Guide dog volunteers celebrated

GUIDE Dogs Victoria (GDV) already has about 100 volunteers in the Geelong region but is wagging their tail to find a few more.

As part of National Volunteers Week, the organisation held a celebration on Thursday last week at the Narana Aboriginal Cultural Centre to recognise all the fantastic guide dog volunteers in the local area.

GDV chief executive officer Karen Hayes said Geelong volunteers made up about a sixth of the total across the state and did incredible work, but said GDV had experienced a recent “puppy boom” so needed even more people to help out.

“Today’s really about celebrating the enormous role our volunteers play in our ability to deliver services to people who are blind or have low vision, but there’s also a big call out for puppy raisers at the moment.

“We’ve got lots of puppies being born – we’ve got about 50 puppies in our nursery, with a couple of mums due to deliver in the next week or so.”

She said GDV now had a puppy development advisor based in Geelong to help guide the first year of training.

“In that year, the puppy raisers help the dog become socialised, there’s basic training, they look at how the dog doesn’t get distracted by other dogs or food or things in the environment.

“We don’t give them a dog and say ‘we’ll see you in a year’ – every six or eight weeks we have a formal training aspect of the program.

She said GDV would supply all the food and cover any veterinary costs for the puppies to the puppy raisers.

“Everybody says ‘oh, but how do you give it back at the end?’ I’m not going to lie; there’s always tears.

“But what I find with our puppy raisers is that they continually focus on the greater good of what they’re doing, and that is to provide a beautiful guide dog to somebody who’s blind or has low vision, and therefore give them the independence, the freedom and the safety we all, as sighted people, take for granted.”

Mandy Mitchell-Tavener knows this better than most – the Anglesea resident trained Willow, the GDV ambassador dog Ms Hayes brought to last week’s event.

Ms Mitchell-Tavener has raised 16 dogs full-time over the space of 20 years, and said she wanted to start while she was pregnant but was wisely advised to “wait a while until you apply”.

For more information, head to the Guide Dogs Victoria website.