The new guide dog training: e-bikes, phone zombies, busy cities

Times

21-06-2025

Nothing upsets Laurie. With 'pavement zombies' marching towards him obliviously while tapping at their phones, with ambulance and police sirens screaming in his ears, and a speeding-but-silent e-scooter flashing across his path at 25mph, he pads safely and calmly through the chaos. Still, at least there are no robots to worry about today.
Laurie is a 20-month-old labrador-golden retriever cross with a look in his eyes that could melt your heart. He's also a professional, with a job to do.
He is nearing the end of his six-month training to be a guide dog, an intense process and one which has had to change a lot in the past decade, as Britain's roads and pavements have been transformed by new technology and evolving attitudes.
'We've had to adapt fast,' said Karen Brady, 35, a training and behaviour manager at the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, known as Guide Dogs, which launched in the 1930s. Their animals are now taught to cope with a host of new hazards — and delivery robots are one of the most recent.
'We've had a lot of fun with those in Cambridge,' she said. Introduced in the area in 2022, the automated vehicles trundle along the pavement and simply stop when they detect a pedestrian. Guide dogs were initially baffled, and stopped too. 'We had to teach them to treat the robot like a car that's parked on a pavement, and find a way around it,' she said. 'The makers gave us a shell to practise with.'
Other innovations are much more widespread — and potentially dangerous. 'Electric vehicles are a big thing, because the dog owner can't hear them,' said Brady. 'E-scooters fly up past the dogs really quickly, really quietly. We've hired them sometimes and rode them around to get the dogs used to them.'
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Owners and their dogs work as a partnership, and with the human unable to perceive an almost-silent car, bicycle or scooter, the dog must be extra vigilant. The human is in charge, but the watchful dogs are trained not to move across a road if they see a danger.
There are plenty more new hazards. 'Cars have got bigger, and often park on pavements — we've taught the dogs to do a lot more work, often having to go on roads so the owner can get through the space. You get e-bikes and scooters littered all over the pavement now too, which is another big thing to find a way around. Then there are mobility scooters: we get them used to those as puppies.
'And of course there are people staring at their mobile phones, not looking where they're going. We do indoor exercises in our training centre to get the dog used to them. Outside, Oxford Street is a good place to practise.'
Modern life impinges in ways that the sighted might not consider. Glass lifts, increasingly common in shopping centres, can confuse dogs trained to avoid height hazards. 'Just seeing that the floor beneath them is moving up and down can be worrying for the dog,' said Brady.
Shared spaces, where cycle and scooter paths are integrated with pedestrian pavements, present issues too. 'We have to familiarise the dogs with new schemes — cycle lanes, floating bus stops and so on,' said Laurie's sighted handler today, specialist trainer Wayne Townley. 'You have this real grey line of where traffic sits.'
Some distractions are more traditional. This year, Guide Dogs ran a training session at Ascot to ensure the animals would not be unnerved by enormous, garish hats and fascinators. The charity said many are scared and confused by oversized headgear, which can make a familiar person look strange.
London dogs have always had to get used to the Tube. Shallower lines such as the Hammersmith & City are easiest to cope with: only those with the strongest nerve can endure the high-decibel screeching of the deep Northern and Victoria lines.
Laurie has taken it all on board, and is a model of calm purpose as he guides Townley, 58, through the pandemonium of London's West End. He effortlessly tacks around an approaching phone zombie, is unfazed by deafening sirens and traffic, and ignores a tempting discarded kebab.
'They're a lot more common than they used to be — it's littered with them round here on Saturday morning — but the dog must know it can only eat food when it's given to them,' said Brady. 'We call it food manners.'
She said most of the public are kind and considerate around guide dogs, but often do not notice that one is near them. 'People are involved in their own worlds, expected to do emails on the way to work. The modern world is such that people are looking down a lot of the time.'
There are about 3,000 working guide dogs, mainly labradors, golden retrievers or crosses of the two, which are purpose-bred. It costs £38,000 to train each dog, all of which comes from donations.
Their training begins when they are 14 months old. Most will then stay with one owner until about ten years old, when they retire to a volunteer's home to become a family pet.
Laurie will soon be matched with a visually impaired person on the Guide Dogs shortlist, which could be anywhere in the country: there is then another five weeks of training specialised to their needs.
'Sight loss has no regard for background,' said Townley, who has been training dogs for 36 years. 'We've had to familiarise them with visits to a church, or mosque, even to Emirates stadium for Arsenal games. A businesswoman user had to fly a lot, so we did trips through the airport and a couple of flights. Every owner, and every dog, is different.
'But I've been doing it for 36 years and it's still a privilege. You see the change it makes to people's lives, the freedom, the confidence. It's humbling.'
To donate to Guide Dogs, go to guidedogs.org.uk/donate-now