Do you know how to train a dog? It is not easy. Can you imagine training dogs for a living? I interviewed someone who trains dogs for a living for my Capstone interview. The person I interviewed was Valerie Quick and she trains service dogs for Guiding Eyes. Guiding Eyes provides service dogs for blind people.

Valerie has been working for Guiding Eyes for 13 years and her title is Training School Kennel Manager. She started out in the kennel learning how to take care of dogs. Valerie likes everything about training service dogs except for training dogs outside in bad weather. She likes working with dogs and thinks it is one of the best jobs she ever had.

She trains labradors because they are smart. Guiding Eyes breeds their own dogs. At 8 weeks the puppies go to volunteer puppy raisers and come back when they are 16 months old. Then they get trained and the process usually takes until they ar 2 years old. Once the dogs are trained they are moved on to find their owner. They match dogs to their owner by seeing what the owner is like and seeing what the dog is like.

Have you ever been to a service dog walkathon? That’s where I went for my site visit. I went to a Blue Path walkathon in Yorktown Heights, NY at FDR State Park on May 18th. Blue Path is a company that trains service dogs for autistic kids. The walkathon was an obstacle course for service dogs. Blue Path was trying to raise money for their company.

I met a few people and asked them questions about what it’s like having a service dog. I learned how service dogs would help autistic kids and stop them from running away. I also learned there was a very popular type of service dog there which was a labrador. They said labradors were a good breed for helping kids because they are smart.

I also met some trainers and learned what they did to help train service dogs. After puppies are 8 weeks, they go to people’s houses, where they learn simple tasks like fetching and retrieving. One trainer said she would train the dogs to be social and to learn to be around people. She also said that service dogs she trains go to kids.

Blue Path assigns dogs to kids by finding dogs that will match their personalities. I learned a lot during that visit and met a lot of new people.

For my capstone, I needed to find an inquiry question. An inquiry question is a question about your topic that you want to learn about. My topic is service dogs and there are a lot of things about service dogs to learn about. First I made up questions about service dogs. I thought about training service dogs and how they help its owner. I wondered if service dogs are friendly and what kind of breeds are service dogs and more. Then I combined two of my best questions into one big question for my inquiry question. My two best questions were how do you train a service dog and how does it help its owner. Combining it to one question which is “How do you train a service dog and then how does it help its owner?”. I plan to study this by interviewing people that train service dogs and finding out what they do.