2mo ago

TIL guide dogs for the blind are called seeing eye dogs because they originally came from an organization called The Seeing Eye.

seeingeye.org

Seeing Eye® | Guide Dogs for the Blind & Independence Training

10 comments

"That's my blind seeing-eye dog."
"Boy, what good is a blind seeing-eye dog?"
"The dog isn't blind, moron, I am!"
Cool! It says the founder was inspired by how someone in Germany trained dogs to guide blinded WW1 veterans! In England they're called guide dogs because the first ones there came from an organization called Guide Dogs. Also they guide.
- Are you sure they aren't called 'Blindenhund'
- In Australia, they are also called guide dogs, for the same reason. And for the same other reason too.
  Exactly the same, in fact, since our Guide Dogs was started by a bloke from the OG English crew back in the 50s. Not sure what blind people did before that, just kinda wandered around and hit things with sticks I guess.
Good things it wasn't called "The Hand that Gropes."
- That's Trump's organization.
As an official representative from Lord Sauron, I would like to point out that his intellectual property has been violated here.
I mean, sure? But the organization named themselves after what they planned on doing, which was training seeing eye dogs.
So a less interesting way of saying it is that they're the first organization that wanted to train seeing eye dogs, and they named themselves after what they planned on doing.
- Who the hell would've said "seeing eye" to describe normal dogs that have been trained to guide the blind? Now let me go back to petting my breathing lung cat.
  
  I'm just saying. They made the name because that's what they were calling the trained dogs. It's not like they were already an organization that then started to train dogs.

10 comments