Guide Dogs

The youngest has joined the 4-H group where we live. One of their first activities was this weekend. Unknown to us we have a Guide Dogs for the Blind facility near by. Saturday we went and attended a "graduation" and a tour of the facility. It was really amazing!

This is an amazing organization. This started in 1942. They only have two facilities and provide dogs to people all over North America. No public money is involved! Everything is funded by private donations. The organization has operating philosophies that are completely unique.

They actually have their own breeding program. They claim responsibility for the dogs from birth to death. The dogs go to normal families for their first year then to training at one of the facilities for their second year. When the dogs are about two years old they are paired with sight impaired person. We got to see 5 dogs paired up with someone.

The people get two weeks of training with the dog at one of the facilities. All the expenses for flights, meals and training are taken care of. The care of the dog is taken care of for its whole life as required.

The campus was really nice. There are around 150 dogs at the facility in training at any one time. There was no smell. None. No dog smell and no dog poop smell. It was pretty amazing.

Graduations are held every two weeks with about 5 people and dogs graduating. There are somewhere around 2500 dogs active in the system. When dogs are too old to be guides they are placed with families for their retirement years.

This was one charitable organization that I felt really good about. They have a small number of full time employees and a huge number of volunteers. Really top notch volunteers!

Check it out. Guide Dogs

A Good Medicine Moment

The Native Americans spoke of Good Medicine or things that occurred that were very meaningful. In my life time I have had a few of those occur while spending time outdoors. In my life the most worthwhile thing I have is my family and children. Recently Little C and I were elk hunting near Wallowa, Oregon. We spent a long day hiking through all the areas that will have elk. It was a rough weekend to be hunting due to it being a full moon, a spike hunt and the second weekend of the hunt. Most of the hunters had gone home so no one was pushing the animals around. It was a sunshine day and we hiked our legs off. Even though we didn't connect with a critter we had a nice visit with our friends and got to spend time outdoors.

I haven't been up to Wallowa Lake in a few years and I wanted to show it to Little C. I hoped that there would be some of the big bucks hanging around the park like usual.

There weren't many deer that day but we found one guy that liked our apple slices. It was pretty neat to see the look of wonderment on my son's face with that big buck picking up the apple pieces off the ground right next to the car. He wouldn't take them from his hand but almost. So we got to see this buck standing within three feet of the car munching up the pieces of apple. There was a doe there too but he had chased her off a short ditance. C threw her some pieces too.

She actually would take the pieces out of his hand before the buck came over and chased her off. I would venture to say that Little C won't forget this moment the rest of his life.

We hope to go back in the middle of winter when the snow is deep and there are more bigger bucks hanging around. We can also go to a place where the Game Comission feeds the elk. There we can usually see some monster bulls hiding in the timber close to the feeding area. DMP