My essay in the June 2025 issue of Theatre Journal offers a performance history of The Seeing Eye (TSE), a charitable organization founded in the Depression era in order to systematically breed and train German shepherds (and later, other dog breeds) to work as guides for the blind. It was the first organization of its kind in the United States. That by 1990 the organization had trained 10,000 dogs to partner with blind human companions offers one measure of TSE’s success. That the popular appellation “Seeing Eye Dog” would eventually come to stand in for all guide dogs, regardless of provenance, offers another. The idea that such an organization warrants historical analysis perhaps requires little justification. But the suggestion that performance studies offers the best tools to do so may require some elaboration.
The essay’s title, “‘Honest Work Done by Honest Dogs’” is—I hope—instructive in this regard. The source of this quotation is Dorothy Harrison Eustis, an American philanthropist who lived at a chalet (and later, hybrid chalet-kennel) in Vevey, Switzerland. Eustis’s interest in guide dogs originated not with the collective fate of the blind but with the collective fate of German shepherds. Eustis was troubled by what she and many others considered to be the breed’s degeneration in recent decades. The codification of dog breeds in the late nineteenth century resulted in perceived changes to German shepherds’ physical morphology, mental aptitude, and temperament—transformations that, in conjunction with widespread changes to the use of animal labor in the period, effectively rendered the breed disabled from employment. Eustis regarded the conformation and temperament of her own German shepherd, Hans von Saarbrücken, an exception to the rule and hoped to remake the breed in his workmanlike image.
Eustis was eager to restore the breed to its working origins and excited about the range of employment options that had opened for such shepherds following World War I, from police work to military communications. She toured various European institutions to learn about the prospects of and processes for rehabilitating German shepherds toward productive employment. When reflecting on her experience visiting the school in Potsdam, Germany that drew her attention to the guide dog movement, Eustis described being struck by the “honest work done by [these] honest dogs.”[1] When I encountered this phrase while reading extensively about The Seeing Eye, I was struck by what Eustis valued in the quotidian performances of trained guide dogs. The language of honestness bore associations with authenticity, valorizing a seemingly antitheatrical performance repertoire that distinguished the dignity of their canine work from the allegedly degraded labor of dogs working in popular entertainment—and even those (seemingly) nonworking as household pets.
This sense of legibly honest canine labor turned out to be as prescriptive as it was descriptive, a normative performance theory that would help to both instantiate German shepherds as workers and communicate that the activity they undertook constituted labor. When a series of developments led Eustis to found The Seeing Eye in 1929, the organization trained guide dogs to perform in accordance with this ethos and developed an elaborate repertoire of live and mediated performance practices to communicate the fact of their canine labor as well as its honesty and its mundanity—so (seemingly) unremarkable and ordinary so as to appear as anything but theatrical.
But The Seeing Eye was not only concerned with canine labor, of course. The organization also sought to make blind Americans economically independent—for guide dog use to allow them and their family members (now freed of caregiving responsibilities) to return to work. I applied the language of “rehabilitating” above to describe Eustis’s concern with animal labor because the specific methods and outcomes she pursued paralleled those that were marshalled to resolve the alleged problem of the (economically) dependent disabled in the same period. For The Seeing Eye, both canine and human employment was at stake. Indeed, these commitments were inseparable from one another, and the porous, intersubjective embodiment demanded by the performative norms of TSE’s training and instructional practice underlined this. It is for this reason that my essay theorizes TSE’s ideological project—indistinguishable from its performance repertoire—as interspecies rehabilitation.
I have written substantively about rehabilitation’s performance history in my previous work. My first book, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (New York University Press, 2024) offers a social and cultural history of disability performance in the United States since World War II. In that book, I demonstrate how the US government’s midcentury investments in vocational rehabilitation, a policy paradigm that valued getting disabled people off welfare and into the workforce, was a fundamentally theatrical project. For example, I analyze how federally funded disability employment initiatives, such as the National Theatre of the Deaf, attempted to theatricalize the purported economic and moral virtues of rehabilitation for domestic and international audiences alike. Tracing the aesthetic and infrastructural legacy of state-funded rehabilitation theatre from the 1960s through the 1980s, I also show how disabled artists rarely fully complied with the political ideology that funded their work and even appropriated state resources to make more radical (and in some cases, anticapitalist and antiwork) art and performance.
While “‘Honest Work Done By Honest Dogs’” shares more than a couple of keywords with Disability Works, the article is not simply an attempt to consider related phenomena in an earlier context—it is not Disability Works 2.0: Now With Dogs! The path from the book to the article was far less straight forward than their shared commitments would seem to suggest. Originally, I set out to write an entirely different article about a particularly bewildering controversy surrounding representations of service animals in American theatre in the 1930s. (That essay, “Let Working Dogs Lie, Or, All About Flush: Canine Autobiography, Actor Memoir, and the First Service Animal of American Theatre” is still in the works—stay tuned!). Indeed, when I started writing this blog post, I thought I would be able to narrate the endlessly recursive research rabbit holes that took me from that essay to the piece that appears in this issue of Theatre Journal (networks of white lesbian elites! cocker spaniels breaking character! Black Beauty! Jack London!). But the more I wrote, the more I found myself drafting that article instead of narrating my research and writing trajectory.
Given my inability to narrate this, I thought I might instead focus on a key difference between Disability Works and “‘Honest Work’” (besides the shift in species). Certainly, the book and the article share a commitment to theorizing the resolutely normative aspects of rehabilitative performance: the goal of using performance to turn the once dependent disabled (whether human or canine) into what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have called “the able-disabled.”[2] In the case of TSE, this normalizing project was incumbent upon the deliberate cultivation of other social and cultural normativities through processes of casting, training, rehearsal, and public spectacle (however mundane). This is especially true with respect to race, gender, and sexuality, exemplifying what disability historian Bess Williamson has described as rehabilitation’s propensity for scripting “the familiar activities of middle-class, white, and gender-appropriate life.”[3] But this TJ essay dedicates significantly less space to theorizing how rehabilitative subjects resisted the normalizing demands of these rehabilitative regimes. This is partially a matter of word count limits (however generous!) and partially a matter of a political point I wanted to make in the final section of the essay. That is, it was important to me that the essay demonstrate how twenty-first-century efforts to constrain what constitutes a legitimate service animal (and legitimate services for that animal to provide) have their roots in the TSE’s early performance repertoires.
But my ability to discern TSE’s normalizing endeavors was predicated on the fact that this normativity’s risk of failure appeared at nearly every turn. For example, my essay highlights the range of ways in which heteronormativity governed TSE’s rehabilitative project. This includes the organization’s training of blind human rehabilitants in normatively gendered modes of comportment; leaders’ hope that partnering with a guide dog might enable their (predominately) male clients to return to competitive labor so their wives could return to unwaged housework; and, perhaps most curiously, TSE’s tendency to represent the partnership between these clients and their (uniformly) female canine guides as exemplary heterosexual coupledom.[4] Lest this last example appear as merely a whimsical aside, the works of nonfiction literature about TSE that I examine are replete with anecdotes about marital strife brought on when blind men could depend on their dogs rather than their wives for companionship and mobility alike. These repeated scenarios are interesting to me for many reasons, the most significant of which being that they highlight (albeit in a frequently misogynistic tenor) that one of the most radical forms of services that animals provide is that of friendship or kinship. This is the note my essay ends on: a suggestion that the immiseration of disabled life in the present through restrictive policies about service animals can only be effectively countered if we take seriously the friendship, kinship, and sociality that service animals offer as service—as labor.
Pet historian Katherine C. Grier has written extensively about the history of understanding nonhuman animals as friends and family members. I won’t rehearse her larger argument here, but I do want to suggest that there is something queer about this history. Grier notes, for example, that by 1845—nearly a century before TSE came onto the scene and (literally) harnessed disabled people’s productive employment to canine labor, “some people…argued for the therapeutic value of pets as friends and even as surrogate children in the lives of lonely adults.”[5] “‘Honest Work’” ends by suggesting that we need to revise our understandings of service animals and our shared quotidian performance repertoires, and I hope the essay might lay some groundwork for how we pursue that work of revision. I also hope that it might lay the groundwork for a book project that mobilizes the insights of performance studies and theatre history to understand the very queer history of service animals in the United States. To convene this queer history, ranging from blind playwright Booth Tarkington’s collaborations with the guide dogs he received from TSE, to the work of P.A.W.S. (Pets are Wonderful Support), an organization that originated with providing care for the pets of people with HIV/AIDS, I am excited to undertake this queer interspecies history of disability and companionship in my book project Companionable: A Queer and Canine History of Collective Care.
[1] Eustis, quoted in Peter Brock Putnam, Love in the Lead: The Miracle of the Seeing Eye Dog (1979; University Press of America, 1997), 24.
[2]David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (University of Michigan Press, 2015), 36
[3] Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York University Press, 2019), 58.
[4] On this last point, see dog studies scholar Neil Pemberton’s similar observation. Neil Pemberton, “Cocreating Guide Dog Partnerships: Dog Training and Independence in 1930s America.” Medical Humanities 45, no. 1 (2019): 95.
[5] Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 229.