Summer Centered: Through a Behavioral Trait Analysis, Aileen King ’27 Seeks to Increase the Number of Successful Guide Dogs

Besides beloved family pets, there is perhaps no nobler life for a canine than serving as a guide dog for those living with disabilities. But of the thousand Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers and German Shepherd puppies who undergo extensive — and expensive — training in the U.S. each year, only about 50% at best become successful guide or service dogs, says Aileen King ’27. 

King, a prospective biology major, knows this all too well. Throughout high school, she was a volunteer puppy raiser for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a nonprofit that provides guide dogs free of charge to those with vision loss. She originally got into, she says, when her family dog was aging and did what any teenager would do: ask her parents for another one. 

“My grandfather in Ireland is blind, and some of my cousins there had actually raised two puppies,” King recalls. “I have an older brother, and our parents were looking for things for us to do, so I asked, ‘What if we raise a puppy?’”

Today, King’s commitment to service extends into her summer experience supported by the Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center. Through a virtual internship, she is conducting a principal component analysis of 3,783 guide dog puppies through data provided by Connecticut-based Canine Genetic Services. 

“It costs about $50,000 to raise a successful guide dog. It takes so much work, so much time, and so many resources,” King says. “It’s really important that we conduct this kind of research so organizations can determine what dogs will be successful from a younger age.”

The research, she says, is tied to a system called The Behavioral Checklist comprising 53 different categories that cover everything from how a puppy reacts to stimuli and wearing a harness or how focused they are on their training. She says she hopes her work will shape a more manageable set of tools for puppy evaluators to use, which, in turn, might boost the number of successful training graduates who go on to greatly benefit their owners' lives. 

After cleaning the immense amount of data drawn from labs, shepherds, and a number of golden retrievers, King is working to determine the reliability of the checklist across sex and breed. She’s also examining the temporal consistency or whether  traits remain consistent as the puppies begin to grow up. 

“If a dog shows an undesirable behavioral trait at a young age, earlier intervention might be conducted so that the dog never reaches the point where they’re actually having problems,” King says. “Right now, we don’t have a real understanding of how the traits interact with each other across ages.” 

While it took a bit of convincing to get her parents on board with her raising her first puppy, King says her mom is now raising her own. As for the three King raised, none went on to work as guide dogs. One, named Paisley, was adopted by her family. The others, Ingrid and Bocci, work with police in Connecticut in narcotics and at the state capitol, respectively. 

“Bocci is named after Andrea Bocelli,” King says. “He has an Instagram. It’s great, and we follow him.”