Our family’s incredible journey in puppy raising began the day that I saw the ad in the Alexandria Gazette: volunteer raisers needed for Guiding Eyes for the Blind puppies. They had me at puppies. As I continued reading further in the volunteer section of the Alexandria Gazette almost 20 years ago, I found that it might be possible to be a volunteer home raiser for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, an organization with the mission to train and place dogs as guides for visually impaired individuals. I was to find that these special dogs were raised in homes like mine to learn social skills, house manners, polite behavior, how to handle new experiences and how to interact with other dogs and people in a polite and calm manner.
There was another motive for this particular endeavor which was to have a service project for one of my teenage sons, Scott, that we could do together. Plus I did love dogs, already having two golden retrievers in our Alexandria home.
Fast forward another year, and we had almost completed the raising of our first guide dog in training, Lawrence. We enjoyed him since the age of two months and worked with him in lots of situations and classes that this organization provides locally throughout Alexandria, Mount Vernon, Fairfax County, Arlington and other metro locations.
At 18 months, he returned to the campus of Guiding Eyes in Yorktown Heights, New York, and passed his next step to be in for training. This meant that this beautiful black lab was probably going to be a bona fide guide dog after just another six months of harness training by the professionals.
Although parting with a handsome and well-trained dog that we’d come to love is not the easiest on the emotions, the reward is experienced when your dog’s success becomes your success at graduation six months later, and when you meet the lucky individual who gets your dog as their guide. Lawrence moved to Kansas City and guided Ron until retiring after seven years of service. How wonderful to hear from that human-dog team from time to time about how well they worked together.
And, you could get another puppy ….
There have been four more dogs that our family has trained and helped graduate since then. All have been a joyful and expansive learning and life experience because of the organization of people we have met. As we’ve trained our pups, gone to classes, shared puppy play dates sponsored by other raisers with fenced yards, puppy overnight swaps, and problem solved with more experienced raisers and regional instructors along the journey, we made many enduring friendships. And sometimes you even see your pup again!
One of our pups,Tilly, retired early and came back to our household at age four, and became a trusted therapy dog at the private special needs school where I worked in Alexandria as a nurse. Another dog, Parsley, became a police dog upon graduation because she had the profile and work ethic for that career. The next dog, Star, successfully began guiding a busy, young professional man last year near Boston.
Most recently our family raised Mia, now an 18 month old yellow lab just accepted in for harness training in April. This was the first time we have co-raised with another family, Tim and Kathleen McQuade. It was a very good choice at this time, benefitting Mia to have so many humans invested in her success, and sharing the responsibility of training. Included in this village of raisers were grandchildren, children, neighbors, and the NoVa region’s extensive volunteers, co-raisers, and regional managers — so much support. Behind the scenes are financial sponsors like Margie Weinreb who named Mia after her granddaughter and whom we met at Mia’s testing this month; another special human piece of this guide dog training.
Raisers are always being sought for these amazing pups: check out this link to see if you might look back one day and see how much you loved it.
https://www.guidingeyes.org/