A dog may develop a chronic condition and have to retire early. 2. A dog may burn out and have to retire early. 3. The dog and handler may fail to bond. 4. A dog may be attacked by a loose dog and have to retire early. Things like the dog not being trained correctly or sufficiently are going to be abundantly apparent during team training which typically lasts 3-4 weeks. When dogs break training it is nearly always due to operator error, an owner who failed to maintain the dog's training regimen so his skills became rusty. An inability to work for all but one person (such as a favorite trainer or puppy raiser) is going to be abundantly apparent even before team training. A guide dog cannot lead a person into a busy street or to the wrong place because neither of those things are his job. It isn't the dog who decides when to cross the street, but the handler. A guide dog performs the same basic job functions as the long cane and a person certainly doesn't wait for the cane to tell them when to go or where to go. With both a guide dog and a cane, the human operator is responsible for listening to traffic and deciding when to cross, and for keeping track of where they are and where they are going, as well as how to get there. The dog's job is to identify obstacles in the person's path. When a guide dog fails in his job, a person gets bumped into something, not lost or run over. I don't know what kind of presentation you're doing, but it's clear you have many misconceptions about guide dogs and how they work. You should take some time to learn more about them before doing a presentation on them. Try visiting seeingeye.org |
