Waiting handlers call it the “puppy truck,” but it’s really more like a small bus outfitted with dog crates.
And the dozen pups riding inside when the bus pulls into the the parking lot at Arapahoe County Extension Office in Littleton are no ordinary canines out for a Sunday drive.
They have come to Colorado with a purpose: to begin their training for Guide Dogs for the Blind, a working-dog organization based in San Rafael, Calif.
The dozen wiggly pooches that arrived earlier this month joined 85 pups already training with volunteers.
After checking tattoos inside each dog’s ear, the drivers announced their names – Bo, Biloxi, Chloe, Christina – and passed the 8- to 10-week-old fuzzballs to handlers who will spend the next year preparing the pups to be the eyes of blind people.
The truck comes to Colorado four or five times a year. Golden retriever, Lab and Lab-golden cross puppies bred for temperament and intelligence are handed off. Older dogs, now 13 to 18 months old, are fetched and returned to one of two Guide Dogs campuses for evaluation and several months of formal guide training.
The ecstasy of awaiting an arrival contrasts starkly with the agony of those sending dogs back. Some volunteers experience both extremes the same day.
The loss is wrenching, even for veteran puppy handlers. “Why do we do this, again?” Carolanne Fisher and Cathy Greenwald ask each other over and over as the time comes to load Conchita, a Lab-golden cross, onto the truck.
Their grief is particularly raw since their own dog, a nearly 13-year- old Newfoundland, died last year. They say he was a “dog of a lifetime” and still grieve his loss.
As Conchita is loaded in for the bus ride back to California, Fisher says softly: “If you don’t like it there, you let them know and you can always come home.”
As she and Greenwald say their final goodbyes, their 12th guide puppy, a black Lab named Gatsby, waits to the side.
“I think there would be something wrong with you, if you got hardened to it,” says Greenwald, a retired teacher. “If you don’t love the dog and really open up your heart to it, I think dogs figure it out pretty fast.”
Gatsby’s puppy kisses seem to ease their heartbreak.
He’ll spend the first week getting used to his new home outside Nederland. His first outing, probably to the local library, will soon follow.
Fisher and Greenwald have attended their dogs’ graduations at the Oregon campus and have met the people who benefit from their hard work. They’ve seen how these dogs change lives. They know this day’s distress means a lifetime of options for someone else.
And that’s the point, says Marcie Davis, who will travel to Michigan in May to get her third assistance dog.
The Santa Fe human services consultant has used a wheelchair for 35 years and has been helped by service dogs for 13 years. She recently co- wrote “Working Like Dogs: The Service Dog Guidebook,” (Alpine Publications,$24.95), which covers everything potential service-dog recipients and volunteers need to know about the process of raising, training and matching service dogs to their human partners, who often wait 18 months or longer for a dog.
In addition to guide dogs for the blind, service dogs can be trained to alert the deaf to sounds such as a fire alarm, a ringing telephone, a crying baby or a doorbell, or may be trained to help disabled people with basic tasks like opening doors or retrieving dropped objects.
Although they are beloved, these dogs are not pets.
Davis, who rehabbed at Craig Hospital, says her current dog, Morgan, a golden retriever trained by Paws With a Cause, is like an extension of her own body. Just as you wouldn’t walk up and touch her, people shouldn’t try to pet a working dog without permission, she says.
“When someone distracts my working dog, it can be very unsafe for me,” she says. “People will try to call him over. They offer him food. That just surprises me every time.”
It’s a hard lesson for everyone to learn.
Dogs in training wear special coats and they should be ignored, unless you ask permission to interact with them, says Barb Deevers, Guide Dogs for the Blind community field rep for Colorado and Utah.
And, she says, people ask a lot. If an outing should take one hour, Deevers tells volunteers to plan on two, much of which will be spent explaining why the pup can’t be handled by strangers.
“He looks like he’s just standing there, but he’s working really hard at just standing there and not bothering you,” Deevers says. “That’s hard for a puppy to do.”
In the end, these pups will learn to do more than that.
Jodie Kirkovich, who has had epilepsy for about 30 years, eagerly awaits a trip to Pennsylvania in June to meet her first service dog: a seizure-alert dog.
A paramedic recommended she apply for a dog during an ambulance trip – one of many – that followed a seizure. Having a dog that can alert her 30 to 45 minutes before a seizure hits will allow her to take medication and get somewhere safe until the danger passes.
Kirkovich will pay $2,600 for her dog and must cover her travel expenses to visit the training facility. She’s relying on community donations to raise the $5,000 she needs. So far, she’s about halfway to her goal.
“I’m looking to get my independence and privacy back,” Kirkovich says.
She hopes Ruby, the female black Lab she’s been assigned, does the trick.
Contributions to help pay for Jodie Kirkovich’s dog may be sent to: Kirkovich Service Dog Fund, c/o 1st Bank, PO Box 27179, Lakewood, CO 80227
