DogTrainingAggression.com

Have you ever wondered who thought up the idea of using dogs to guide blind people? I mean, who was it looked at a dog and said, “Hey, that dog can help guide my blind friend around”? That’s a good question, but the answer is that nobody really knows. There is some evidence that guide dogs have been used by blind people for many years in several different cultures, but there is no concrete evidence of what culture used them first. We do know that there was no real guide dog program in existence until after World War I.

When most people think of a guide dog, they picture a German shepherd. That is probably because German shepherds were the first dogs that were trained as guide dogs. There are two reasons why German shepherds were the first guide dogs. The first reason is that the breed is known to be naturally loyal to their owners and naturally protective of them. The second reason is that the first guide dogs were trained in Germany. The first school for training seeing-eye dogs was called Potsdam, but the school failed financially after the war, as did many businesses in Germany.

Dorothy Eustis was an American woman who trained police dogs. She heard about the company in Germany that trained dogs to lead the blind and wrote an article about the subject that was published in The Saturday Evening Post. A man by the name of Morris Frank heard about the article and asked Ms. Eustis to train a dog for him. The rest, as they say, is history. Ms. Eustis did train a dog for Mr. Frank, and he was the first blind person to use a seeing-eye dog in America.