Guide Dogs' principles

We have four principles that we use to guide our interactions with our dogs to gain the best outcomes for both dogs and people.

What are the Guide Dogs' principles?

Our four principles apply to all our dogs throughout their life journey, regardless of their role. The four principles – knowing, managing, training, and partnering - can be applied by all our volunteers, staff, guide dog owners and rehomers. This means that everyone ‘speaks the same language’ and uses the same thought process in their interactions with their dogs. This approach provides our dogs with predictability and consistency, ultimately producing strong human-dog partnerships based on a shared understanding of meeting each other’s needs.

Knowing each other

Your dog needs to be treated as a dog – how they experience and interpret the world is different to how you do. So, it's important to understand dogs as a species, but also get to know your dog as an individual.

Managing for success

By managing environments, situations, and your dog, you can help to keep everyone safe. Careful, thoughtful, and consistent management helps prevent your dog from practising undesirable behaviours and supports the development of behaviours that we prefer. These behaviours will become habits over time.

Training together

Your dog is raised and trained upon ethical principles, especially using positive reinforcement reward-based training to teach and establish desired behaviours. Positive reinforcement (PRT) is the most ethical way to teach behaviours and the best way to help your dog learn and create a strong partnership.

You shouldn't use physical punishment or techniques which cause fear or stress. These methods do not meet our ethical standards and are increasingly unacceptable to the public. When it's necessary to interrupt an undesired behaviour, we advise doing this in a calm, neutral way; your intention should be to provide your dog with useful information rather than correct or punish them.

Being a partnership

We're here to help people with sight loss to live actively, independently, and well. Your dog should be treated as your partner and co-worker to balance the needs of both you and your dog. Your dog should be happy and healthy, but also confident and capable in their role as a guide dog. By applying these ethical principles, you can ensure that overall, your dog enjoys a good quality of life.