Lat1 Task 2

Synthesis

This highly informative and emotional article discusses the creation and evolution of the blind community’s best friend, the guide dog. Although this article emphasizes the military history behind the creation of the guide dog and also boasts the various services for guide dogs for military veterans, I will be focusing on the basic concept of the guide dog itself, which is also elaborated upon in this article. From this article there are three characters that I’d like to review with each person representing the various strides that have taken place to advance the concept of the guide dog for both civilian and military uses.

The historical aspect of the guide dog began almost one hundred years ago in Germany when the German’s discovered the high level of intelligence of the German Shepherd and began to use the breed to their advantage. During World War I, the German’s utilized the breed for military support as ambulance or messenger dogs. During this same time frame the use of a dog as a guide tool for the blind was not thought about until a doctor in Germany made a chance observation of a German Shepherd actually assisting a blind patient. This observation expanded and transformed the entire German concept of what dogs were capable of doing for humans (Ostermeier, 2010). In this article, Mark Overmeier (2010) elaborates with amazing detail about a few various ways that people who are blind have come to depend on their guide dog.

America’s history began with Morris Frank, a blind American who traveled to Germany to train with a guide dog in a German school. After graduating, Mr. Frank’s first hurdle was to prove the authenticity of the program and allow the guide dog to gain the respect of the American public, demonstrating over and over again the safety of the guide dog, along with its dependability (Ostermeier, 2010). The article does not state what the public perception was when Mr. Frank and Buddy, his guide dog, arrived in the United...