New Assessment Kennel!

It was a long drive to Southeastern Guide Dogs for a puppy meeting, but the reason was quite a special one: the opening of the new assessment kennel!!! And we were going to get to see it for the first time! WOOT!!  How exciting is that?!

South and Central Pinellas Puppy Raiser Groups had obedience before the opening ceremony. John Bauer was leading the meeting.

 It was a lovely day for a building ribbon cutting ceremony.  Perfect weather for it.  And there was a nice big crowd.

Puppy raisers were doing obedience.

Fred and Dewey were in the sun for a tiny bit.

Dewey quickly migrated to a down stay in the shade.

Westen was looking very handsome.

A south puppy raiser and her cute yellow puppy.

Brian and Marcia are trying the sit and pay attention to me command. 

Bill walks up to try and distract Marcia, but fails. 

Julie was puppy sitting Java.

Cesar, a yellow lab puppy, was just so darn photogenic.

Cesar, smiling.

Chris pointed out this guide dog with a curly tail.  We think he must have Jack as a dad.  Jam has Jack as a dad.  Curly tails are his speciality.

Titus welcoming us to the ribbon cutting.

Cesar, being cute again.

Mr. Hirst talking about the center, named after him and his generous donation.

Marcia remembers me.  Can you see her foot on my foot?

Outside of the Hirst Assessment Kennel.

 

Inside of the female kennel wing.

female kennels.

Self-watering drinking fountains for the dogs in the kennels! How cool is that?

One of the pups was already learning how to drink out of the fountain!

Hurricane proof in-out doors on the kennels.  

Grates for waste, easy clean up, drains are flushed every 20 minutes (I hope I have that right!).

They have their own vet clinic. See photos below.

Place for exams.

Scales to get weighed! She was 38 pounds. 

Privacy Wing.

For the ladies in the red tent.

For training in inclement weather and all other testing, etc. Those big glass windows at the back house the observation room.  Turn off the lights and the dogs don't know you are there!

Spa grooming center!

 It was such a fabulous center.  So nice and clean and state of the art.  What a joy for our puppies going in for training.  Thank you Mr. Hirst and to all the donors who made every inch of that training facility possible.  It is an amazing place. Dewey will love it.

With the Flu

By Fred
Today I thought I could do it. I thought I could get dressed and take Coach out for lunch to our favorite place. In fact I did get dressed, and I got Coach into his leash. But a cold and rainy wind hit my face when I opened the door, and I could hear my mother's voice in my mind saying "You can't go out in that, not with the flu."

So like a child I turned around and went back into the house. As a younger man I would have said "screw it" and drove to the restaurant. I've grown older with a generous regard for illness--for the flu and pneumonia and all the things tougher than I am.

Coach doesn't seem to care. We did some doggy push-ups, and maybe he got a special treat. Coach is such a good boy. I'll be glad when this flu is gone.

Also, good news from Dr. Woodman. Willow has come out of her surgery very well (she had a bump removed from her eyelid).

Sins of Omission

By Fred
I remember that day in Sister Agatha's class when I learned about sins of omission. An eight-year-boy like me got in trouble often enough without this new idea of getting in trouble for doing nothing.

I believe I sinned again the other day at Casa Tina's restaurant. The little girl at the table next to me dropped some of her food on the floor. It landed with a messy, stinky, loud splat only a few feet from Coach's nose. Normally he would have pounced, but this time he just looked up at me calmly and smiled. The girl's mother was very impressed when I told her that Coach is only eight months old.

"You are doing a wonderful job with him," she said, and I just smiled. Sin #1.

A picture of Coach with his tongue hanging out.
We are walking along the busy streets for practice.

This brought on a typical conversation about the guide dogs, and two other tables joined in with questions. I was so full of myself that by the end of the lunch I thought I'd double down.

"We're working on his go-to commands," I told them as we got up to leave. "I'm going to ask Coach to lead me out of the restaurant, and then I'm going to let him lead me without prompting. So we might be here for a while." I have an audience at this point.

"Find the door," I said to Coach. I fully expected that I would have to cheat a little (a real sin of commission). But Coach walked me right to the door and sat down. Applause.

A moral person would have turned around and admitted that, wow, Coach had never done that before. I just walked away. #2.

Inside or Out

By Fred
Yesterday I had an extensive list of chores to perform, both inside and outside the house. And since Cheryl is not here to distract me and give me excuses to goof off, I knew that it would be a busy day. And I wondered how I could get Coach involved in my chores in some way.

I started with weeding. Our Turks Cap in the back yard gets full of vines--I pull them but they always come back. Normally when we are in the backyard with the dogs, the focus is on them, but yesterday my focus was on those vines, me on my hands and knees, crawling though the thick maze of plants, and Coach quickly lost interest.

When he walked away and became involved in mischief, I took him into the house and then returned to work so that he could see me through the French doors. A month or so ago Coach would have just found some mischief in the house, but now he was perplexed by his situation. So he just sat there and watched me. It seems that all the puppies go through this transformation at about 6 or 7 months old, when you can finally trust them a little.

Ten minutes later I let him out and returned to weeding while giving Coach a speech about the nature of vines and so on. The neighbors, I'm sure, have formed an opinion about me (good). He watched and listened again for about 10 minutes and then wandered off.

Coach standing by the Vines.
Notice the curly tail--just like Jam

So I took him back into the house for another 10 or 15 minutes. The next time he came out he sat close by until I finished my yard work.

Then later I was in the kitchen preparing food for the grill but I made the dogs stay on the porch, where Coach sat patiently staring inside. Then outside at the grill, when Coach got bored and wandered away, I put in back into the house to watch me from there. More confusion on his face.

Five minutes, ten minutes, and I let him out again. He did not wander away again.

More chores today.

A Frog's World

By Fred

Yes, the water falls from the sky in big drops. It soaks through the patio stones. The bushes droop under its weight, and the frogs have a new-found confidence because a wet back yard is a frog's favorite world. It is not Jam's world.

Jam prefers to stay inside when it rains. He will reluctantly go out to sit on the porch, but he will not venture beyond on his own, not without a leash, and then with a leash he will only walk along sadly and sigh. He will not pee or poop, not in the backyard when it is raining.

Then at bedtime he is given one more chance. Cheryl and I take turns with an umbrella, giving him all the various encouragements, lies, threats, reassurances, feigned indifference, etc. that we can imagine, because we know that he really needs to go and that the next opportunity will be early the next morning, or rather when he wakes us in the middle of the night, or worse.

And then we remember that our front yard is in a completely different universe for Jam. In the front yard, which is just as rainy and wet, he has no problem at all. Jam is keen to walk along and sniff at every soaking thing, as long as it's not in the back yard.

At the garage door I hold his leash in one hand and the umbrella in the other, and he is thrilled with the idea of walking out into the pouring rain, walking down the sidewalk and into the black night. Within 30 seconds he pees and poops.

Surely we have done something wrong...

A Sweet Little Bird

By Fred

When Jam is deep in thought, the top of his head gets wrinkled and looks like this:

Jam eyes a bird.

We had lunch today on Casa Tina's patio in Dunedin, and a little bird flew up into the rafters. Jam sat still as a stone, watching the bird as it rustled its wings and whistled, and his behavior caught the attention of everyone on the patio.

"Look, he's watching the bird," someone said. "What a sweet, good dog," said someone else. But I could just see the top of his head and the many folds of scalp, meaning that his ears working at full capacity, using his doggy radar to get an exact location for the bird. And under that fur his brain was planning the things he would do to that little bird if only he could catch it.

Today was probably his best day ever at lunch. He ignored food on the floor. He posed and smiled. He carefully navigated through the diners on the way out, never looking twice at anyone's plate. And I can't be sure what he would have done to the bird.

Good boy, Jam.

Orchid Thief

By Fred

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional...
The Orchid Thief

Jam doesn't actually steal the orchids; he just knocks them over on his way from here to there. I noticed today, however, that he seemed more curious about them, and maybe just a little more gentle than in the past.

We've had the orchids on the porch for years, and we never really expected much from them, but this year they've bloomed all at once (all except two plants), mostly white blooms with splotches.

It has been difficult to teach Jam about the orchids. Fortunately, dogs don't require wordy explanations (and I really don't have any). They eventually just want to be good, if only for a while, like today.

Stairs-Up, Stairs-Down

Bingo gets some daily practice with Stairs-Up and Stairs-Down. When he was younger and fearless and believed he could fly, we would carry him up and down the stairs, and that suited him just fine. He would hold out his paw (with this dainty, helpless look on his face) to make it easier for me to pick him up. Soon (I reasoned) he would be ready to learn, but in the meantime the paw thing was pretty cute.

Then one day I saw him and Cheryl walking downstairs as if it were the most normal thing in the world. She laughed and said they had been doing it for several days--while he still was holding out his paw to me. Sneaky.

Chuck, one of our SEGD coordinators, said recently that guide dogs must be able to distinguish between Stairs-Up and Stairs-Down. If, for example, a blind person is approaching a down set of stairs but mistakenly says Stairs-Up, the guide dog should disobey and actually move in front to stop the person from continuing. Wow. But that type of training starts when Bingo goes to school at SEGD--Cheryl and I just work on the basics, to expose him to situations he will encounter in his career.

He still thinks he can fly, though, so we keep a close watch.

Big Dog Food Mountain

By Fred
Today at lunchtime Bingo and I went to Petsmart for some dog food, Panera for lunch, and then Target to pick up a few groceries. These places have two things in common to tempt and torment a puppy: sticky floors and stinky smells. The rain opened up as soon as we got to the store, not that Bingo cared. We both got pretty wet.

We'd been to Petsmart before, to get some toys, but today we needed to visit the several aisles that have bags of dog food stacked to the ceiling. Big mountains of dog food loomed over him as we walked, back and forth, around and around until finally he regained some sense of focus and sobriety, at which time I gave him a big hug and his little tail really wagged. I'm doing more hugs now when he can overcome distractions.

In Panera, I found myself holding a tray of food and drink with one hand and holding, with some uncertainty, the leash in my other hand, noticing for the first time how much food and little pieces of paper and napkins that people drop on the floor. But Bingo did fine, even when a man actually dropped a whole piece of bread on the floor as he walked past us.

He was really good in Target, a B+, maybe, with some points deducted for nose diving near the dairy case and for getting too friendly with a bag of tortilla chips. In the checkout line a man rushed up to us and reached out to pet Bingo, but a sweet grandmother nearby yelled "You cain't touch him," causing the man to slink away quickly when he saw that the woman was considering whether to smack him with her fat purse.

Back home, we unloaded the car and he promptly curled up for a nap, his paws soon twitching their way up the big dog food mountain.

Distracted

By Fred
This morning Bingo and I attended a SEGD meeting without Cheryl, who stayed home to nurse a cold. Normally we would have taken Bingo on a nice, long walk before a meeting like this, just to shave off the edge of his natural exuberance, but we've had a steady rain since before sunrise, so Bingo was wound up pretty tight by the 10am meeting.

As you might guess, these meetings are full of very nice people (without exception) and very well-behaved dogs (mostly), including many young puppies, sitting or lying down, waiting patiently (mostly).

Debbie, an area coordinator who is partially blind, was there with her new guide dog, and she showed us how happy he was to get into his harness, how dedicated he was to her and to doing his job, how completely focused he was. Someday Bingo will be like this. Someday, but not today.

As we all practiced walking in a circle, Bingo jumped and lunged at the other dogs and generally burned up his energy (perfect timing, right?) despite my efforts to control him. He is completely fascinated with the other dogs and completely distracted by them. I made excuses, saying that he has been walking so well here at home, which is true, but the real world is full of distractions, and we have to work with Bingo on these.

Of course, by the end of the meeting he was all tired out. Cheryl had texted me to ask if I would stop by the grocery store on the way home, smiling to herself, I'm sure, because Bingo was more than a little distracted by smells on our first visit to Publix. But on the drive home from the meeting he gave me a sweet look--I don't know, maybe it was a promise to be good from now on.

I took him in and picked up a basket instead of a big cart (smart). The store was filled with people and children, a sea of unrestrained children, more temptation than any puppy should have to endure. But this is the real world for a blind person.

This morning Debbie said that you transfer your emotions to your dog through the leash: if you are unsure or hesitant or fearful, the dog will sense it. So I walked ahead as though we were out on our normal walk through the neighborhood. He pranced along beside me like a pro and was not even distracted when a little girl rushed at him and attempted to tackle him.

On the way out I heard him laugh when I asked, Why couldn't you do this in the meeting today?