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- more reflections on ITD - June 30, 2023
- On travel while at ITD: reflections after day 1 - June 27, 2023
- ITD day 1 - June 27, 2023
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- Traveling without a Guide Dog: Experience with Cane and Walker - October 14, 2022
- Disability and Church, Intersection - June 11, 2022
- Review: When Chronic Pain and Illness Take Everything Away - June 11, 2022
- Grammar and Style Resources for Writers - June 9, 2022
Pepper and I are hard-working girls!!! According to the app on my phone, I am walking 3-4 miles/day. Some of this includes the distance in the building. The routes are about a mile. We do one in the morning and one in the afternoon. There is at least one lecture each day about some aspect of working with the dogs or caring for the dogs. This is dog number 6 for me, so I have heard most of these before. But it is good to have the info fresh in my mind as I am learning how it goes with this particular dog’s mannerisms. Some dogs are cautious and some are very bold, so it is important that I learn how to read each dog’s signals individually. I can officially say now that I have worked each type of dog.
Right now Pepper is being very careful, and she has second guessed herself a few times and I have needed to get her back on her game. Sometimes, when dogs aren’t sure of what I want to do, their behaviors make it appear that they aren’t trained. If you are reading this and you are sighted, imagine that you are new at a job where you are using a new computer with an operating system that you have never seen before, and you are done with your training but sometimes things still pop up that you have never seen before. It still makes you feel a little shaky at that new job. This is what happens to new dogs for the first few months or so, and it is why it is so important for the blind person to feel confident about making choices and giving directions. It isn’t the dog’s job to make all the choices. So when you see a person out working with a dog, please keep in mind that the blind person is the one in charge of making the decisions about where to go and which directions to go. The dog is responsible to avoid obstacles and do things like stop short if someone turns right on red in front of you.
