Guiding Eyes for the Blind graduates to wed

Graduates of Guiding Eyes for the Blind will be tying the knot soon.

Guiding Eyes for the Blind provides guide dogs for those with blindness or other visual impairments, and in a touching story, two human graduates who met through the program will be getting married soon.

Guiding Eyes is a nonprofit organization that breeds, raises and trains guide dogs, and then trains students how to work with their canine partners.

Five years ago, Patsy, from Phoenix, Arizona, and Ryan, from Seattle, Washington, met while in the three-week-long residency portion of the training program at the Guiding Eyes campus in Yorktown Heights, New York, which is about an hour and fifteen minutes north of New York City.

More specifically, they kept running into each other because their dogs, Portland and Genseng, kept finding ways to meet up. Their pups must have studied Pongo and Missus’s actions in Dodie Smith’s novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians in getting their humans together.

Patsy and Ryan’s wedding will be held in Las Vegas on Saturday, October 12, and instead of gifts, they are requesting that people donate to Guiding Eyes, which can be done here.

They hope to raise $5,000 for the program, so they can name a future guide dog puppy Wilson, after a beloved grandmother. It takes about $50,000 in total to fully train and outfit a guide dog team.

Portland and Genseng will have roles in the wedding ceremony, which will have a Guiding Eyes theme.

The couple will live in the Seattle area following the wedding.

Guiding Eyes for the Blind was founded in 1954 by Donald Kauth, with over seven thousand graduates since, and they are the only guide dog training school with their own MRI machine at the onsite veterinary hospital.

If a canine candidate washes out of the program, they are released to become a pet, just like what happened to Ranger earlier this year.

Please consider donating to their fundraiser as a small way to help celebrate their big day, and help the community as well.