To: jbe who wrote (75252 ) 2/27/2000 7:54:00 PM From: Daniel Schuh Read Replies (3) | Respond to
Joan, I had to resort to the old paper Reader's guide at the library, but I finally dug up my favorite dog article from the Atlantic. "Four ways to walk a dog.", by Michael Lenehan, The Atlantic, April 1986 v257 p35(24) . It's not available on the Atlantic web site, unfortunately, though I found it online through Infotrac, a db we get through the library system here. It's really way too long to post, but it's both funny and informative. Pretty touching too. 2 of the 4 ways are old line animal trainer William Koehler and new wave doggie behaviorist Michael Tortora. (aside: sometimes deconstructionist literary critic, Yale faculty member, animal trainer and Pit Bull devotee Vicki Hearne is a Koehler disciple, but that's another story). That individual dogs of the same breed--even of the same litter--Can have vastly different "personalities" is no great secret. Any experienced dog person, and countless popular books, will tell you as much; certainly a great many have tried to tell me. But the lesson and its importance did not sink in for me until I visited the Seeing Eye. It's in the air there. Every day Pete Jackson works with eight or ten different dogs--a bold one, a lazy one, a sensitive one, a nervous one, a shy one. Every fourth Saturday a new group of blind people arrives on the campus--bold ones, lazy ones, and every other type--and on Sunday each goes on a "Juno walk" with one of the trainers. The trainer, holding one end of a working harness, plays the role of Juno, a trained guide dog, and leads the person through the streets of Morristown. After this opportunity to judge their students' physical strength, walking pace, and personality, the trainers huddle with their supervisors and decide which dog is best suited to which person. Making the right matches, they say, is one of the most important elements of the program.
