When exploring how the evolution of service dogs in the United States, one particular name comes to mind: Dorothea Harrison Eustis.
She was born in 1886 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and eventually moved to Vevey, Switzerland when she was 35. There, she created a kennel and started to experiment in the dog breeding. Eustis was 41 years old when she started to specialize in breeding German Shepherds to become police dogs. Dorothy wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post which described a German dog guide training school for blind veterans from World War I.
The publishing of this article resulted in lots of attention, including a letter from an American man Morris Frank who promised to create a similar school in America if Eustis would train him. Eustis invited Morris Frank to Switzerland, where he spent over a month learning to work with multiple dogs. In December 1928, Eustis and Frank launched The Seeing Eye in Frank’s hometown of Nashville, Tennessee which was the first guide dog school in the country, jumpstarting the exploration of how dogs and other animals can help individuals with different disabilities and mental disorders.
In America, service dogs were not recognized legally until the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in July of 1990. Service dogs were first defined as any signal dog or other animals trained to assist a person with a disability. During the 1990s and the 2000s, people started training service dogs to help with more disabilities; dogs were trained to assist children and adults with autism, people with diabetes, veterans suffering from PTSD, and people with emotional and psychological disorders.
For a modern day look at how guide dogs are affecting daily life, the following documentary is titled "One Vision - A Guide Dog Documentary" and exhibits what it's like to raise guide dogs, the challenges the dogs face, and the cause behind it all.
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