Baráthegyi Vakvezető és Segítő Kutya Iskola

Report on the Public and Private Regulation of Guide Dog

Many Western countries have laws that relate, in some fashion, to guide dogs for the visually impaired.
These laws tend to broadly apply to all assistance dogs or service animals, of
which guide dogs are a subset.
While all the countries we studied had laws related to guide dogs and their users, we found significant variations in the extent to which governments regulate the training of guide dogs or the application process, ranging from detailed regulations in France and California to almost no regulation of the application process in Germany.
This report was granted by Réczicza White & Case LLP.
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Report (169kB)

Canine Science 2008 Conference

Is it reasonable to forbid the use of dog guides for the blind as predictors of epileptic seizures? -a case report

Tamas Mezosi (1), Andrea Pallos (1) dr., Piroska Komondi (1), Jozsef Topal (2) PhD
1 Baráthegyi Guide Dog and Service Dog School Foundation
2 Institute for Psychological Researches, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Introduction: A service dog is a dog that is trained to provide a valid medical function for the individual owner. Seizure alert dogs are one type of service dogs; they are specially trained for the prediction of epileptic seizures. Many professional dog trainers suggest that people who suffer from both blindness and epilepsy can not use guide-dog for the blind because the owners' oncoming seizures may produce dangerous situations.
Seizure alert dogs are subjected to an extensive early socialization with their owners to allow the development of social dependency and a perfect co-operation. They gradually become sensitive for the small changes of human behavior which implicate an upcoming seizure. Their attitude changes due to their anxiety, and this can be trained into a specific warning sign. Recent experiments on dog-human attachment (Topál et al. 1998, Gácsi et al. 2001) however, suggest that this kind of relationship between dog and owner can develop at adult age as well, and guide-dogs and their owners collaborate as a team, applying their very own language throughout their daily routine (Naderi et al. 2001). Our basic presumption was, that seizure predicting signs perceptible to canines can be sensed by the guide-dog, and its behaviour aimed to protect its owner takes effect. This reaction will differ from any other and even after scarce training the dog will use it as a warning. This way the dog can also be function as a seizure alert dog, protecting both its owner and itself from any harmful event., To our knowledge, however, until now nobody has trained and used service dogs with double (both guiding and seizure alerting) functions.

Methods: In our case a twenty-year old, dog loving, female, blind patient suferring from sever seizures recieved a guide-dog. The patient due to her injuries is often depressive, which is kept in balance by drug treatment. Her state of depression was constantly evaluated. Otherwise she is prominently intelligent and synergistic. Family background and supervision is assured. During the process of handing over the dog, they not only learned to move together, they also practiced contact-improving exercises and they developed an individual communication system. In the meantime the patient and her dog lived together in their home, only the patient communicated with the dog, our trainers only provided professional instructions.
Results: The dog was able to securely fortell the approach of the seizure at the time of the third seizure, exceeding our expectations incredibly soon. Throughout the next 1,5 month it warned its owner perfectely of 17 seizures. The dog never misused the sign and it never failed to warn the upcoming of a new seizure.
Conclusion: The work of the guide-dog and the seizure-predicting dog can be conciliated. As long as the individual treatment and the surveillance is guaranteed, it shall be rewarding to conduct experimental observations with provision of guide-dogs to blind and epileptic people.

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