Day after day, there were dogs in the union hall. Very good dogs. From Aug. 24 to 28, Machinists District W24 hosted a dozen dogs at its Gladstone, Oregon headquarters so that half a dozen apprentice dog trainers could get facetime with Michele Pouliot, a nationally respected dog trainer who lives in Oregon City. Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, and mixes, the dogs are trainees in a union-sponsored program of guide dogs for the blind.
Guide Dogs of America was founded in 1948 by Joseph Jones, a 57-year-old union machinist who went blind and couldn’t get a guide dog because at that time he was considered too old. Jones went to his union executive council for help, and they set up what is now known as Guide Dogs of America. Based at a 7.5-acre campus in the Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles, Guide Dogs of America trains guide dogs and provides them to blind individuals free of charge. To raise money for the work, Machinist locals around the United States and Canada hold fundraising events — motorcycle poker runs, golf tournaments, fishing derbies, and more.
Guide Dogs of America breeds its own dogs, raises them on its campus, and trains them for up to two years, starting when the dogs are about 13 months old. By the time the dogs graduate, their trainers can walk the streets blindfolded and trust that they’ll be safe. Each dog is then paired with a client who comes to campus for three weeks for training.
It costs the charity about $60,000 to train each dog. Clients pay nothing.
Not every dog makes it through the program. Even in the best training programs, about half of the dog trainees don’t graduate, Pouliot says.
“We call the ones that don’t graduate ‘career changers,’” says Cheryl Herman, senior director of guide and service dog operations at Guide Dogs of America. “If they don’t work as guide dogs, we could switch them to the service dog program or vice versa.”
Not every applicant gets a dog either. Guide Dogs of America tries to place dogs with people who are going to rely on them for mobility, not companionship. Ideally, they’d have at least three walking routes on a weekly basis.
Guide dogs provide extraordinary service. They are trained to move in a straight line, put a paw up when they encounter a step up, and to stop when they reach a curb or an obstacle like foliage that might be hanging down from a tree — the dog could pass beneath it but the handler would not.
Labrador retrievers are the best-suited breed for the work, because they’re big enough, don’t require much coat care, and have the right temperament to remain stable in very difficult environments.
During their visit to the Gladstone union hall, dogs are the star players, but the star coach is Pouliot.
Pouliot has been training guide dogs since 1974, and in 1995 she set up a training campus in Boring, Oregon, for Guide Dogs for the Blind, the largest guide dog training program in North America. Then, starting in 2003, she helped lead a revolution in dog training.
Up to then, training programs the world over relied on punishment. Trainers would yell at the dog when it did something wrong, or jerk on the dog collar with a leash, known as collar correction.
But in the 1980s, a former marine mammal trainer named Karen Pryor began to apply positive reinforcement methods to dog training. Her methods had been pioneered in the 1960s to train orcas and dolphins, animals that don’t respond well to physical punishments.
Pryor used a small mechanical device that makes a clicking sound to mark the exact moment an animal performs a desired behavior, which is then rewarded with a treat.
“Think of it as a communication tool,” Pouliot says. “We don’t speak their language. They don’t speak ours. This is a way to tell them, ‘That’s it. That moment was it.’”
Eventually, they perform the behaviors automatically and don’t need the clicker any more. When a guide dog has its harness on and can feel slight pressure from its handler holding the harness handle, it knows it’s “at work.”
When positive reinforcement was first introduced in dog training, it was controversial. Punishment had always worked because dogs have such a forgiving nature, Pouliot says. But sometimes punitive methods produce passive, fearful animals. A guide dog can’t be fearful; it needs to have enough confidence that it can commit intelligent disobedience — refusing a dangerous command until the handler identifies an obstacle.
In the last two decades, punishment-free positive reinforcement methods have become standard in training guide dogs. Pouliot says that’s because it isn’t just more humane. It gets better results.
Pouliot is now officially retired, but she finds it hard to say no when she’s invited to “train the trainer” events like the one in Gladstone, a chance to spread the method.
“If you can make a dog happy about working, that is like a gift from God. They want to be a good boy,” Pouliot said. “Positive reinforcement builds a dog that wants to work, wants to please the handler.”
