Woman trains dogs to help

12-05-07

During the past nine years, Katie Bross has had eight dogs, including Windsor, her current dog.

She kept each one for about a year, then gave it away, no matter how attached she got to it. For the most part, she has never seen any of them again. But it’s all for a good cause.

Starting when she was 9, Bross has participated in a program where young people help raise and train Seeing Eye dogs — specially trained dogs that lead around visually-impaired people.

Her interest in the program started when her grandmother went blind from cancer.

“We found a pamphlet advertising for the Seeing Eye. They wanted puppy raisers, and we tried it out, and we really like it,” said Bross, who lives on her family’s 175-acre dairy farm that straddles the Lebanon-Berks county line east of Fredericksburg.

The Seeing Eye is the oldest existing dog-guide school in the world. Since 1929, the organization has helped train more than 12,000 seeing-eye dogs.

The 18-year-old Bross got her first dog. when she was in fourth grade. She said raising the future Seeing Eye dogs is easy once you get the hang of it. “It’s like raising a normal dog. It’s just they have some guidelines you have to follow and specific commands,” she said. For example, the dog has to be house-broken within two weeks, and it should know its name within two weeks, she said. Then Bross will teach the dogs some basic commands, such as sit, down, rest, stay and come. She also teaches them how to walk in a figure eight to prepare them for weaving in and out of people when they’re in a city setting.

But Bross did not go it alone. She described it as a family program because it required that someone be available to be with the dogs while she was at school. Her mother, Pat, filled that role. Bross usually keeps dogs for 12 to 15 months, depending on the dogs. “Certain dogs, like males, we’ll keep longer, and females will go back sooner,” she said. “Labs are prone to getting cataracts so we’ll keep them longer, that way they have a better chance of detecting it if the dog is going to have it when he goes back for his physical.”

After raising a dog for a year or more, Bross said it can be difficult to give the dog away. She said she often finds herself calling her dog the name of the last dog. “You expect to come home to one, and he’s not there,” she said.Despite the sadness she might feel after being separated from a dog she has become attached to, Bross said it is rewarding to know that what she is doing might benefit someone else. “It’s one of those community-service feelings where you know you’re helping somebody and you might not get to meet them, but you still feel good about it because you know you’re making a difference,” she said. But not every dog Bross cares for goes on to become a Seeing Eye dog. About 75 percent of dogs who start the training fail to become Seeing Eye dogs for one reason or another, she said. Reasons for failure can include health reasons or behavior issues such as excessive barking or biting.

For Bross, the first two dogs she trained failed, but since then, three of the five dogs she cared for have become Seeing Eye dogs. Under the program, which is run in conjunction with local 4-H clubs, kids 8 through 18 raise puppies as a 4-H project. After turning 18, participants can become an adult raiser, which Bross is now. She received a $1,000 scholarship from The Seeing Eye for her achievements in the puppy-raising project and briefly attended Lehigh Valley College outside of Allentown to study business. Bross is currently taking a break from college while she ponders her future. She is working at Dutchway restaurant in Schaefferstown in the meantime. “I’m really an animal person, so just being able to work with animals is really nice,” she said.

Article Source LDNews

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