Through the eyes of the blind...
When most people think about blindness they think of a person who was born blind or when someone grows old and loses their sight. The truth is there are many different reasons and different ages that can affect blindness.
There are diseases that can cause loss of eyesight; cataracts, glaucoma, uveitis, age-related macular degeneration, trachoma, corneal opacity, and diabetic retinopathy. The most common out of this group are cataracts, which make up almost 50%. Of the millions of people blind in the world, 70 to 80 percent are able to get all or some of their sight back through different treatments.
Jeff Molzow is one of the 161 million people world wide who suffers from a visual impairement. Though Molzow could see when he was born, he lost his sight due to his optic nerve has disconnected itself.
Molzow gets up every morning at 5:45 to let his dog out and then cooks breakfast, before leaving the house he puts a harness on his guide dog, Kip, and together they head to school. Having lost his ability to see, Jeff relies heavily on Kip to get around.
So how does a dog get trained to become a guide dog and how long does this training take?
''Training a Seeing Eye dog is a multi-step process. When the dog is about eight weeks old, it is placed in the home of a volunteer puppy-raiser, where it is taught basic obedience and socialization and given lots of love. When it's about 18 months old, the dog returns to the organization where it first came from and begins a four-month course of training with a sighted instructor. When the dog passes this phase, it's matched with a blind person. The person and the dog then train together, under the supervision of a sighted instructor. Someone training with his or her first dog participates in a 27-day training session. For someone training with a second or subsequent dog, the session lasts 20 day." *
*TheSeeingEye.Inc