Co-Creating Guide Dog Partnerships: Dog Training and Interdependence in 1930s America

This article scrutinises issues around disability and dependent (interdependent) agency, extending these to nonhuman animals and service dogs, with a sustained reference to the training of guide dogs. It does this through a detailed engagement with the training methodology and philosophy of The Seeing Eye guide dog school in the 1930s, exploring the physical, bodily and instrumental means through which the guide dog partnership, and the identity of the instructor, the guide dog and the guide dog owner, jointly came into being. The novelty of the article lies in how it reconsiders what interdependence meant and means from the perspectives drawing from historical and sociological literature on dog training. In doing so it opens up new ways of thinking about service animals that recognise their historical contingency and the complex processes at work in the creation and development of interdependent agency.

This article has two central aims. First, it aims to explore the issues around disability and dependent (interdependent) agency, extending these to nonhuman animals and service dogs, with a sustained reference to the training of guide dogs. I will do this through a historical exploration of the training methodology and philosophy of The Seeing Eye guide dog school during the 1930s, exploring the role of the instructor and the nature of the training of humans and dogs. The other aim, with which I will begin, is to use this reconstruction of a historically-situated instance of dependent agency to show the value of reconsidering what the interdependence of dog training has meant, historically and sociologically.