Leader Dogs for the Blind School is a nonprofit awesome cause. What you do is raise a puppy for a year. Within this year, you must train the puppy to do basic commands; sit, stay, down, come, heel, etc. Also, the key point is that you must socialize the dog. By this I mean you have to take it to public places in which a blind person may go.
In our club there are currently five 4-Hers who are raising puppies. They take them to everywhere they may go. The dog must always wear the bandanna on them while in public. (There's also a vest they wear when they get bigger) After a year you turn them back in and they go through an evalutation. They can be career changed from the school for temperment reasons, health problems, or socialization reasons too. They are consistantly being watched to make sure there are no faults in them all throughout the training period at the school. The training to become a leader dog is about six months.
They can also be chosen for breeding stock. This means they will not become a leader dog, but they have the genes to make other great healthy leader dogs. They can also be put in career change. This means they are not suitable for being a leader dog, but they could be useful in other purposes. For instance they could become a police dog, a service dog theat assists the handicape, a hearing dog that helps the deaf, etc.
They can be totally rejected from the school also. The rate of rejection is 40% of all puppies that come to the school. If they are rejected, the puppy raiser has the first call to keep it. If not, then they have a huge list of people willing to take in the dog.
The ultimate goal is to graduate from the school with a blind person. This is the ultimate joy of raising a puppy; to make someone's life happier and easier. |
