LOCAL CHARITI E S GUIDE DOGS
PUPPY LOVE CALL THE CANINE MIDWIFE 68
Dog lover Matthew Bottomley has possibly the best job in the world. As head of breeding operations for Guide Dogs’ Breeding Centre in Leamington Spa, he oversees the safe arrival of more than 1000 adorable puppies every year. He is tasked with providing a steady supply of suitable pups to become trainee guide dogs for blind and partially sighted people in the UK so it’s a position which comes with huge responsibilities.
Next year sees the 90th anniversary of the first ever guide dog partnerships, dogs which had been trained out of a small lock-up garage in Wallassey near Liverpool. The procurement of dogs destined to be trained as guide dogs then became a very ad hoc affair with members of the public offering up their unruly and untrained Labradors which entered a training programme with varying degrees of success.
Fast forward 90 years and it’s a very different picture as Matthew explains. “Back in the 1950s Derek Freeman, who was the founding father of the breeding programme, realised if our supply of guide dogs was to be more sustainable we needed to look at starting these puppies at a younger age and choosing the right dogs.”
Initially the charity found and bought puppies, mainly Labradors and Golden Retrievers, at eight weeks old and used a vast volunteer army to take on these youngsters in their own homes to familiarise and expose them to the wider world for several months before they started their formal training, a role which continues today with puppy walkers.
The natural succession of this was to start breeding their own puppies, to the exacting specifications the charity knew the dogs needed to become successful guide dogs.
The first breeding dog was bought in 1958 and a very modest breeding operation was set up out of a house in Leamington Spa. Today the charity boasts a state of the art breeding centre at Bishop’s Tachbrook which not only supports the breeding of
LIVE24-SEVEN.COM hundreds of puppies at any one point, but usually welcomes
visitors to show them the great work that goes on behind the scenes to enable the charity to provide guide dogs to a growing number of blind and partially sighted guide dog users.
Visitors shouldn’t expect to find hundreds of puppies at the centre though. Again relying on some fabulous, generous volunteers, the puppies are nearly all bred and raised in individual’s homes. The charity currently has around 270 brood bitches and around 90 stud dogs with agreements in place that the dogs will be used primarily for the breeding of future guide dogs whilst living in a loving home environment, thus giving the puppies the best start in life.
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