9781422273005

Additionally, there have been several carvings and paintings found throughout medieval Europe and China that indicate various cultures across history have trained dogs to assist humans with special tasks, such as leading the blind. While historians and archaeologists don’t have an exact date as to when this occurred, the evidence we do have suggests it happened thousands of years ago. It wasn’t until the 1750s that the first planned program to train guide dogs for the blind was created in Paris, France. Shortly after, Josef Riesinger, a blind man from Vienna, trained his spitz dog so well that many people thought he was only pretending to be blind. The idea of using dogs to guide the blind continued throughout the 1800s. The founder of the Imperial Royal Institute for the Education of the Blind in Vienna wrote a book on the topic of educating blind people. In this book, he mentioned the usefulness of teaching dogs to assist them. It wasn’t until World War I that the use of guide dogs as we know it today began. Thousands of soldiers who fought in the war returned home blind following their service at the front because of the type of poison gas used. Dr. Gerhard Stalling, a German doctor, came up with the idea to instruct large numbers of dogs to assist these soldiers. In August of 1916, Dr. Stalling founded the very first guide dog instruction center in Oldenburg. Once the idea took hold, similar training centers opened across Europe. Combined, these centers instructed approximately 600 canines a year. While Dr. Stalling’s centers closed in 1926, other training facilities had opened up in other places. The most notable of these was located in Potsdam, Germany. When Dorothy Eustis, an American responsible for training military and police dogs, heard about this school, she decided to check it out. She spent many months there studying their methods and wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post about the school. She ended her article by stating that with a guide dog, “The future for all blind men can be the same, however blinded. No longer dependent on a member of the family, a friend,

What Is a Service Dog?

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