Guide dog life
How Does A Guide Dog Know Your Destination?
If he’s never been there before, and — do you ever get lost?
I get asked this question a lot; I wondered about it myself before I got my first guide dog.
How does the dog know where I want to go?
Short answer — the guide dog doesn’t know our destination until he learns it. After taking a route a few times, he’ll know the route by name.
For new routes, the dog will follow directions — right, left, straight ahead, go back, and so on. He also knows hand signals which are handy in noisy areas.
I’ll use my guide dog, Cooper, in these examples.
Cooper’s job is to get me to my destination safely, but he relies on me to navigate, I’m the GPS.
Going to our regular places, I don’t need to say much other than, ‘Cooper let’s go to work’ or, ‘Let’s go to the park’ and so on.
If we’re taking the train, he knows, let’s go to the train, and on the train, he waits for me to tell him when we’ll be stepping off since we use a number of different stops.
What Cooper does when I’m daydreaming
There are two ways to get to our work building. One is via Starbucks and the other way is along the park.
If I’m daydreaming and don’t say left (Starbucks) or right (the park and building) guess which way he chooses.
If you know Cooper from his other Medium stories, you already know he’ll take us past the park.
He’s smooth about it too, just as though this is the way I wanted to go anyway. He slows down and looks at it longingly — that’s his hint that we should stop.
Going for coffee
When he’s done playing and sniffing in the park, we’ll backtrack to Starbucks for coffee and a breakfast egg sandwich for Cooper.
Do we ever get lost?
When we’re going to a destination Cooper is not familiar with, he listens to me for instructions; he won’t make assumptions on his own. If I’m daydreaming in this scenario, we may get lost. It’s happened before.
This story is about the day we got onto the wrong train:
How do I find an address I’m unfamiliar with?
You might be wondering how I find my way to a location that’s new to me. The same way as a person with regular vision — a GPS.
I have a GPS the size of a phone, which is designed for individuals with vision loss, made by HumanWare. It’s more precise than iPhone apps, and takes me to the exact point, within a meter.
Cooper’s Dear Diary stories:
