The Orion Online

Issue date: 3/5/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: Briana Morrison Black Labrador Vashti leads her owner, Lauri Evans, who works at Disability Support Services, while going for a walk on campus. Evans said puppy raisers play an important role in training Seeing Eye dogs. [Click to enlarge]

One could only imagine how terrified the people in the World Trade Center were when it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, but imagine being blind, 70 stories up and the only hope for survival was a dog.

That was the case for New York resident Omar Rivera. According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, he was led down 70 flights of stairs to safety by his Seeing Eye dog, Dorado. Dorado refused to leave his side even after Rivera, in an attempt to save the dog, let him off his leash and told to him to go.

Seeing Eye dogs open doors and give freedom to the visually impaired. But Dorado and other certified Seeing Eye dogs are not born service dogs. It takes years of grooming, and it all starts with puppy raisers.

Kay Nelms is one of the puppy raiser leaders for the Puppy Raiser Club in Chico. They are part of Guide Dogs for the Blind, Inc., an organization based in San Rafael, Calif.

Puppy raisers get a puppy when it is around eight weeks old, Nelms said. They work on obedience, training, house behavior and socialization. When it's about a year and a half, it's given back to Guide Dogs for the Blind so it can be trained as a Seeing Eye dog.

"A puppy will go to the movies and go shopping with you," Nelms said. "You have to look for opportunities to socialize it."

Three active members in the club are Chico State students. One of them is Nelms' daughter, Amy Nelms.

Junior Amy Nelms became interested in puppy training when she was about 13, and she has been doing it ever since, she said.

"Getting to take the dog out in public is fun," Amy Nelms said. "And seeing how they help other people. Not just the blind, but the community enjoys them."

Most of Amy Nelms' professors don't mind having the dog in class, she said.

"Some just don't say anything about it," Amy Nelms said. "I've had some think I was blind on the first day of class­­ - but they kind of become like the class mascot."

Raising a puppy takes a lot of time and dedication, but if students are willing to put in the energy, they are a good group to raise puppies because of the situations they expose the dog to, Kay Nelms said. Puppies learn to sit through class and get used to stairs and elevators.

But having a guide dog puppy is not like having a pet, Kay Nelms said. The dog is being raised for a specific purpose, and raisers go to meetings twice a month. The puppies have to be raised in a specific way.

"The dog has to be well-behaved so you have to be consistent," she said. "You can't take the dog to the mall and let if be goofy one time and then not the next."

About 90 percent of the dogs are Labrador retrievers because they have the right temperament for the job, Kay Nelms said.

Lauri Evans, the support services coordinator for Disability Support Services, is blind. Her Seeing Eye dog, Vashti, is a 2-year-old black Labrador she nicknamed Shadow.

Evans was 16 when she got her first Seeing Eye dog, she said. Before that she used a cane and it was "miserable."

"When I took my first walk with my guide dog I could hold my head high," Evans said. "I trusted the dog because I knew it had proper training."

A Seeing Eye dog's job is to get a person from one point to another in the most direct manner without running into objects, Evans said. It is up to the person to have good orientation and know where they want to go.

"It's a lot like a car - you can't get behind the wheel and tell the car to take me to The Graduate or take me to the store," Evans said. "You need to know how to get there."

Training the dogs takes a lot of work and it couldn't be done without the puppy trainers, she said.

"I want to say how much the puppy trainers do and how important they are," Evans said. "They do a lot and it really, really benefits us and the dog."

Helping people and seeing her dog succeed is one of the reasons senior Nicole Peretti likes puppy training, she said.

"I wouldn't recommend it to everyone," Peretti said. "It's more than just having a puppy. You take it in public places where people expect it to be trained."

Peretti has been involved in puppy training since the fifth-grade, she said. Puppy training has inspired her to pursue a career in dog training. She works at Pitts Pack Leading, a dog training and dog sitting business.

"You have to get used to it because you only have two hands, and you have a dog in one and a purse in another," Peretti said. "But you just go through your normal everyday life. You just go through it with a dog."

But puppy training does have a downside, Peretti said. Everywhere they go, people want to know what they are doing and pet the dog. But "squeaking" at the puppy is only distracting it from its work.

Another downfall of puppy training is raisers eventually have to give the dog back, Peretti said.

But this is something they get used to doing.

"It's not that hard to give them away because you know you're doing something for a bigger cause," Kay Nelms said. "You just do it because the dog has the potential to change someone's life. And you know from the beginning the dog doesn't belong to you."

Ashley Latoof can be reached at
alatoof@theorion.com

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