Dog Guides in Dojos

This last Saturday my roommate and I both passed our belt test and achieved the green belt in shotokan, karate, a variant on traditional Okinawan martial arts and American freestyle kickboxing. While at the dojo a couple of parents asked me how my guide dog did in class. Did she get distressed when I got thrown, practiced defenses, yelled at the end of a combo, et cetera? Did she get aggressive, cause problems? This is indeed something to think about if you’re a legally blind martial artist who is considering getting a guide dog or a legally blind dog guide user who is considering taking up martial arts. Are the two compatible? Yes, they are.

I had studied martial arts in one form or another for the two years just prior to getting Prada, so I fall into the “legally blind martial artist getting a dog guide” category. I knew I wanted to continue studying the arts, but I also wanted a dog. Specifically, I preferred the notoriously combat-oriented, unpredictable, and protective German shepherd. So how does one find out if his or her furry companion do well in martial art classes? Here’s my recommended approach. Go to the first class period and just sit and watch with the dog. Keep the dog calm, but don’t soothe. If he/she gets agitated, correct. Act like everything’s perfectly normal. Then, for class day two, bring a tie-down and hook the dog up to something heavy off to the side where the dog can see the class working, and go through the lesson like normal. If the dog gets up, barks, growls, turn around and administer a sharp “pfui” and then go back to normal. When you return, or if you have water breaks, come by and give the dog lots of praise for behaving so well. After that, continue class as normal.

Now, if you’ve had your dog a while and have a general idea of how he/she will react, you could probably skip sitting out with the dog on the first lesson. I took that approach and it worked out just fine. Interestingly, Prada doesn’t get agitated at all during karate. She gets playful. When I come back to get ready to go she gets all hyper and perky and starts batting at me with her paws and play-growling and bowing. She does get upset in my acting class if I act out a distressed character. She interrupted my blocking exam last week twice by dragging her “puppy-sitter,’ a classmate I’d asked to hold her leash (there wasn’t anything heavy enough to tie her down to), across the room to get to me when my character got upset. This I didn’t mind at all and neither did my scene partner. We got comic relief out of it and a couple of seconds to recollect our lines. Yay Prada  During the belt test I had a slightly stronger and more dog-smart person hold onto Prada’s leash and she behaved herself beautifully.

This, of course, implies that blind and visually impaired persons can participate in martial arts. I happen to have met somewhere around twenty to thirty VI martial artists, one or two of which were instructors. There’s an urban legend going around about the Way of the Shadows, which is supposedly an ancient Japanese martial art used by blind ninjas, but in general we blind folks do just fine in almost any martial art class. Judo and jujitsu and related arts tend to be more popular with the VI community than traditional karate because these styles focus more on holds and prolonged contact than the others. If a blind person has physical contact with a person they can determine through angle and muscular tension where the rest of the person’s body is. Once we lose that contact we’re groping in the dark, quite literally. If I take hold of someone, I want to remain in contact with him or her as long as I can so that I have that knowledge of where the rest of him or her is, and where he or she will be in the very near future. This makes practices like judo and jujitsu that focus on holds and grappling ideal for us. Karate is much more strike-and-block oriented, which affords limited contact. It is possible, but not easy, for VI’s to work this style.