History
Meeting a person with a guide dog isn't really exceptional these days. Walks in the city or in countryside, shopping centres, travelling by public transport and many other places have become widely accesible to blind people thanks to the reliable guiding of their dogs It didn't always use to be like that though.
Even at the beginning of the 20th century, blind people only had to rely on care and good will of other people. Their chances to live a full-fledged life were rather limited.
The evidence of coexistence of blind people and their dogs can be first traced in ancient history. The wall paintings in Herculaneum, that was eventually burried after the Vesuv's explosion, show scenes of common life from ancient Rome. One of those depicts a dog accompanying an evidently blind person. There is a woodcarving from the Middle Ages showing a person with a dog on a leash.
The first recorded attempts to train a guide dog took place about 1780 in Paris. Johan Wilhelm Klein founded the Institute for Education of the Blind in 1819 in Vienna. In 1847, a Swiss Jakob Birrer described his 5-year-long experience of being guided by a dog that he trained himself.
Systematic training dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. The First World War with the use of toxic gas blinded big numbers of future disabled veterans. Even during the War a guide dog training center was established in Oldenburg, Germany by Gerhard Stalling in 1916. Similar centres were then established in other big German cities resulting in about 600 trained dogs a year. These dogs then were often distributed all over Europe, even the United States and Canada. In 1926 though, the project was stopped. It was replaced by Pottsdam school, a training centre for german sheperds. This school eventually inspired Dorothy Harrison Eustis, an American maecenas living in Switzerland, who decided to let her own dogs serve the purpose. In 1927 the Saturday Evening Post published her article The Seeing Eye which followed the topic. It gripped a young American called Morris Frank, who had lost his sight in an accident and found it hard to cope with his dependence on other people. He contacted Ms Eustis and then, in Switzerland, went through training with a german sheperd called Buddy. After returning to the States in 1929 he used the donation from Ms Eustis to found the first guide dog training school. The name of his school had an idetical name with the article from 1927 – The Seeing Eye. Even in its first year it had 17 people asking for the guide dogs and the demand was growing quickly. The Seeing Eye foundation became a pioneer in guide dog training and it's been providing services since then.
The idea of guide dog training spread around the world in the 1930s, there was a school founded in Great Britain in 1931, in 1989 The International Guide Dog Federation was also founded there. In the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia, the first training attempts date back to 1922, a real boom then came only in the 1960s. Back then everything was much more difficult due to the complicated political climate. Eventually the bureaucracy was defeated and the first center could have been established in 1974. In those days, the trainers had limited chances of cooperation with the West so concerning the methodology they had to rely on their own experience and of course the trial and error method. Significant progress was made in 1990, when, under the patronage of Czech Union of the Blind and Weak-eyed, the guide dog training centre was established in Prague.
