| Dogs and mankind enjoy a special partnership. Few other animals in the history of civilization have woven themselves so tightly in our everyday lives. For thousands and thousands of years, dogs have been our friends, our sentries, our beasts of burden, our police force, emergency medical and fire technicians, hunters, shepherds, and even our therapists.
And in 1929, after a heartfelt plea from a blind man in Nashville, Tennessee, Dorothy Harrison Eustis would envision and implement a conditioning program in the United States and Switzerland designed to train certain breeds to be our eyes.
Born Dorothy Leib Harrison Wood Eustis on the 30th of May, 1886, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Eustis began her career as a breeder of military and border patrol German Shepherds in Switzerland with her second husband. Her interest in dogs as tenders of the disabled came when she caught wind of the German training schools in Potsdam working to that end for the benefit of soldiers blinded in the First World War. She penned an article, printed in the November 5th edition of the Saturday Evening Post in 1927, in which she introduced Americans to the idea. “The future for all blind men can be the same, however blinded,” she wrote. “No longer dependent on a member of the family, a friend, or a paid attendant, the blind can once more take up their normal lives as nearly as possible where they left them off.”
The article captured the imagination of Nashville resident Morris Frank, himself blinded at 16 after a fight at school. Frustrated with the limited options offered to him as a blind person in American society, he wrote overseas to Eustis expressing his desire to work with her to bring these dog training programs home to the United States. She accepted and arranged to train one of her German Shepherds for Morris to use as a guide. In 1929, both she and Morris, joined by new recruit “Buddy,” returned to tour America, moving from city to city, staging demonstrations to promote the training. She successfully founded The Seeing Eye, Inc. in Nashville, which has since relocated to Morristown, New Jersey. Her efforts also carried over into the United Kingdom, where Mrs. Muriel Crooke and Mrs. Rosamund Bond, aided by trainers from Eustis’s American schools, poured the foundation for what would become The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association in Wallasey, Cheshire.
At the time of her death in 1946, just 17 years after the program’s initial inception, Dorothy Eustis’s efforts to aid the blind and disabled in America had led to the effective partnering of 1,300 guide dogs with handicapped individuals. Since then, the organization has helped thousands more, placing well-trained guide dogs in homes where their balanced energy can continue to aid the disadvantaged.
For more information, please visit:
The Seeing Eye, Inc.
The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association |
