by Jen Reeder

As a working mom with three kids, Tracy Boyd has her hands full. Her kids, who are 6, 10 and 17, keep her busy with all of their after-school sports, and she’s pregnant with her fourth child. This would be a lot on anyone’s plate, but Boyd is also blind. So she relies on her guide dog, Chiffon, to help her locate the elevators when she goes to the doctor’s office or help her lead her kids to their sporting events.

“She’ll show me an empty seat, or the bleachers,” Boyd says. “She has brought a lot to my life … the independence that she provides to me.”
Though Boyd lives in Portland, Ore., Chiffon was raised and trained as a puppy in Durango. Her “raisers,” local residents Jim and Sue Mooney, are volunteers with Guide Dogs for the Blind, a California-based guide dog training school.

“It’s time consuming but very rewarding,” Sue Mooney says. “We really feel it’s a way to give back.”

The Mooneys are currently training their third potential guide dog, Ryder, a black Lab who was 10 weeks old when they received him (the organization breeds Labradors and golden retrievers for favorable traits like mellowness). They train him for future service by putting on his guide dog harness and exposing him to as many different kinds of people and situations as possible – the goal is for guide dogs to be calm and obedient in all circumstances, even if there are loud noises or distractions like other dogs.

“We do take them everywhere we go,” Sue says. “I take him to church with me, we just came from City Market – sometimes in stores kids will come up and say, ‘You know, a dog isn’t supposed to be in here’ and we’ll explain, ‘This is a helper dog.’”

There are frequent meetings with other Guide Dogs for the Blind volunteers to go over training methods, such as teaching the puppies to relieve themselves only in special places, and never playing potentially exciting games like fetch. They do get time off from working; once their harnesses are removed at home, the dogs can play in the yard or socialize with other dogs. If training goes well, when the dogs are about 15 months old, the Durango raisers meet the puppy truck in Grand Junction to return the dog to Guide Dogs for the Blind. Because they grow attached to the dogs they raise, the Mooneys like to get a new puppy at the same time that they drop off the dog they’ve just raised.

“It really helps when you get a new puppy right4 away, because when we got Ryder, we were saying goodbye to Chiffon, and the puppy truck is driving away and I’m crying, and Ryder is licking the tears off my face. So that really helped,” Mooney says.

After being dropped off with the puppy truck, the 15-month-old puppies travel to Portland for a final three months of training. The raisers are sent weekly progress reports during the final training, and then are invited to the graduation ceremony at which the dogs are placed with a blind person who they will guide.

“It’s fun getting to meet their new people,” Mooney says. “’Handlers’ is the official term, but I just say ‘their new moms.’”

It is unusual for a small, remote town like Durango to have a Guide Dogs for the Blind program. It started here in 1990 when Mancos-resident Darla Welty and her husband relocated from California, where she had been raising guide dogs for years. Welty, the volunteer Puppy Raising Leader for Southwest Colorado, recruited raisers from the region because a minimum of three raisers is necessary to form and maintain a club. It is critical to never let the club lapse; Grand Junction had less than three raisers, lost its club status and hasn’t been able to restart since.
“We’re always looking for puppy raisers,” Welty says.

She says people interested in becoming puppy raisers should visit www.GuideDogs.com for more information about what the job entails. Then, they must attend three meetings and have a home visit (Welty inspects homes to be sure they are puppy-proofed) before filling out the application.

“There are a lot of people who say, ‘I could never give them up.’ But when you do this project, it’s a group project. We trade the puppies, we meet as a group, and we are always aware that these are puppies that we have to raise for somebody else,” she says.

Puppy raisers are supported by puppy sitters, a pool of substitute trainers who take over duties when the raisers need to go out of town. (The group can always use more puppy sitters as well.) Nancy Wharton, co-owner of DurangoSpace, has been a puppy sitter for the last few years because she can only raise dogs on weekends due to her job.

“I’d love to do more,” Wharton says. “It’s just a really nice group of people and dogs. And it’s fun to be around such well-behaved dogs.”

Welty says Durango’s restaurants, schools and other establishments have been largely supportive of Guide Dogs for the Blind by allowing the dogs inside. Raisers have special cards proving that the dogs are in training, and the organization insures the dogs so that institutions aren’t liable when they allow dogs on the premises. However, some restaurants refuse to admit the dogs because they are in training instead of working for blind people, despite the fact that Colorado passed a law in 1995 (S.B. 95-029) making it a misdemeanor for businesses to deny entrance to guide dogs in training.

“All businesses should know that there is a Colorado law that allows businesses in Colorado – and that includes restaurants – to accept dogs in training the same way they accept actual working dogs,” Welty says. “It’s very important for these dogs to have the experience of going out and being in public and being required to be well-mannered, no matter if there’s noise or exciting things going on or whatever.”

That exposure and training pays off – Guide Dogs for the Blind has graduated more than 12,000 dogs since its inception. Another Durango graduate raised by the Mooneys, Peppermint, now lives with Yvonne Stewart in Delta, British Columbia. Peppermint is Stewart’s first guide dog, and the 42-year-old college student says she’s been helpful “in more ways than I ever imagined.” Peppermint recognizes Stewart’s friends when they’re on campus and leads her to them, locates staff in stores, and even helps bridge the gap in communicating with others.
“People are more willing to approach you when you have a dog than when you have a cane,” she says.

She says she is grateful to all the staff and volunteers at Guide Dogs for the Blind who worked to raise Peppermint, a point driven home at the graduation ceremony.

“I just felt there was such a collective effort there to help me, personally. It was emotional,” Stewart says. “She’s changed my life – there’s no doubt about that.”

For more information about becoming a puppy raiser or sitter for Guide Dogs for the Blind, contact Darla Welty at 970-533-7231. To donate, visit www.GuideDogs.com.