Breeding a Better Guide Dog
Geneticists, breeders and trainers seek the ultimate guidedog traits.
By Matthew Schenker
Have you ever watched a guide dog lead its blind handler
through a busy crowd or across an intersection? Perhaps
you’ve marveled at how the dog remains focused, unperturbed
by people reaching out to pet it, children running by or
other dogs trying to play.
The German Shepherd Dogs or Labrador Retrievers you see in
guide harnesses are the products of intense selective
breeding, followed by a constant focus on their most minute
characteristics and behavioral tendencies. About half of
all puppies bred to be guide dogs do not make it beyond the
first few weeks of training, and are redirected to another
“career.”
Behind the scenes, guide schools employ geneticists who
look for sources of health and temperament traits.
Statisticians analyze data to determine trends in guide-dog
populations. Inspired by a belief in guide work, thousands
of volunteers invite guide-dog puppies into their lives,
immersing the pups in all kinds of situations: sitting in
quiet offices, maneuvering through bustling city centers,
navigating stairs and escalators, and even flying in
airplanes. Even more important, guide dogs are carefully
chosen as a perfect match for the individual holding the
leash.
Guide-school breeding programs
To succeed, guide schools need control over what happens
with their dogs from one generation to the next. They
accomplish this by maintaining breeding colonies.
Dolores Holle, VMD, has been the attending veterinarian and
director of canine-health management at The Seeing Eye in
Morristown, N.J., for 17 years. “We select dogs for
breeding,” Holle says. “There’s socialization, where they
earn Canine Good Citizen certifications. They do agility
and clicker tricks. At 4 weeks of age, they go into a room
where we simulate real-world sensations, such as riding in
a car or running up stairs. Like children, the puppies have
play sets.”
It sounds like fun, but serious work takes place to assess
which dogs are the most fit for guide work, physically and
temperamentally. Starting when the puppies are young,
experts test their elbows and hips, and track which parents
produce the healthiest offspring.
Marina Hall directs the breeding program and labor-anddelivery kennel at Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael,
Calif. “We’re always doing colony reviews to see which
females should breed next season and which ones we’ll no
longer breed.”
Guide schools often breed hundreds of puppies each year.
Even after the puppies leave the breeding program and head
out into the homes of trainers, socializers and eventually
clients, guide schools continue to track them. “We see what
kind of temperament and behavior they have throughout their
lives,” Hall says. “That way, we constantly determine which
mothers and studs produce the traits we want, and whether
to continue giving them a role in our program.”
Improvements through selective breeding
Cathy Chenoweth of Los Angeles has been raising puppies for
Guide Dogs for the Blind for 30 years, since she was 11
years old. She receives the puppies after they leave the
breeding colony and prepares them for the real world.
Chenoweth has seen many improvements since she began doing
this work. “These dogs have become healthier. A larger
percentage of the dogs have just what we’re looking for in
guides.”
Gwen Gillispie is the breeding manager at Southeastern
Guide Dogs in Palmetto, Fla., where she has worked for 20
years. “Sometimes, we want to change a particular quality,”
Gillispie says. “A lot of guide dogs are what some call
‘soft’ – they’re not bullheaded – so if we want a stronger
personality, we can breed that up. It might take a couple
of years, but we can do it.” Gillispie says that with
careful monitoring, generation after generation, guide
schools know how to mix and match parents to get the traits
they need.
Breeding up particular personalities takes place slowly
over time. The changes are more dramatic in the incidence
of health issues. Eldin Leighton, Ph.D., of Arlington, Va.,
has been a geneticist at The Seeing Eye since 1977.
“Genetically, we have focused our attention on two major
traits,” Leighton says. “One is behavior, or what we call
trainability. The second is hip quality. Dogs with bad hips
will not be good guide dogs. In 1980, about 30 percent of
the German Shepherds failed out because of hip dysplasia.
That has now dropped to about 3 percent.”
Jane Russenberger, senior director of breeding at Guiding
Eyes for the Blind in Patterson, N.Y., has seen similar
success in the Labrador Retrievers her agency breeds. “In
the general Lab population, incidence of hip dysplasia is
about 20 percent,” Russenberger says. “In our population,
it’s down to about 2 percent.”
Other guide schools report similar successes reducing the
incidence of eye and ear diseases, as well as skin
problems.
Success comes in part from sheer numbers. As Russenberger
explains, working with so many dogs allows guide schools to
take an already successful idea to higher levels. “If you
think about most breeders, they spend a lifetime practicing
their art, whether they’re breeding herding dogs or show
dogs,” Russenberger says. “But they just don’t have the
opportunity to keep the best dogs out of a very large
number of great dogs. We can watch all our dogs and just
choose the best two or three for breeding.”
Guide dogs are healthier than they used to be, and they’re
starting to look different, too. The guide schools that
breed German Shepherd Dogs describe a different body type
that emerged from the specialized breeding, one more suited
to the demands of guide work. “When you see one of these
dogs, right away you can see a very straight topline, which
has been bred away for the show dogs,” Holle explains. “To
a certain degree, we’re creating a subset of a breed.”
Link between genetics
and environment
Guide schools also rely on the art of interpreting the hazy
mix of genetics and environment. “We’re always trying to
sort out what’s genetic and what’s training,” Holle says.
“At any time, we have 800 volunteers out there training
dogs in all kinds of environments. Puppy raising still
makes or breaks a guide dog.”
Russenberger says, “Hip dysplasia is black or white. Does
the dog have it or not? But when we talk about temperament,
we’re looking at a whole set of traits coming together.”
Personality diversity
Guide dogs have also started to show a wider variety of
personalities. “In the past, the dogs were in three
categories: shy, middle-of-the-road or hyper-crazy,”
Chenoweth explains. “We still have those types, but there’s
more variation within them.”
This variety means guide schools can better match guide
dogs with specific people, based on personality and
lifestyle. For instance, a high-energy sales rep would need
a dog that can be constantly on the move. Someone who works
in an office needs a guide that can be sedentary for long
periods.
Matching the dog to the person can get even more precise.
In fact, many trainers are adept at reading subtle cues in
people’s
personalities. “Some people need a softer dog that obeys
commands easily,” Gillispie says. “Others need a more
stubborn dog.”
Who would want a stubborn dog? By nature, some people can
get themselves into trouble. Perhaps they’re accident
prone, or live in a confusing environment. “They need the
dog to decipher the situation, determine independently if a
command is going to get them into trouble, and decide
whether or not to disobey,” Gillispie explains.
To make these matches, trainers are mindful of traits on
the human and dog sides. That might be why Hall earned a
degree in animal science, with a minor in psychology. “We
look at which dogs and which people have higher stress
thresholds, energy levels, attention-seeking levels and
problem-solving skills.”
This kind of super-specialization intensifies as guide
schools learn more about physical and temperamental traits,
and how to control them in breeding and training. This puts
increased pressure on the dogs. “We have an internal
competition,” Hall says. “Only the top dogs in the class,
with the best aptitude, are selected to produce the next
generation. Winners produce winners. We try not to tell the
dogs about it, but they are always weighed against each
other.”
Increasing the knowledge base
Adding even more to the power of their high breeding
numbers, guide schools have begun sharing their knowledge
with each other.
In the 1990s, many guide schools began realizing that
although their dogs were succeeding, they were beginning to
experience a statistical problem. It stems from the way
guide schools measure each generation’s suitability for
guide work. “We use a ‘trainability score,’” Leighton says.
“It’s a nine-point scale, kind of like grading kids in a
classroom. For each generation, we compare the dogs to
previous dogs that came through the system. The best dogs
are in the 90th percentile, the next best in the 80th, and
so on. We know that dogs that score below six have almost
no chance of making it as guides.”
This system is effective. However, as the number of tested
traits grew, it became difficult to compare across
generations of dogs. Guide schools realized they were doing
long-term tracking with a moving target. “That’s where
better statistics can help,” Leighton says.
To provide those statistics, in 1993 The Seeing Eye turned
to James Serpell, Ph.D., of Philadelphia, who manages the
Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the
University of Pennsylvania, and has more than 20 years
experience researching canine behavior. One of the
problems, Serpell says, was each school had a different
kind of assessment. “There was no consistency, and because
the schools generally stop breeding half the dogs in their
breeding program, they were constantly shifting what they
were looking for and could not determine if they were
moving in the right direction,” he says. “We came up with
standardized measures that schools can use to compare each
generation during training.”
After working with The Seeing Eye for a short time,
Serpell’s program attracted the attention of four other
guide schools: Canine Companions for Independence, Guide
Dog Foundation for the Blind, Guiding Eyes for the Blind
and Leader Dogs for the Blind. The five schools now have a
consortium. Each school uses the standard assessments, and
shares their breeding and training information with each
other. The schools are able to use the findings to go even
further toward creating dogs with honed, specialized
temperaments.
Guide dogs and society, changing together
As the abilities of the dogs improve, and the schools
develop better assessments of canine traits, the future
holds interesting possibilities. Guide schools use
forecasting, which involves collecting detailed information
from their trainers, breeders and clients to figure out how
many more people will one day need their services.
Forecasting also helps determine what new requirements
future clients will have, where future clients will live,
and so on. “More guide dogs will have to be good at dealing
with busy city atmospheres with lots of activity and
stress,” Chenoweth says. “The dogs will need better
stamina. They will need to be more flexible and alert, even
more so than what we normally look for.”
Moving beyond the traditional guide-school clients, Hall
says, “We’re seeing more people with multiple disabilities
besides visual impairments. We’re also seeing older clients
now. That’s changing the demands, so we have to keep
changing the kinds of dogs we breed.”
Gillispie, who works mainly with clients in Florida, has
seen a turnaround in the age of her clients, from a senior
to a younger demographic. “The older clients needed slower
dogs that didn’t pull much,” she explains. “With younger
clients, we need faster-moving dogs.”
As guide-dog trainers work to keep up with a changing
society, Serpell says the five-school cooperation will be
more essential. “The end point is not static,” he says.
“Things are shifting all the time. The guide schools need
to be able to look back and assess how they have done over
time, so they can be sure they’re getting better. Without
the data, it’s just guesswork.”
No matter where guide work goes in the future, and no
matter how much science becomes part of it, there will
always be mysteries of behavior and temperament. And the
dogs will always be dogs. As Holle says, “What makes these
dogs really special is their ability to bond so well with
humans.”
Award-winning freelance writer Matthew Schenker lives in
Northampton, Mass., with his wife and their Standard
Poodle.