I follow the actor James Dreyfus on Twitter, because I liked him in Gimme Gimme Gimme and The Thin Blue Line, and because his opinions seem to be refreshingly un- and often anti-PC.
Dreyfus recently tweeted about a device that the owner of a blind dog had made for the dog, to stop the dog bumping his nose into things, and instead bumping the device into things before his nose got there. It looks like a sort of horizontal halo, with a curve curving out in front of the dog’s nose. As a result, the blind dog became willing to wander around, whereas previously he’d been too scared of bumping his nose on things. There’s video, showing how this device works and what a difference it is making.
James Dreyfus is in favour of kindness to animals, as am I, and he complimented the owner for his kindness and inventiveness, as do I.
When I went a-googling on the subject of blind dogs, I discovered that you can actually buy a device like this, as one of Dreyfus’s commenters points out. It’s called a halo guide, although it doesn’t do much in the way of guiding. It just takes the hurt out of bumping into things. But, it is sort of guiding, because presumably the dog gets to learn his way around.
But, these halo guides are quite expensive, and anyway, how would you know beforehand what are they called, or even that such a thing already exists? How do you go looking? I got lucky. (Before I realised that a commenter had said this.)
However, what I was trying to find out was if any blind dogs are assisted by guide dogs. But if you google that, Google just sees “blind” “guide” “dogs” and assumes the dogs are for blind humans, as they mostly are of course. Try telling Google that you want to know about a guide dog and a blind dog. Can’t be done. I couldn’t do it, anyway.