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Peering into the pooches’ peepers: Calgary vet provides special service for service dogs

Click to play video: 'An eye-opening experience: annual check-ups for Calgary service dogs'
An eye-opening experience: annual check-ups for Calgary service dogs
WATCH ABOVE: Whether they’re helping someone who’s blind, deaf or physically disabled, having good eyesight is important for a service dog. As Gil Tucker shows us, they got a chance for a check-up Monday, on a visit to a vet with a vision – May 2, 2016

No matter how many dogs he sees in a day, Dr. Brian Skorobohach said he never gets tired of looking into their eyes.

And it’s a good thing Skorobohach never tires of it, because he was gazing into a lot of canine eyes on Monday – 65 pairs of them, to be exact.

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His Calgary clinic, the C.A.R.E. Centre Animal Hospital, was hosting the ninth annual National Service Dog Eye Exam Day, providing free check-ups for service dogs, along with puppies training to become service dogs.

Whether they work helping people who are blind, deaf or physically disabled, it’s vital that the dogs themselves don’t have vision problems.

Volunteer puppy-raiser Cynthia Hlynski said, “they spend a lot of time retrieving things that people have dropped from their wheelchairs, so vision is very important.”

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And even after donating his services for almost a decade, examining the dogs’ eyes is always one of the highlights of the year for Skorobohach.

“It’s just fascinating to see,” he said. “I never get tired of it”.

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