Multiple-choice reading

Ruth Hallam has a rule she repeats to every new trainer who joins her team: “The dog is not the student. You are.” After eighteen years of training guide dogs for people who are blind or partially sighted, she still believes most problems begin at the human end of the lead.

Ruth did not plan this career. She studied geography, worked briefly in a bank and, by her own account, “had never owned so much as a goldfish”. Then, one wet afternoon, she watched a young labrador refuse to cross a road with its owner, even though the green man was showing. A cyclist shot through the red light a second later. “The dog had seen something the traffic lights hadn’t,” she says. “I went home and looked up how you learn to do that.” Within a year she had left the bank.

The work is slower than most people imagine. Puppies spend their first year with volunteer families, who teach them basic manners and get them used to buses, shops and noisy streets. Only then do they come to Ruth’s centre, where training lasts another five or six months. Not every dog makes it. Some are too easily distracted by smells; others are simply too nervous in crowds. Around a third go on to different careers, often as companion dogs, and Ruth refuses to describe this as failure. “A dog that’s frightened of traffic would be miserable doing this job,” she says. “It isn’t a test they’ve failed. It’s information.”

The hardest skill to teach is what trainers call “intelligent disobedience”. A guide dog must follow instructions, but it must also know when to ignore them. If its owner says “forward” at the edge of a platform, or when a car is reversing out of a driveway, the dog has to stand still. Ruth teaches this with endless repetition, rewarding the dog every time it makes the safe choice, whatever it has been told. “You’re asking an animal to understand that it’s sometimes right to say no,” she explains. “That takes patience. Mostly mine.”

Ruth’s days rarely follow a timetable. One morning might be spent walking the same busy street four times with a young dog; the afternoon, sitting in a client’s kitchen discussing how their new partner will fit into family life. Matching dog and owner is, she says, “a bit like arranging a marriage”. A fast walker who works in the city centre needs a confident, energetic dog; a retired teacher who likes quiet walks in the park needs something calmer. Getting it wrong can mean months of frustration on both sides.

What keeps her going is the moment, usually weeks after a dog has gone home, when a client phones her. They rarely call to say the dog is perfect. More often they want to tell her about something small: walking to a café alone for the first time in years, or visiting a grandchild by train. One man, a former engineer, rang to say he had finally stopped counting his steps to the corner shop. “He’d done it for nine years,” Ruth says. “That’s what independence sounds like. It’s not dramatic. It’s just ordinary life coming back.”

She admits the job has its costs. Saying goodbye to a dog she has spent months with never gets easier, and she has stopped pretending otherwise. But she has no plans to leave. “People ask if I’d like to do something less tiring,” she says, laughing. “I tell them I tried working in a bank.”