Program having guide effect
CNIB hopes to provide 100 dogs a year to people living with vision loss
CAMBRIDGE— Ulysses goes to every one of Danika Blackstock’s university lectures. But he sleeps through all of them.
“He will always be ready to go when I am done, though,” Blackstock, a legally blind University of Waterloo student said of her new guide dog.
Ulysses, a retriever mix, is one of six graduates of a new training program run by the CNIB Foundation.
The non-profit started training service dogs for people with vision loss 18 months ago.
“The demand for Canadian guide dogs is so great. The other organizations just can’t keep up,” said Victoria Nolan, head of stakeholder relations and community engagement at the institute.
“A lot of people thought we already did provide guide dogs, so it’s about time we do.”
The foundation offers programs and advocacy for people living with vision loss.
It hopes to offset long wait lists for guide dogs from national training organizations with its own program.
The backlog for people requiring a guide dog is so large that many people who need them go south of the border to acquire a service dog, Nolan said.
There are almost half a million Canadians who are blind or partially sighted, according to the CNIB. Part of the reason the wait list for a guide dog is so high is because it is quite difficult to train the dogs and the success rate is only 50 per cent, Nolan said.
The other reason is that many of the national organizations that train service dogs provide animals for people with many different needs such as autism, post-traumatic stress disorder and a range of disabilities.
“I think they are worn pretty thin,” Nolan added.
Blackstock, a social work student, was paired with Ulysses a month ago. When she first heard about the foundation’s new dog training program, she immediately put her name forward.
“He’s an amazing dog,” Blackstock said. “They matched our personalities really well.”
Nolan said the foundation has 50 dogs in the program at various stages of training. Ulysses was part of the first group of graduates. The CNIB hopes to be able to provide 100 dogs a year to people living with vision loss across the country.
“It’s not going to solve the problem, but it will help with the backlog,” she said.
The CNIB advocates for people living with vision loss and offers a variety of programs to help people impacted by blindness. To learn more about the organization’s new guide dog program, visit the website at www.cnib.ca.