AmazingRibs.com is supported by our Pitmaster Club. Also, when you buy with links on our site we may earn a finder’s fee. Click to see how we test and review products.

About Leader Dogs For The Blind

Share on:

We support several charities, but none is more dear to me than Leader Dogs For The Blind.

Leader Dogs is one of the largest schools for training service dogs in the nation, founded in 1939. About 300 dogs a year graduate from the remarkable 14 acre campus and they go on to mean independence to their new masters. Four of those graduates got their first year of training in our house. Here are some pix of a few of the five pups my wife and I have raised for Leader Dogs.

Leader Dog Sport Leader Dog Leader Dog Jazz wags From left to right: Sport, our first, is navigating the streets of Mexico City, Layla is working in Southern California, Jasmine is working in Fort Worth, and Wags is working in Northern Virginia. Below is our fifth trainee, Sunshine. All five of our pups graduated and went on to drag blind people around. Not a bad record since only about half of the trainees graduate.

Exterior of the Wienermobile In February 2009, Sunshine and I got to ride in the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile in Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. She is shown here with “Hotdoggers” Molly Fergus and Amanda Maurer. Sunshine is now working in Madrid, Spain.

Interior of the Wienermobile

Here’s the inside of the Wienermobile. That’s Molly at the wheel, her mother at left, and Mary Ann Brauneis on the right, retired owner of a popular Southside hotdog pushcart. There’s a mean sound system in this chariot.

reese and ivy In 2011 Leader Dogs paired us with Reese, the beautiful sweet Golden Retriever, above, with our pet English Pointer, Ivy. From the start she was skittish, shying awar from plastic bags. Although she trained up as well as the others, when we sent her back for grad school, the took her almost to the end and asked us if we wanted to keep her as a pet. She was skittish, and “lacked work ethic.” In other words, she was lazy. A Leader Dog has to get up in the morning ready to go to work, and she preferred sleeping late. Of course we adopted her and she is still with us.In March 2021 after Ivy died, we got back into the Leader Dog program and started training Sandy, a female Yellow Lab. We are blown away by this dog, by far the smartest we have ever worked with and that includes Molly, our pet Border Collie, who won ribbons in agility. That’s her below, at 7 weeks old, the day we were given her by the puppy breeders at Leader Dogs for the Blind.

sandy on day 1

Related articles

Published On: 3/11/2014 Last Modified: 2/25/2024

Share on:
  • Meathead, BBQ Hall of Famer - Founder and publisher of AmazingRibs.com, Meathead is known as the site's Hedonism Evangelist and BBQ Whisperer. He is also the author of the New York Times Best Seller "Meathead, The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling", named one of the "100 Best Cookbooks of All Time" by Southern Living.

 

High quality websites are expensive to run. If you help us, we’ll pay you back bigtime with an ad-free experience and a lot of freebies!

Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we don’t have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.

Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. But please don’t think of it as a donation. Members get MANY great benefits. We block all third-party ads, we give members free ebooks, magazines, interviews, webinars, more recipes, a monthly sweepstakes with prizes worth up to $2,000, discounts on products, and best of all a community of like-minded cooks free of flame wars. Click below to see all the benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive.


Post comments and questions below

grouchy?

1) Please try the search box at the top of every page before you ask for help.

2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.

3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50°F so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.

4) If you are a member of the Pitmaster Club, your comments login is probably different.

5) Posts with links in them may not appear immediately.

Moderators

  Max

Click to comment or ask a question...

Spotlight

These are not paid ads, they are a curated selection of products we love.

All of the products below have been tested and are highly recommended. Click here to read more about our review process.

Use Our Links To Help Keep Us Alive

Many merchants pay us a small referral fee when you click our “buy now” links. This has zero impact on the price you pay but helps support the site.