(upbeat music)
Welcome to Hadley Presents.
I'm your host, Ricky Enger,
inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, Ed McDaniel and Jeff Flodin
join us to discuss guide dogs.
Welcome to the show, both of you.
Thank you, Ricky. Hi, Ed.
Thank you.
So delighted to have you both.
And you both have appeared on Hadley properties
on various topics here and there.
But for those who don't know you,
why don't we just get a couple of introductions
out of the way?
So tell us a bit about yourself and then,
of course, the reason that we're all here,
we want to hear about your guide dog.
So Ed, let's start with you.
I'm sixty-years-old
and I live in Morganton, North Carolina.
I'm a semi-retired psychologist.
I do have a couple of part-time jobs,
and I do quite a bit of volunteer work,
my favorite being facilitating
a vision loss support group.
I have Usher Syndrome 2A,
which means I was born hard of hearing,
and I have retinitis pigmentosa.
I have less than five degrees of visual field.
And more recently,
I've been starting to lose acuity in one eye.
Gotcha.
And how about your dog?
My dog is Serena.
She's four-years-old.
She's a black lab.
I got her two years ago
from Guiding Eyes for the Blind
in Yorktown Heights, New York.
She sounds lovely.
All right, Jeff, how about you?
Tell us about yourself and, of course, your dog.
My name is Jeff Flodin,
and I was a social worker.
I'm semi-retired.
Like Ed, I facilitate a low vision support group.
I also write a blog
called Jalapenos in the Oatmeal,
Digesting Vision Loss.
And I've been doing that for about 12 years
on a bi-weekly basis.
I was diagnosed with RP when I was 36-years-old,
declared legally blind when I was 43,
cane-trained when I was 45,
and got my first dog when I was 52.
I'm now on my third dog.
The first two came from the Seeing Eye
in Morristown, New Jersey.
And Tundra was from a school called OccuPaws
based in Madison, Wisconsin.
I chose that school because at the time
I was living in Chicago,
so OccuPaws sent a trainer and Tundra to me,
and we trained in Chicago for a couple of weeks,
and then COVID hit.
So that was a big impact on putting mileage,
getting miles in with Tundra.
Yes, and I'm still stuck on Tundra
as a sort of a mode of transportation
just like the Toyota Tundra,
so I love that.
And what breed is she?
Oh, like Ed's dog,
Tundra is a black lab.
And the three I've had
have been a golden retriever
and now, two black labs.
Love it.
Black labs are wonderful.
My dog retired in 2016,
but his name was Eddie,
and he was from Southeastern Guide Dogs,
and he too was a black lab.
So yeah, black labs represent.
So I know that there are
a lot of misconceptions that I think
the general public has about guide dogs,
and then even people who are thinking
about getting a guide dog,
they may have these ideas
that just turn out not to be right.
So I'm wondering if we can discuss that.
I know one thing that I hear a lot
is that you don't really need any training
in how to travel.
So no orientation and mobility training,
no information on how to think about your surroundings,
how to use your senses,
how to get from one place to another without a dog.
So a lot of people think, oh,
as soon as I lose some vision,
I can get a dog and,
you know, the dog fixes everything.
So that's the one that I hear most often.
Ed, do you have one that comes up a lot
that you've heard from either the public
or maybe you had yourself?
I think one of the misconceptions
is that you have to be completely blind
to get a guide dog.
And that certainly wasn't the case for me,
I still have some central vision.
So I think that's a misconception for people
using guide dogs and even canes as well.
Yeah, that's a good one.
That's a really common one.
And in fact, we will talk about some of that a bit later
in terms of working with a dog
and still having some usable vision.
Jeff, do you have one to add to that?
Yes, I do.
I think one misconception that I had
was that a dog would cost about $50,000
for the student to purchase.
And fortunately, with the subsidies
and the fact that most of these schools
have endowments, that was not the case.
So the good thing was that guide dogs were affordable.
And along the lines of the O&M training,
the misconception that I have run into
is that getting a dog
is like getting a self-driving car.
You don't have to do anything.
The reality to me is that your O&M skills
need to be even sharper
because not only are you learning,
but you're also having to teach the dog.
So it's twofold rather than just one.
That's a really great point.
And I had a trainer at Southeastern Guide Dogs
put it this way,
that you need to be the brains of the team.
And I thought that really put things into perspective.
Your dog is giving you all sorts of information,
but you are the one
who's in the metaphorical driver's seat.
So for each of you, as you thought about
getting a dog for the first time,
and Ed, I know for you
this was actually a recent decision,
what factored into that?
Because we know that dogs aren't for everyone
and there are some really great things
about getting a dog and,
you know, maybe some things that aren't ideal.
And then, maybe part of the decision
is something that
just isn't working well for you
with your current mobility aid
if it's a cane or if you were going
sighted guide all the time or what have you.
So Ed, what factored
into your initial decision to get a dog?
I think the biggest factor was safety.
I'm a runner and I wanted to be able to continue running,
and I had some issues with cars and safety.
And so Guiding Eyes for the Blind
does train running guides
and that's why I chose them.
It was getting to where it was clearly unsafe for me
to continue doing that without a dog.
And so that was the major factor for me.
Yeah.
And Jeff, you've done this a few times,
so clearly, something keeps you coming back.
I'm curious if you remember that very first decision,
what was going through your mind at that time?
And then you've done it again
a couple of times since.
So what continues to keep you saying,
yes, this is right for me,
and are there things that you think about
that make you possibly reconsider?
Well, I have a history
of resisting anything that's good for me
in terms of adjusting with decreasing eyesight,
and that applied to cane training
and most every other adaptive strategy or device.
When I was living in Philadelphia
and commuting into the center city by rail
with a white cane,
I was working in a program
that had many visually impaired people as employees,
and some of them had dogs and some of them used canes.
So I got a chance to talk to those people
about the relative benefits and liabilities
of each of those.
And I decided that, as Ed said,
for safety reasons, and also,
as it turned out, for comfort reasons,
I seem to be quite hypervigilant
when it comes to cane use.
And using the dog, at least for parts of the journey,
I was kind of able to switch off
the hyper end of the vigilance
and not do the self-driving car,
but remain the brains,
but also disconnect a little bit
so that I could enjoy the process
of walking with the dog
as opposed to being always on edge.
And the subsequent dogs that I've had
were pretty much the same reason.
I moved from Philadelphia to Chicago,
got a job where I was walking to and from work
three miles a day.
That dog lasted for nine years for his working life.
We probably put 2,500 miles on walking
and in varied weather, snow, ice, rain, heat, and so on
with 20 intersections.
And once the dog learned that route,
I felt tremendously safe and comfortable with him.
And so much of it depends on the lifestyle.
What purpose are you looking for the dog?
Certainly, the school will want to make sure
that you're not just getting a dog
to have a furry friend around the house,
but that you'll actually use
what it's trained to do.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
And I think that goes back
to the misconceptions discussion that we had earlier.
One of those is, oh, I will have a companion
that I can take anywhere with me.
And that's really the primary reason I'm doing this.
And I think that is not the way to proceed.
We do keep talking about this theme of being safe
while traveling with a dog.
And maybe it would help to elaborate a bit
on what that means.
'Cause I think when some people think
you're safer with a dog,
they're thinking that dog is a protector
and that's not how we're talking about it
in this instance.
So could, you know,
one or maybe both of you talk about
what it means to feel a bit safer
traveling with a dog as opposed to a cane?
I think for me,
as I said before, safety around cars was a big issue.
And because I have both hearing and vision loss,
I'm not always aware when there's a car around.
And that was creating
some serious safety issues for me in mobility,
but also just even traveling inside a building as well
and just kind of navigating indoors, I think, is safer.
Obviously, if you're not bumping into things,
that's definitely a factor.
Absolutely.
I agree with that.
And I think that's a real perceptive point too, Ricky,
in terms of we're not talking about personal safety
in terms of protection.
I've had people who have mistaken
guide dogs for guard dogs.
But from a safety standpoint,
in terms of missteps and using the dog
for what it was taught to do,
to find the stairs, find the curb,
find the door, find a seat, and so on,
especially in urban areas
when you're doing a lot of bus travel and so on,
it's a personal safety issue
rather than a protection.
Right.
And thank you both for kind of clarifying that
because I think when people are listening
and they haven't traveled with a dog before,
it is difficult to imagine
what exactly does it do that a cane can't.
And one of my favorite things
about traveling with a dog was that with a cane,
you generally have to touch something with that cane
in order to then decide
what you're going to do about it,
whether that's go around it or in the case of stairs,
you know, okay, I'm going down or up now.
And with a dog, a lot of those things
are handled just more seamlessly,
which is wonderful.
For both of you, it sounds like
you have traveled with a dog,
and you still had some usable vision
so you could get information
about your environment visually.
Now, whether that information was trustworthy or not
is an entirely different thing.
So I imagine that when you're traveling with a dog
and you still have some usable vision,
and yet the dog is trained
to keep you safe in these different ways of,
you asked me to find a seat
so now I'm going to do that.
I've been trained to find the stairs,
so now I'm going to do that.
How do you relinquish the right amount of control
and trust your dog as opposed to
maybe your problematic vision?
I think for myself,
because I still do have some central vision,
there are some times, however,
where my vision fluctuates depending on the lighting.
And there are times where I don't see anything
because of changes in lighting.
And so I definitely have to, in those situations,
completely trust Serena.
But there are times where, you know,
I use all of my senses because,
you know, she and I are a team
and I use the limited hearing that I have,
I use the limited vision that I have,
and I use her cues altogether.
And that doesn't mean
that we, you know, aren't going to make mistakes,
but that's how we learn, through our experiences.
I haven't had any issues with
when I needed her more
to let her show me the way.
I think sometimes I do have to be careful
that I'm not always the one
determining some of the directions
because she can see better than I can, obviously,
and I'm going to miss some things.
So I do have to pay attention to her cues
and not just make those decisions myself.
Great.
Yeah, I was going to say, Jeff, how about you?
Because you've gone from having
more usable vision with your first dog,
I think, to now far less.
Correct.
They call it progressive vision loss.
I don't think it's progress
in the usual sense of the term.
Well, I took my dog, my first dog, Sherlock,
to elementary school classes
and talked to the students about life as a blind person
and life with a guide dog.
And one day, in a third-grade class,
there were a lot of questions from the students.
But then one day, a third-grade boy said,
how hard was it for you
to put your trust in your dog?
And I thought that kid's going far
because that's a pretty abstract thought for,
let's say, an 8-year-old.
And the trust issue is really good
because when you can't trust
what you see or depend on what you see,
whether it's a cane or a dog,
you have to put your faith in something.
And I did have more usable vision in 2003
when I trained with my first dog.
And it was sometimes disconcerting
when the dog would be walking down the street
and be aiming right for that parking meter.
And I'm starting to cheat one way or the other
to go around it and then he zigs out of the way
in the last two or three steps.
I know that there are some schools that may have employed,
and I'm not speaking for current or any particular school,
that they would use a blindfold with students
who find that they were being distracted
and override the training
that the school had put into those dogs.
That's the big conflict, I think,
is that the dog trusts its own instincts and vision
and smell and so on.
And if the dog senses that you are overriding it
when you have the dog in harness
and he or she's supposed to be in charge,
that undermines some of the training.
So it's a tricky thing,
but it does ultimately involve trust.
And, you know, you put on a few miles,
and you zig around the fire hydrants
and the parking meters, and you stop at the stairs,
and you stop at the curb,
it's easy to put your trust in
once you get a few miles on.
Yeah.
So let's talk about people and dogs.
People feel things about dogs.
Some people love dogs
and can't resist petting them
even if they shouldn't.
And then Some people are terrified of dogs,
some people are, maybe they have dog allergies,
there's just this whole list of things
that people might feel about dogs,
and I think that is reflected in how people
interact with you when you're traveling with a dog.
So let's talk about then the,
I guess, the social kind of benefits and drawbacks
of traveling with a dog as opposed to a cane.
What changes?
I have found that, a lot of times,
people do have trouble ignoring
or not interacting with Serena
because there are a lot of dog lovers out there,
and that is distracting to her.
And a lot of times, people will say,
I know I'm not supposed to talk to your dog,
but then they'll start talking to her.
So it is a challenge because she's very cute
and very lovable and friendly,
and it's hard for people not to do that.
And sometimes I've had to explain that to people.
Usually, they understand and they back off,
but not always.
So that's a challenge.
I know some people say that having a dog,
people are more likely to approach them.
I haven't really noticed that much difference
when I was using a cane versus a dog.
I do have some central vision,
I do notice sometimes when I'm going down the sidewalk
and people see, it's common,
they will sometimes cross to the other side of the street.
I don't know if it's because they're fearful of dogs
or they don't want to distract us,
I really don't know,
but I've noticed that happens sometimes.
And Jeff, what about you?
Well, I understand and respect anyone
who has a fear of dogs.
I've been lucky to have good experiences
with dogs during my lifetime,
and I feel bad for those who have not,
so I want to respect other people's feelings.
I too, like Ed, have had situations
where I can sense or even hear someone approaching me
on the sidewalk, and then the dog
will kind of start to show off a little bit,
prance a little bit.
I have approached people who then would walk
into the parkway between the sidewalk and the street
and kind of be as quiet as they could be.
So, maybe if I don't make any noise,
the dog and the person won't hear me.
And usually I'll kind of consider
when I'm abreast of them and say,
hi, how are you doing today?
Just kind of freak them out a little bit.
But especially in workplaces and so on,
the best advice that I can give people
who often come into contact
with someone with a dog is to say,
The best thing you can do around a guide dog
is to ignore it.
And I know that's really hard to do,
and like Ed said,
I know I shouldn't do this,
but I just can't resist that cute doggy.
Well, that's true,
but you have to restrain yourself.
And the dog is a social being too.
It's a pack animal.
It wants to meet the level of energy
that is shown to it by its own energy.
And so if somebody comes part wheeling up,
I mean, kids and so on, you know,
bless them, you know?
I mean, they're waving their arms,
and they're all akimbo,
and this and that and the other,
the dog reacts that way too.
So there are rules, and you have to be firm.
I mean, I had social situations
when I was commuting by train in Philadelphia,
and I'd come into the car with a cane,
nobody would say, hey, over here, over here, over here.
As soon as I got the dog,
people were falling out of the way
to give me a seat and say,
Come over and sit here.
Come sit here.
Right.
I guess you're part of the package.
I'll hear a bit about you, but yeah.
Yeah.
Well, this is so wonderful
and informative to hear from people
who are happily using dogs
and just being able to talk about
what is realistic to expect
and to get that glimpse
into what it might be like to have a dog.
In our show notes, we'll have a link
to a couple of Hadley's workshops
on talking about weighing
the pros and cons of a guide dog.
There have been a couple of schools mentioned,
and we'll have a link to those
as well as just some general research that you can do.
'Cause there are a lot of schools
and a lot of different training methodologies,
whether it be in-home training
or heading out to a residential situation
where you're there for a few weeks in training.
And at Hadley, you can call us
and we can happily answer those questions
if you're thinking about doing this.
As we wrap up, I'm wondering from each of you,
what is something that you absolutely didn't expect
when you got your dog?
What is just a really surprising thing
that you discovered?
For me, with Serena personally,
she never barks.
And I've never had a dog that never barks.
I know some guys' dogs do bark,
but that was just very surprising and unusual for me
to be with a dog that never barks.
Yeah, my dog never barked either.
And what I found surprising was that
he was two different puppies.
So there was the dog in harness
who was very serious and dedicated,
and then as soon as that harness came off,
he was playful and had his sense of humor,
and both of them were him,
but they were just two very different aspects.
And I guess I had never thought about that.
Jeff, how about you?
Yeah, that's a good point, Ricky,
because it's not like I got a working dog.
I got a working dog and a pet.
And I know there's a danger in that
in terms of justifying to a school
that you need a dog
because they're giving you a dog
that has been trained for months and months
and in a puppy raising family for socialization.
You're not just getting a pet,
but two for the price of one aspect
that Ricky was talking about is very important.
And I think we've all been in situations
that have become a little bit uncertain
or even downright scary,
whether it's the surroundings or the weather or so on.
But the idea of being a team,
because blindness can be so isolating,
you can be alone in a crowd.
And I've had so many experiences
when I've been with the dogs
where I have depended on them as a member of my team,
almost to the point where I want to break into
"You'll Never Walk Alone"
singing as we go down the street.
So it's interesting, the different needs
that the dog has fulfilled
all the way from a practical to an emotional level.
Love it. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you both for sharing about,
I guess, yourselves and your dogs,
and just the journey that going
from traveling in one way with a cane
to traveling differently
and the experiences that that brings you
when you're traveling with a dog.
I think, again, this has been really informative,
and it's been a wonderful chat
getting to know about you and your dogs.
Thank you, both.
Thank you, Ricky.
Good to hear you, Ed.
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