From: Pete Donahue 
Subject: Re: Seeing Eye's bad dogs
Hello Harvey and listers,
I will stay by my gun on this one.  I for one would welcome a shorter stay
at a guide dog school.  For one thing there is a lot of down-time; time
one spends sitting on a van, or in the dorm at ehe school.  If the schools
could be staffed in sucha way that more time is spent in training then
shorter class stays are possible.  Infact, one school, The Fidelco Guide
Dog Foundation and severalother smaller schools have all ready proved that
it can be done.  They take about ten days to train a team, but much of
this traing is done one-on-one and the training is done in the blind
person's home area.  Perhaps other schools ought to look seriously at this
arrangement and consider training more students in this mannor.  I for one
would rather be trained with my dogg in my home area instead of packing up
my life and spending a month at a school wasting half of the time sitting
around.  And I've felt this way long before Peggy verbvalized what I have
been thinking about for a number of years.  I just don't have these kind
of hang-ups.  If people want toleave the room when a member of our
national board comes up to speak that's their problem.  They just better
not be complaining about the kind of training they receive or how guide
dog users treat their dogs at our National Convventions.  For god sakes we
need to cut this kind of crap out and begin to expect a level of
performance out of guide dog schools just we do of other agencies in the
field.
And Finally, we need to get over our hang-ups about who speaks to us on
guide dog use.  Perhaps thost who walked out missed entirely what Peggy
was saying which has been repeated above, that we must set the performance
levels for guide dog schools and not leave it to the schools themselves.
We've gone down that road to long.  This reminds me of the days when most
of the division's time was spent on teaching people how to clean up after
their dogs rather than discussing issues of pressing importance.  This
kind of thing needs to stop or all of us will be loosers in the end.
Finally, Harvey, have you contacted Dr. Gabbias tooffer your services as a
speaker on guide dog training for this summer's NAGDU Meeting?
Take care and have a great day.
Peter donahue
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