The article I am writing about is titled “ Guide dogs bring more than sight” and was found at the Academic Search Complete database from the University of Kentucky library website at http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uky.edu. The article was written by Allison Gray and was published as a newspaper article by USA Today.
The article starts off talking about Deni Elliott, a legally blind woman who wanted not just a service dog, but a best friend. She didn’t care what type of dog it was, what color it was, its gender, or its size, but she did care about its personality. Deni and her dog, Alberta are among 7,000 guide dog pairings. These pairings are more than just a guide dog and their owner, its like a marriage. Alberta went through a lot of training to become a guide dog, and it first started with a year and half program with puppy raisers. These puppies will be trained in crowded areas to see how they handle people, and will be tested on how they react to little distractions like a coin falling to the ground. These dogs can be much more than just guide dogs. A college student was too shy to eat in the cafeteria, but once she received her service dog she was no longer shy. Other service dogs can help owners with peanut allergies smell if there are any traces of peanuts in the food they eat. Many legally blind people like Deni prefer guide dogs rather than canes. Deni says, “My world now is as big as a guide dog can sense, which is a whole lot bigger than the arc of a cane”.
This article was cool to look at and read. I was fascinated about how dogs are trained to sniff out the slightest bit of peanuts to help their owner. I was curious about the 7,000 pairing number. Is that number just based off of legally blind people, or does it include others that have service dogs as well? If I wanted to pursue this question towards my research I could easily find out how many total service dogs are active today by doing a couple quick google searches.
Link to Article
That is remarkable how a dog can be trained to do such a detail oriented task such as that for a blind person. I find it interesting how the person that was blind became more open once the dog was in her life, maybe that dog gave her a sense of companionship that she may have lacked?
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