On Monday, August 17, three Labrador puppies were driven onto the tarmac at Westchester County Airport, loaded into a small single engine plane, and flown to Florida. Not in cargo. An actual charter. It sounds like a stunt until you understand why it had to happen, and then it turns into one of the more quietly impressive logistics stories in the county.
Every Guiding Eyes Puppy Is Born in New York
Guiding Eyes for the Blind breeds and births all of its own dogs at its canine development center in Patterson, just over the county line. That is where the whelping kennel and the veterinary hospital are. Every guide dog the organization has ever produced started life in that building. At somewhere between six and nine weeks old, each puppy leaves to go live with a volunteer puppy raiser.
The Volunteers Are the Bottleneck
Here is the part that explains the plane. For years, raising a Guiding Eyes puppy meant living near one of the organization's established regions, which are concentrated in the Northeast. If you lived in Florida or Arizona or Montana and wanted to raise a guide dog, you were mostly out of luck. So Guiding Eyes built a program called Remote Puppy Raising that supports volunteers anywhere in the country, with the training and check-ins handled remotely.
Which solved one problem and created another. The puppies are in New York. The new volunteers are not. And you cannot reasonably put an eight week old puppy in the cargo hold of a commercial flight.
Enter the Volunteer Pilots
Pilots to the Rescue is a 501(c)(3) whose volunteer pilots fly at risk animals out of overcrowded shelters, usually to places where they have a better shot at adoption. A load of future guide dogs is a slightly different assignment. The organization partnered with Guiding Eyes to move puppies to their remote raisers, and on August 17 that meant a flight from Westchester County Airport down to Sanford, Florida.
Meet Betty, Gingee and Dermot
Two of them are yellow Labs and one, Betty, is black. Waiting for them in Florida were Nathalie, Talor, Hayden and Ashley, four students at the University of Central Florida. They will keep the puppies for 14 to 16 months and spend that time teaching them stairs, elevators, buses, crowded rooms, restaurants, and how to stay calm while the world does whatever the world is doing. It is a genuinely enormous amount of work and these four took it on alongside a full course load.
Then They Come Home
When the raising is finished, the dogs come back to New York for formal guide dog training at Guiding Eyes' campuses in Patterson and Yorktown Heights. The organization was founded in 1954 and has graduated more than 10,000 guide dog teams. And here is the number that should be better known around here: it provides all of it completely free of charge to the people who receive the dogs. No fee, no payment plan, nothing.
If you have ever idly wondered whether you could raise one, the answer is that Guiding Eyes is about forty minutes from most of this county and is actively looking for people. You just have to be able to give the dog back.
Photos courtesy of Guiding Eyes for the Blind and Pilots to the Rescue, both of which published images of the flight on their own channels. The Westchester County Airport photo is by RabinoWIN via Wikimedia Commons.
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