Outsmarting The Guide Dog

Guide dogs love their work. They thrive on guiding their owners safely in all environments. They revel in being allowed to go into shops, cinemas and restaurants - unlike their fellow canines who are tied up outside looking forlorn and bereft. And they absolutely glow with the responsibility of being in charge.

Well, that’s the theory. And it has been true up until now for my guide dog, Lucy.

But in recent times, she’s showing signs of feeling bored with her constant hum drum routine work. I can almost hear her planning her retirement - days spent lying on the couch, feet in the air, or checking out the local parks with a mob of scruffy and rebellious ex-guide dogs. She sees herself eating anything she wants, not worrying about putting on weight, and generally living it up.

How do I know what’s going through her mind?

Lucy’s displaying some interesting signs of her boredom. The most significant one is that she slows down almost to a crawl when on the harness and working one of our routine walks. In fact, she was going so slowly the other day that a neighbour driving past us actually stopped her car to see if we were all right!

It doesn’t matter how much I try to encourage her, I just can’t get her to walk at her normal pace. I say things like, “there’s a huge biscuit waiting for you when we get there”, and “you’ll get dinner when we get home”, but to no avail.

Now, she’s very clever, because at first, I got very worried about whether she was in pain or had something terrible like dogggy leukaemia. I had the vet check her out and had people watch her when she moved around without the harness. Lucy knows I’m a softie and she milks it to the max.

But I’m not that gullible. When I take Lucy somewhere different, somewhere she hasn’t been to before, or hasn’t visited for a while, she works like a dream. Her movement is fluid, confident and fast.

Ergo, she is bored with the regular stuff, the stuff I need her to do.

The solution? Easy, I’ve got to trick her. And I can do this in two ways. The first is to go to my regular haunts, but by different routes each time. Now I’m not sure how long it will take her to work this out, or how many different routes I can take to the same place without actually going backwards, but I’ll give it a shot. The only drama is that it might take me twenty minutes to get to Point A instead of the usual five!

The second solution might be better. I’ve noticed that Lucy works really well after she’s been left at home, say if I go to a restaurant and don’t take her. So if I leave her more often, she might get worried and work really well. I can’t keep going to restaurants and cafes or theatres, so my friend in America gave me an idea. And that is to just leave the house, find somewhere to hide for a while, and then return. I wonder what my neighbours will think of me squatting down behind our front wall for about half an hour every day?

Who will win, Lucy or me? Is the dog smarter than the human, or the human smarter than the dog?

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