Finn guide dogs find English a walk in the park
Five assistance animals become bilingual weeks after they arrive to plug canine labour shortage
‘The dogs knew no English at all. You could say “sit” to them and they just looked blankly at you’
EMIGRATING and learning a second language can be a daunting prospect, but for Britain’s first bilingual guide dogs it proved an easy task.
Pico, Pai, Terri, Uke and Reina, all two-year-old labradors, moved to Britain from Finland in August to help fix a UK canine labour shortage exacerbated by the pandemic.
Within three weeks, they had learnt all their cues in English to compliment their Finnish fluency and will soon be helping a blind person in Britain.
Trainers and fosterers initially tried to help the dogs learn English by using the Finnish commands they had already learnt and then repeating the English word, but the language proved tricky for the humans to master.
“The dogs knew no English at all. You could say ‘sit’ to them and they just looked blankly at you,” Becky Rex, a guide dog mobility specialist who brought three of the dogs over from Finland and taught them English, told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I asked [the Finnish trainers] when I went over in June for the words for ‘forward’, ‘sit’, ‘down’ etc and they are the longest words ever! I’d need it written on my hand to know what I was saying.
“We managed until they got to the UK and then I straight away taught them English. That’s the first thing I did was teach them everything in English because I could have pronounced the Finnish words so wrong that the dog would have been equally as clueless as if I said an English word. So it made sense just to teach them English.”
The animals were born and raised in Scandinavia by the Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired, but they were surplus to requirements by the time they finished their training.
“We had too many dogs and not enough clients,” Minna Leppälä, breeding co-ordinator at the federation, told The Telegraph.
“In Finland we have a very good situation with guide dogs at the moment. Waiting time for a client is only half a year.”
Guide Dogs UK had reached out to training schools worldwide amid a domestic dearth of puppies and found the five fully trained dogs – four yellow labradors and one black retriever/labrador cross.
“It was easy to decide to offer our help,” Ms Leppälä said.”This has been a really nice experience and hopefully our cooperation continues.”
Ms Rex added: “The dogs were getting older but not working, so for Finland it made sense to send them over.”
Now, they have been given a crash course in English, taught that cars drive on the other side of the road and acclimated to England’s landscape.
Britain has record waiting lists for guide dogs, with times swelling since the pandemic as the Guide Dogs UK system stopped completely for the first time in its 91-year history.
The people who will get Pico and Pai, which are siblings, have waited for a dog for more than three years.
Three of the dogs – Pico, Pai and Terri – came over first and, after arriving in London via a commercial FinnAir flight in August, spent a night in a Holiday Inn, each with a Guide Dogs member of staff. They were then taken to Shrewsbury to embark on a 10-week course to assimilate to new conditions and to learn a new language.
Reine and Uke came over soon afterwards, as well as a sixth dog, Bertie, who will not be trained as a Guide Dog but is to be used as a stud to widen the breeding gene pool.
The dogs underwent medical checks, vaccinations and got a pet passport before flying, and had their own seat booked on an economy flight from Helsinki to Heathrow. Even though they were not accompanying a visually impaired owner, they were allowed to fly in the cabin.
The international canines had not flown before, but had no issues with the three-hour flight, Ms Rex said, curling up in the footwell of their allocated seats beside their handlers.
It took the animals about three weeks to learn about a dozen cues in English, making the canines truly bilingual as they are now able to respond to “sit”, “stand”, “forward” and other instructions in either Finnish or English.
Ms Rex said: “The way that they train over there is slightly different, their environment’s quite different.
“[Finland] has a lot of very wide pavements, a lot of grid systems, so the dogs walk in straight lines on very wide pavements. The obstacle work they have to do is probably less than they will have to do in the UK if they go to a little market town.
“They knew the basics, they knew how to stop at curbs and they knew how to go around things, but it was just adapting the training and adding bits in that we needed them to know in order to match a UK environment, which is why I’ve had them in training. And obviously to teach them English aswell.”