We all know, to a lesser or greater extent, the commendable work that the so-called guide dogs. Through extensive training, these animals are able to use their extraordinary abilities to help blind and partially sighted people to carry out their daily tasks. However, few know the origin of this service of which Buddy, a female German Shepherd, was a pioneer.
To know its history we have to go back to the end of the XNUMXth century, specifically, to the figure of joseph resinger, born in 1775 and blind since the age of 17. He himself trained his three dogs to help him, an initiative that the Australian Leopold Chimani picked up years later in 1827 in his writings.
However, previously Johann Wilkelm Kleim published in Vienna, in 1819, a book in which he described the training techniques for guide dogs, based on those carried out by Resinguer years ago. These ideas would remain in oblivion until 1845, when the German jacob birrer published a book that collected the techniques that he himself had used to train guide dogs.
The trigger to advance in this field would be the high number of German soldiers who were blind during the battles of the First World War. This inspired Dr. Gerhard Stalling to open the first school dedicated to training of these dogs in 1916, in Oldenburg. Its success would lead to the opening of three more schools in Germany, Württemberg, Potsdam and Munich.
Ten years later the American Red Cross rescue dog trainer Dorothy Eustis, who worked in Switzerland, discovered this center and wrote an article for the American newspaper The Saturday Evening Post about it, making known these training techniques. Said article would come into the hands of Morris frank, a young blind American who proposed to Eustis that he train a dog for him, who accepted.
Thus, in 1928 Morris traveled to Switzerland to participate in the process, becoming the first American to have an officially trained guide dog. This dog was Buddy, a wonderful female German Shepherd. In the following video we can see the fruits of his training and the excellent relationship he had with Morris.
After this success, Morris and Dorothy decided to found together the first guide dog school in the United States, located in Nashville (Tenesse), under the name of The seeing eye (The eyes that see). Later they would open another in Morristown (New Jersey), which housed the residence of the blind and the training facilities in the same space.