Bonding with a guide dog differs from pet love–though not because of love. All around us we see men and women who love their dogs, and children too. The little girl who lives next door has dressed her Labradoodle in her mother’s clothes–shorts and a blouse. The dog is bounding up and down the lawn–being herself–fully alive–wearing the garments of sad adulthood without reflection or displeasure. And the girl is laughing so hard she has to lie down in the grass.
Pet love is a form of resilience. Dogs cheerfully keep us going. “By your leave,” says the dog, “I will be the weight in your clock, steady, standing with and against gravity.” Don’t kid yourself–dogs know how to say these things. And sometimes they just dance around in your mother’s beach clothes.
Bonding with dogs can be silly. I dislike those cable television dog trainers who pretend for profit that creating a well mannered dog is like going to church. Dog training is really nothing more than a loving game and anyone who says otherwise is out for easy money.
A loving game. But as I’ve said, guide dog bonding is a different form of love.
At Guiding Eyes trainer Y shows a young man from the Bronx how to throw a long rope with a rubber pineapple attached. The student in question has never been out of the Bronx. Just think about that. Y is showing him how to play with a dog.
How do you teach a person to play? Give him a dog and a pineapple attached to a rope.
Y tells Malcolm to pretend he’s fishing. “Just reel your dog in,” she says. Malcolm’s dog is an enormous yellow Lab named “Herc” as in Hercules, and he’s got the pineapple and he’s running circles around a very large room–growling in a canine version of giggling, his paws scrambling on the tile floor. He’s canine electricity, all juice. “Just reel him in,” Y says again, and Malcolm grabs his end of the rope and puts his back into it. Herc raises his head, surmises the rope’s slack is disappearing, and takes up a lion’s crouch and times the moment of tension perfectly and yanks Malcolm forward–about a yard forward–and suddenly the man is laughing. He’s laughing in a new way. It doesn’t mean he’s never laughed before. It means he’s never laughed with a dog. He’s never laughed with a dog that’s already walked him through traffic with excellent results. He’s never laughed with anyone who he could trust and who also hungered to be silly.
Planet of the Blind 