IAADP
International Association of
Assistance Dog Partners

Wheelchair Guiding

by Suzanne Whalen, President,
National Association of Guide Dog Users (NAGDU)

What a privilege it was for my guide dog, Caddo, and me to present at the IAADP conference in San Antonio! I am flattered to hear Joan Froling say that I am "pioneering" wheelchair guide work. Actually, Southeastern Guide Dogs, Inc., began training blind people in wheelchairs to use guide dogs back in the early 1990's. In fact, Southeastern has a long tradition of training blind people with and without additional disabilities to use guide dogs. However, in one sense, Caddo and I are pioneers. Guide dogs have been trained in the United States for 73 years. In all that time, there has never been a team trained at two different schools during its working career. Caddo and I received our initial training in July, 1999, at The Seeing Eye, Inc., in Morristown, New Jersey. Since The Seeing Eye is not yet equipped to train guide dogs for wheelchair work, Caddo received this training beginning on August 25, 2000, at Southeastern Guide Dogs, Inc., in Palmetto, Florida. As Kenneth Rosenthal, President of The Seeing Eye, put it: "Caddo has received his bachelor's from Harvard and his master's from Yale."

I have been blind since birth. Up to age 26, when my eyes had to be removed, I had light perception and could see shadows well enough, for example, to count doorways visually as I was walking down a hall. I was proficient enough at travel with the white cane that I used it as my travel tool when I took a semester at the University of Seville in Spain. Thanks to the misinformation of certain rehabilitation professionals, I was led to believe that guide dogs are only for blind people who are either lazy or incompetent or both. Unfortunately, this misconception persists with a few rehab folks, and even some blind people, to this day.

Then, in 1973, one of my very best friends from high school got her very first guide dog from The Seeing Eye. I was utterly shocked, and, I confess, dismayed. She was a better cane traveler than I was, and I knew she was anything but lazy or incompetent. I accused her of "selling out." I indignantly informed her she didn't need a dog and shouldn't have one.

We were both attending different colleges at the time, and she invited me to come to her campus for the weekend. I had barely arrived and put my suitcase and white cane down in her dorm room when she suggested taking a walk around campus. She already had her dog's harness on and was waiting at the door.
"I'll get my cane," I answered.
"No, no, you don't need your cane," Pat said. "Just take my arm."
I digress here to say that we shouldn't have done that. Guide dogs are trained to keep only one person safe from crashing into obstacles. They are not trained to guide two people simultaneously. Yet, they can do this and often do. You just can't correct the dog if the second person bumps into something. People just don't usually "confess" to their guide dog schools that they've sometimes asked their dogs to double-guide. At the time, I thought Pat was crazy. "Are you nuts?" I shrieked. "I'm not traveling around an unfamiliar campus without my cane!"

"Just shut up and take my arm," Pat said. I love her dearly, but did I mention that diplomacy is not one of her strong suits?

Well, I was no slowpoke. But we walked faster than I had ever moved in my life. Sarah, the dog, did a splendid job, and I did not touch even a tree branch. I remember being scared and thrilled all at once. After a similar experience months later with a gentleman whose dog was trained by another school, I made up my mind to apply for a guide dog, and I have never, never regretted that decision.

I received my first dog, a lab-shepherd female cross named Kara, from The Seeing Eye in January, 1975. My next four dogs: Vinnie, Jesse, Iliad, and Caddo, have all been male shepherds and have all been trained by The Seeing Eye. With the assistance of my faithful dogs, I went on to graduate from Wells College with a bachelor's in romance languages and to obtain a master's degree in bilingual education from The University of Texas at Austin. I have held jobs in educational consulting, sales, and public relations in which I have traveled extensively throughout the region, the state, and the nation. My most satisfying career, until the accident which I am about to describe put it on hold, has been the 17 years I have spent as a bilingual educator, first in Elgin, Texas, and then in the public schools of Dallas. With my dogs' help, I have also not hesitated to undertake a variety of volunteer activities for the Austin Rape Crisis Center, various nursing homes in Dallas, the Red Cross, Dallas Services for Visually Impaired Children, my church, and the National Federation of the Blind. Most recently, I was appointed to the Consumer Advisory Board of REACH, an independent living center with offices in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Denton. In this capacity, I was honored to be one of the people representing the agency here in Dallas at the State Independent Living Council (SILC) conference in February. Anyone who saw Caddo's ability in San Antonio should not be surprised to learn that he performed equally well at this conference. This was true even though the hotel's hallways were too narrow and the meeting rooms assigned to us were too small to easily accommodate the much larger number of wheelchairs than conference planners had anticipated.

On February 12, 2000, a new chapter began in my life and ultimately in the history of co-operation between guide dog schools. NAGDU is a division of the National Federation of the Blind. The entire NAGDU Board and some other key people including the Eameses were meeting with the NFB National President at the Federation's headquarters in Baltimore. We broke for lunch, and I went alone to the park across the street to take Caddo out to relieve. When you relieve a guide dog, you remove its harness and lengthen its leash and stand more or less in the same place as the dog circles around your body looking for a place to its liking. It is important to remember that when a guide dog is out of harness, it is no longer responsible for watching out for the safety of the handler. It was snowing and sleeting, and the ground was very uneven in some places and very slippery, covered with ice and slush. Caddo is a very strong dog. I'm not sure if he attempted to jump over or around the manhole and I was pulled off my feet then, or if I was slipped on the ice, but the next thing I knew, I had fallen into the uncovered hole. I sustained major injuries to my legs and spinal column. I exacerbated the arthritis I already had in my spine.

I suffered several ruptured and bulging disks. But I reiterate that in no way do I hold Caddo responsible for this accident.

As I struggled through months of therapy, Caddo was cared for, and his skills were kept sharp, at The Seeing Eye. Even though I have progressed to being able to stand and walk for up to, at most, ten minutes on an unusually good day, when I must travel long distances or stand in long lines, I need to use a wheelchair.

Almost ten years ago, a friend of mine happened to be in class with the very first person Southeastern trained for wheelchair work. At the time, she told me about his adventures, and I thought the stories were interesting, but quite frankly, I was skeptical of his success. When she came home from class, I promptly forgot about her stories. When it became obvious that I would either have to seek wheelchair training for Caddo or give him up, I contacted Southeastern. When Southeastern agreed to train him after I requested it, this was unheard of. Never before had a guide dog school trained a dog from another program.

The first thing Southeastern did when Caddo got there on August 25 was to test his guiding ability with the instructor walking with him through a variety of situations and past a multitude of potential distractions. Did he understand the straight line concept? Could he make the kinds of judgments to help a walking person avoid obstacles, as any good guide dog would? Were his street crossings accurate, no matter how offset the ramp or curb or how angled the intersection? Did he act appropriately to keep the instructor at a safe distance when challenged by cars? Did he intelligently disobey commands that would have led the instructor into danger? Could he maintain his focus while ignoring all sorts of environmental distractions, both planned and unplanned, including toys, animals, people, loud noises, blowing leaves, etc.? The instructor tested his guiding skills by following him first as a walking sighted person, then later as a walking person under blindfold with a supervisor following behind for safety and to rate the dog. Only after she was convinced that Caddo understood guide work did she proceed to the next step. The next thing she did was to sit in a manual wheelchair and have Caddo move out ahead as someone pushed the chair from behind. Note that Caddo was not pulling the chair. Did Caddo act fearfully with something following closely behind him, rattling on the pavement? When he showed no undue stress or fear, the power chair was introduced.

Before continuing, I would like to add parenthetically here an observation about dogs pulling manual wheelchairs. I understand that it is necessary for some physically disabled people to have their dogs pull their wheelchairs. But as sighted people, they take responsibility for determining how to get around obstacles, judging when an aisle is too narrow, planning the route across a street, locating ramps and avoiding steps, and maintaining a safe distance from traffic. To ask Caddo to do all those guiding skills, which sighted wheelchair users don't need, and at the same time also to ask him to provide the physical power to move the chair, would be a tremendous amount of responsibility. Caddo is already being asked to make decisions and solve problems that guide dogs for walking blind people don't have to make, at least not to the same degree.

Since I am not a trainer, I cannot go into as much detail as a trainer would about the step by step sequence of presenting situations and introducing skills with the power chair. I would suspect, as is true when teaching a guide dog to work with someone who can walk, that what you do is set up opportunities to teach the dog clearance work and traffic safety and other guiding skills with the power chair. Then you set up situations where the dog must problem solve through it, praising wise choices and correcting not so wise moves. The dog learns through repetition, practice, experience, and utilizing the skill being taught in increasingly difficult and complex environments.

Caddo, having begun his training near the end of August, was actually finished in December. The plan was for me to enter the January class in 2001, after having at least two months to get accustomed to the power chair which Southeastern bought for me. Unfortunately, a snafu in shipping meant that I didn't receive the chair until mid-January, so my class date was pushed back to March. During that time, the instructor worked on giving Caddo more skills practice, even though his training was complete. He was ready to go, having already passed several tests with the instructor working under blindfold in the power wheelchair.

During those two months, from mid-January to mid-March, I put my skills as a teacher to use in designing a three-phase sequential practice "curriculum" for myself. During the first phase, I practiced maneuvering through doorways and around the furniture in my home. I found that, as had been the case when I was a little child riding a tricycle, I could hear where objects were and maneuver around them without hitting them. In the second phase, I moved outside and traveled through parking lots and down sidewalks and through a variety of indoor settings, including stores and the library. Sometimes I checked my nearness to the sidewalk's edge and to obstacles with a white cane. Sometimes I extended my feet beyond my foot plate to verify my position in relation to edges and obstacles. Most of the time, sighted friends went with me and warned me if I was approaching too close to edges or obstacles. With practice, I found that I could hear where obstacles were and correct my driving before being warned. For the final phase of my pre-class preparation, I arranged for sighted friends to hold the body part of the harness, the part Caddo would wear, as I held the handle. As we crossed streets, went down crowded sidewalks, navigated through parks, and toured shopping malls and other buildings, my friends would lead me around obstacles. They would make turns ranging from very minor to very dramatic. The important point here is that they would give me no verbal warning at all during this phase. I had to drive my chair according to the signals I was receiving through the harness handle, as I would later have to do in class with Caddo. Without a doubt, this third and final phase was the most valuable part of my pre-class preparation.

I arrived at Southeastern on March 19 and was reunited with Caddo on March 20, 2001. After 26 days of training, I returned home on April 13. Several times during the past year, instructors from both The Seeing Eye and Southeastern have worked with me in Dallas, helping us locate the safest and most accessible routes to destinations I visit often. One limitation I have that sighted wheelchair users do not have is that I cannot use Caddo and my power chair during or immediately after a rain. This is because guide dogs are poor at steering around puddles, and water getting into the chair's mechanism can mean real trouble. Also, if I am traveling in a car, I must leave Caddo home. This is because my power chair is too big to fold up, and he has not been trained to guide a manual chair for reasons discussed earlier. However, the increase in freedom I have gained far outweighs the drawbacks.

I found the conference absolutely fascinating! Never before had I seen so many different breeds and sizes of dogs in one place, doing such a wide variety of tasks to assist their human partners! Of course, I have had years of experience around guide dogs, but my knowledge of service dogs, hearing dogs, psychiatric support dogs, and seizure response dogs is, by comparison, very limited. One idea this conference brought forcefully home to me is the difference between the tasks a guide dog does for a blind person and those performed by a service dog assisting a sighted person in a wheelchair. I'd like to illustrate this difference by recounting a dialogue between the audience and me during my presentation. I asked the conference participants using wheelchairs, all of whom are sighted, to list some of the ways in which their canine partners assist them. I was told, for example, that the dogs assist in pulling wheelchairs, retrieving objects, turning lights on and off, opening doors, and helping their handlers get up after falling. I commented that Caddo does not have to help me in any of those areas. Then I asked the same people who had listed these tasks to think about the functioning of the team on a daily basis.
"Which member of the team spots obstacles up ahead and plans the best route around them?" I asked.
"We do," they answered.
"Okay. Which member of the team decides whether an aisle in a store is wide enough for the chair to go down?" I asked.
"We do," they responded again.
"When you're crossing a street with your dog," I continued, "which member of the team locates the ramps and lines up the chair at the lowest part of the ramps?"
"We do," they replied again.
"Which member of the team maintains a safe distance from traffic?" I asked.
"We do," came the answer. In short, staying in the crosswalk, navigating safely around obstacles, and maintaining a safe distance from oncoming traffic are all tasks that a guide dog absolutely must do for a blind person, whether that person is in a wheelchair or not. In addition, a blind person in a wheelchair needs to trust that the dog will always avoid stairs and drop-offs, always guide to ramps, and always take corrective action if there is not sufficient room for the wheelchair to pass safely.

Due to the unique nature of the tasks performed by guide dogs, including those guiding blind people in wheelchairs, there are significant safety risks if anyone other than an experienced and qualified guide dog instructor undertakes this training. Of course, all guide dog schools train blind people with no additional disabilities. In recent years, many have also begun training people with certain additional disabilities, such as hearing loss, diabetes, and balance difficulties, to name a few.

To date, only Southeastern trains blind people in wheelchairs. As word of their success has spread, demand has skyrocketed. Even though wheelchair guiding work was a complete unknown for The Seeing Eye of Morristown, New Jersey, a year ago, their interest in and knowledge of this area of guide work has increased dramatically as they have co-operated with Southeastern and worked tirelessly to assist me. Guiding Eyes for the Blind of Yorktown Heights, New York, and Guide Dogs for the Blind of San Rafael, California have also begun asking questions. I am working toward the day when excellent guide dog schools such as The Seeing Eye implement wheelchair training for blind people needing this skill. This can only mean a brighter future for blind people in wheelchairs.


Published in Partners Forum in 2002

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