Ohio State professor Christopher Gelpi keeps a crate in his office for his dog Chaz, who gets sent to the crate if a person comes into the office that is uncomfortable with dogs. Credit: Dalina Houangvilay | Lantern Reporter
When Ohio State professor Christopher Gelpi gives a lecture to his students, it’s not just him at the front of the classroom. A furry friend joins him, too.
Through the Guiding Eyes for the Blind program—a non-profit organization that teaches puppies skills to be sent to train officially as guides for a future handler with vision loss– Gelpi is able to teach his students political science and instruct his trainee guide dog skills in patience at the same time.
With his current dog, Chaz, Gelpi’s routine as his trainer includes a four-mile walk from Gelpi’s home to campus. Chaz also learns how to sit quietly with his handler until he receives further instruction. According to Gelpi, classroom exposure is an intentional way of training his dogs.
Ohio State’s Guiding Eyes president Julia Jaworski, a fourth-year in health promotion, nutrition and exercise sciences, said it is hard enough to bring dogs to class as a student, much less as the lecturer.?
“It’s the fact that he can read the body language of the dog and know exactly what the dog needs and then also be so intentional with his students,” Jaworski said. “You have your students that you’ve influenced, and then you have the dogs.”
Gelpi and his wife became involved with Guiding Eyes while living in North Carolina, and after moving to Ohio, founded the Columbus chapter of the organization in 2016. Since then, he and his wife have raised 27 puppies, with Chaz being their 28th.
“I don’t think I understood at the time what I was getting into,” Gelpi said.? “But I think that’s true of most great things that people do. You don’t really understand what you’re doing when you get into it. It’s become our joy since then.”
Gelpi instructs Ohio State students in Guiding Eyes on training from the organization’s curriculum.? The puppies are then sent to New York after this preparatory period, where they are trained further and evaluated to become official guide dogs, according to the Guiding Eyes website.?
This training includes learning commands that teaches the dogs sensory skills to better assist a future handler, as well as lessons on recognizing dog behavior, according to Gelpi.
“It’s all about building a relationship with the dog, putting the dog in situations where they can make choices and then trying to support them in a way that’s gonna help them make a good choice,” he said.
Students involved in the club can be “sitters,” where they have multiple puppies for short periods of time, or “raisers,” where they are in charge of taking care of one dog for months.
Cora Anderson, a second-year veterinary graduate student and three-time Guiding Eyes dog raiser said the program is very fulfilling.
“We desensitize them to the world in general and body handling,” she said. “These commands are also precursors to what they teach from their actual guide dog school.”
One of Anderson’s past dogs, she said, went on to save her handler’s life at a Boston crosswalk. Anderson said the dog prevented his human from unknowingly walking into oncoming traffic and guided her to the next sidewalk safely.
“Things like that, still, make me cry, because it’s so awesome and I can’t believe I was a part of something like that,” Anderson said.
Jaworski said hearing stories from the handlers of the guide dogs previously trained through Guiding Eyes gives her chills.
“You know your work and the time and effort that you put in is going somewhere,” Jaworski said. “But it is so humbling when you hear the stories of people whose independence have just skyrocketed just because of four paws that you probably walked across the Oval.”
For Gelpi, his devotion to Guiding Eyes goes beyond starting and continuing to run the club. He even avoided buying a campus parking pass to ensure he walks to work every day with his dogs, even during extreme weather.
“It’s really gotten to the point now where most of the time, if I show up somewhere on campus and I don’t have a dog, the first question people ask me is, ‘where is your dog?’ To which my response is, ‘lovely to see you as well,’ ” Gelpi said.
