Why Seeing Eye Dogs Are So Expensive To Breed And Train | So Expensive | Business Insider

Guide dog trainer Sean is training 18 month old Emerson to disobey, or more specifically when to disobey. When there's oncoming traffic, Tom taps Sean on the shoulder. Sean moves to cross the street. It's Emerson's job to disobey and guide Sean to stay put and stay safe. This is one of the most important tests for a future seeing guide dog. But it's just a sliver of how the organisation prepares its pups for the job. At the Seeing Eye, geneticists look at doggy DNA to breed pups with the best chance of becoming successful guide dogs. But it's not as simple as adopting a house pet. It costs the Seeing Eye about $75,000 to breed, train and match each Seeing Eye dog. And about 40% of pups don't make it to the end of the programme. So what makes a successful Seeing Eye dog and why are they so expensive? The making of a Seeing Eye dog starts with breeding, requires multiple stages of training and hinges on the bond between handler and guide dog. But getting to graduation takes over two years and a lot of effort. What Ivy is doing now, avoiding the train tracks despite Erin's command, is the most unique concept a Seeing Eye dog needs to understand. Intelligent disobedience. Today Erin Hensley, a Seeing Eye trainer, is using a railway platform in Morristown, New Jersey to practice with guide dog in training, Ivy. We were just working on what we call platform refusals. So we kind of encouraged the dog to get close to the edge of the platform and her job is to go anywhere but there. Erin repeatedly leads Ivy to the edge of the train tracks. So you saw in the beginning she kind of drifted in whatever direction was opposite while still kind of keeping the same orientation. And then as I really pressured her to be like, no, no, I think we should turn left or turn right. To approach the edge of the platform, she started to get more insistent and even at times wanted to kind of show me the opposite edge. Because this hill won't kill me, that one will. So she was like, I'll show you the other side of the platform, but I'm not going to show you the side that's going to make us fall into the train tracks. When Ivy does a good job, Erin reinforces her with plenty of praise and pets. Intelligent disobedience is absolutely essential for Ivy when navigating traffic, crowds and any other obstacles a person may encounter. She did a great job. She's a very strong dog as far as platform refusals. Ivy's skills come from a lifetime of preparation and training. Every Seeing Eye dog is born and bred at the organisation's breeding facility, specifically to help people with blindness and low vision. The building is purposefully separated from the rest of the campus to prevent illness among the approximately 500 puppies born there each year. Only about 200 of them will become Seeing Eye dogs or enter the breeding programme. Those dogs need to be temperamentally suited to guide work. They have to enjoy and have an aptitude for what they do, but also they have to be healthy and hopefully long-lived. Katie Evans is a canine geneticist. One of her main jobs is to understand the genetic potential of a dog before it's even conceived. The two kind of conflicting slightly aspects of my role are trying to select for things that we want while trying to preserve genetic diversity. Exclusively selecting for specific traits can quickly lead to inbreeding, so Katie uses ancestry tables that go back 95 years. This kind of selection tends to focus on the health of the dog, since personality-wise, Seeing Eye dogs can range widely. One of the things we always say about guide dogs is that really there is no ideal guide dog. I think the only things that are really common to all of them is that they have to want to do the job and they have to be healthy. This research allows the Seeing Eye to spot certain mutations that could disqualify a dog from the training. Progressive retinal atrophy, which causes a dog to slowly lose its vision, is now completely eradicated from the programme. Genetics is just one piece of the pie, however. We're trying to produce dogs with the best genetic potential, but then we place them with puppy raisers and their role is to maximise the likelihood of them reaching their genetic potential. Puppies start training to become Seeing Eye dogs the moment they come into the world. Their socialisation starts from day one. Peggy Gibbon is Seeing Eye's Director of Canine Development. So they're handled daily from the time they're born. The staff will handle their paws, handle their ears, cuddle a little bit with them. These first few weeks are all about acclimating these brand new puppies to anything they might encounter in the outside world. The staff who work with them will wear funny costumes so that they look a little different all the time. Big sunglasses, big hats. There are also tapes that we'll play with sounds of thunderstorms, tea kettles, children, traffic. Once the puppies are a bit more mobile, they're let loose in the puppy playroom. Yellow Labrador puppies chew on toys, roll through tunnels and wag their tails. And while it looks chaotic on the surface, everything in the room has a purpose. There are toys hanging from the ceiling so that the puppies are looking up because overhead obstacles for them as they grow up are particularly challenging. The inside of this building is all these puppies now for the first seven weeks of their lives. The full cost of raising, training and matching a Seeing Eye dog with a handler comes out to around $75,000. For context, a 2024 study put the average lifelong cost of owning a pet dog in the U.S. anywhere from $19,893 to $55,132. So the cost, if you look at it as for the life of a team, it makes it a little more understandable. Funded solely through donations, the organization creates about 260 partnerships a year. But these puppies are not quite there yet. At seven to eight weeks, pups like Zoe leave campus to live with a puppy raiser until they are about two years old. This gives these guide dogs in training their first taste of real-world experience. Puppy raisers are different from trainers. They're volunteers who bring these dogs into their homes to housebreak and expose them to all sorts of new experiences. Megan Woss will make sure Zoe, a five-month-old Labrador-Golden Retriever mix, learns the basics like sit, stay and how to behave on a ferry. Megan and Zoe are attempting to board a ferry from Weehawken, New Jersey to New York City. It's an official seeing-eye outing designed to expose the puppies to common experiences a handler might need their dog to guide them through. And while the main goal of today's adventure is getting used to riding a ferry, puppy raisers like Michelle Barlack treat each dog as an individual. One of the things that we're going to be looking for today with Geppetto is that he can get really excited when he sees people. And it's really important for a guide to know that they cannot just jump on strangers and get distracted by people when they're working and on the job. And so he's learning that when he's wearing this vest, he is working. Learning is the key word here because the puppy phase can get a bit chaotic. But things like age-appropriate rowdiness aren't enough to disqualify puppies from becoming guide dogs. As a puppy, he's going to have mistakes. He's probably going to get a little rambunctious at times. And we'll work with him on that. He'll get some commands to settle down. Our instructors are full-time paid staff who have received years of training in how to work with guide dogs. So there's a lot that they can do with a dog when it returns to the seeing eye. Most puppies will get the chance to go on and work with the seeing eye's official trainers. We say career change because often our dogs who don't make the program go on to other kinds of service careers. And we also recognize that even if their future is to become somebody's pet, that's also an important career too. Puppy outings also give raisers the opportunity to assess how the dogs walk. The pace at which they walk and the amount of pull they have when they get the harness on is unique to each dog. We want them to pull into the harness. That's really key to how they guide. So when they guide a person, they guide them by pulling. Geppetto will live with Michelle until he's about two years old. Then he'll return to the seeing eye's campus for formal training. It's difficult to say until he goes back and he really enters the training program if he will graduate. But I think he's going to make a wonderful guide dog. More advanced training involves something called a blindfold walk. Sean McDonald, another seeing eye trainer, is walking around Morristown with his guide dog in training, 18-month-old Labrador, Emerson. Sean puts on a blindfold to get rid of any unconscious cues he might be giving Emerson as they walk. Tom Pender, Sean's training manager, follows them to make sure they are safe and to help them test Emerson's ability to keep them out of traffic. When traffic is in front of them, Tom taps Sean on the shoulder. He wants Sean to move forward and he wants to see how Emerson reacts. But when Sean goes to walk into the street, Emerson disobeys, keeping his paws firmly on the ground. On these walks, Emerson is being tested on his ability to keep himself and his handler safe, his confidence and his focus. Were you concerned about the squirrels? We were. Yeah, he did pretty darn good today. I definitely could feel his reaction a little bit, but the fact that he didn't really react and kept me safe the entire time was a good thing. Well done, Emerson. Dogs who make it through training still need to be matched with their handler. First-time students stay on campus for about 25 days to meet, get to know and learn how to work with their Seeing Eye dog. Room and board and even travel are part of the package. I lived in Chicago at that time and I was flown here and back. I was fed amazing food, given amazing instruction that has served me well to this day. Melissa Olman is the Seeing Eye's Senior Advocacy and Government Relations Specialist, but she's also a former graduate. So this is Luna. She is a Yellow Lab Golden Cross and she is the best dog in the world. But Luna wasn't the only one to receive training. Melissa stayed on campus for three and a half weeks, making sure their personalities matched and to receive some instruction herself. I had been used to traveling down a block with my cane, encountering objects because a cane is an obstacle detector and a dog is an obstacle avoider. You know, probably even in class, I was just getting a foretaste of how Luna would save my life so many times. Of the $75,000 it takes to raise, train and match a Seeing Eye dog, most graduates only pay about $150 out of pocket. Some pay even less. She also came with equipment, right, like a harness and a leash and things that were very carefully crafted. After she takes Luna home, Melissa is then responsible for the care and costs of raising her. But the Seeing Eye offers assistance to graduates for the rest of their dog's careers. So when I had a tricky intersection that I was dealing with a few weeks after I left the Seeing Eye, they came out to visit me and helped me with that intersection. You know, remember, I was in Chicago. The Seeing Eye is located here in Morristown, New Jersey.