Right, and the conversation thread this started with was she hypothetically had a dog like mentioned in Yllaria’s post.
If you act like **Hyperlastic ** then you have bigger issues then cruises because you’ve apparently gone off your meds or never sought treatment.
If the cruise elected to cut costs by not having a wheel chair ramp would that be okay? Crips should stay home?
Of course she creates it herself. Anxiety doesn’t fall at random from clouds. And I have no idea why you put quotation marks around the word as if anxiety isn’t real. But no one intentionally creates anxiety for themselves.
Often it manifests itself both physically and mentally. My father had anxiety so bad that he could walk only short distances and then he would have to sit down. A concert pianist that I used to know threw up before every performance. I sometimes feel like I am smothering and can’t get enough air unless I lie in the floor. Some people feel like they are having heart attacks. All these are physical expressions of anxiety.
Mentally, anxiety causes panic and confusion. Items on shelves in a supermarket seem to run together and the aisles become confusing. I feel overwhelmed and incapable. I have no sense of control. Often I will break out into a cold sweat or start crying and won’t be able to stop. At my worst, I have confused time and place – but that’s been a very long time.
Never would I intentionally bring about these feelings and physical reactions on myself anymore than a diabetic intentionally brings on hyperglycemia. They are part of a disability. Don’t limit your yourself in your effort to limit others.
Contrapuntal, if you live near a medical school they will often arrange of those who need help to see a psychiatrist at a very low cost. Or sometimes there are facilities with sliding scales. Try calling your State Department of Mental Health.
I have no idea what this means, or how it pertains to your query about seeing eye dogs.
So what? Why shouldn’t the cruise line accommodate me? If she can claim, without substantiation, the need for special treatment, why can’t I?
Again you’ve lost me. What the fuck does that have to do with the topic at hand? How is enforcing a rule against pets remotely similar to deciding not to install wheelchair ramps?
Zoe, thanks for the kind thoughts.
Did you read the post I referenced? If so do you dispute that was a highly trained service dog?
Ahh I see your confusion. You seem to be under the impression I said without substantiation. Would you please tell me where I said anything like that? If you can’t would you kindly stop putting words in my mouth?
Because if it’s a service animal then it’s accommodating a disability.
I just can’t make sense of the sentence. What is a conversation thread? And what does it matter if she bonds with dog or not? If it’s a seeing eye dog it is by definition allowed.
Where in the OP does it say that the woman substantiated a disability that required a service dog?
And if it isn’t, it isn’t. Is a depression dog a service animal? My dogs help with my depression. Can I insist that everyone accommodate me? Can I take my 80 lb. Rotttweiller into the Children’s Museum just 'cause it makes me feel better? Even though half the parents would freak out?
That clear up any confusion?
You responded to this :
With this :
To which I said this :
So no, it clears nothing up. He’s talking about the OP, I’m talking about the OP, and so far no one in this thread has cited anything remotely proving that a depression dog is a service animal.
So if he was talking about the OP why the fuck did he quote me instead of quoting the OP?
Ask him.
Again, I think that seeing eye dogs work precisely because they’re providing service for a rare, unambiguous condition. A person is blind or not: it’s not subjective, it’s easily quantified. Depression is far more of a spectrum, lacks clear cutoffs. Blindness is really rare, so making accommodations for a blind person doesn’t inconvenience anyone very much. Depression is (in our society) relatively common, so making accommodations will be more of an inconvenience.
Service animals are for truly exceptional cases, under the current system. If they cease to be for the true exceptional cases, then the laws need to change drastically.
Or I could take a leap of faith and assume when someone quotes something I’ve said then they’re responding to something I’ve said and not just quoting random posts for the hell of it.
Left Hand of Dorkness, what, just as effective, thing would you replace service animals with?
And I’ll take the same leap and assume that when you quote what someone has said, you are actually responding to their post, and not some other one.
Meanwhile, should I be allowed to take my Rottweiller into the Childrens’s Museum, even if she scares the hell out of half the patrons? She makes *me *feel better, and that’s what matters, right?
That would be a good choice since I always do exactly that. If someone nitpics me out of context however I will provide context.
Would a Rottweiler pass professional screening, training, and what not to be a service dog? If yes then yes, if no then no. The afore mentioned fear, although misplaced IMHO (every rottweiler I’ve seen has been a big baby that wants petted), would prolly rules rotts out.
You seem to be fixated on attacking a position I don’t hold, but you keep quoting me like you believe I hold it. I have never once said people should be able to drag along yappers just because. In fact I’ve said and passionately argued the opposite.
What I have said is if this lady’s dog has passed screening, training, and what ever else is needed to be a service dog to help her manage a disability then yes she has a service dog and should be given the same consideration other people with service dogs are given.
There are Rottweilers serving as service dogs with the police and military. Its quite a shock for some people to see my brother’s German Shepherd taking up most of the floor of a bulkhead row on an airplane, but I don’t think anyone has every complained.
I can offer a personal testimony on this issue. I have not reviewed the relevant scientific literature, if any.
I have one patient who uses an anxiety dog and says she gets great benefit from it. She had the dog before I knew her, so I can’t comment on how much improvement it may have produced. I also don’t know what special training, if any, it may have received, but I can say that it appears to be a very well trained dog, and I can’t imagine anyone other than the severely allergic or dog-phobic from objecting to its presence.
When I first met her (having been previously warned, um, brought up to date on her history, by clinic staff), she produced a tattered, semi-legible letter from her previous shrink telling whom it may concern that she had a medical necessity to keep poochie with her at all times to avert crippling anxiety attacks. She asked me to retype it on fresh letterhead with my name, as it was looking rather raggedy having been carried around in her purse for years.
My thought process was approximately as follows:
I have never heard of this treatment modality before. If I sign this letter, I will be abusing my position as a doctor by falsely implying that I have the slightest clue how to evaluate whether a patient would benefit from having an anxiety dog and how to judge whether a particular dog is well suited for this purpose.
:dubious: Surely her previous psychiatrist would not have signed such a letter if she did not have specialized expertise and experience in this matter, and I can safely rely on her professional judgment…right?
:eek: If I don’t sign the letter, she will have a huge meltdown in my office, I will be way behind schedule by the time I can get her out the door, and my boss, her boss, and his boss will have to waste many hours of their valuable time pretending to take her hysterical complaints about me seriously. Our doctor-patient relationship will be terminally poisoned before it even gets started.
It’s such a cute puppy!!
This is clearly a woman with legitimately severe psychiatric illness. Despite many years of treatment, she can’t work, has no meaningful relationships, and doesn’t leave her house unless absolutely necessary and sometimes not even then. She sure ain’t going on no cruises! If, by signing this letter, I can bring a bit of pleasure into her life and make it more likely that she will be able to make it to her crucially necessary doctor’s appointments (she’s a wreck physically, too), I’m not going to lose much sleep over it even if it is a tad ethically dubious.
I would like to say that my decision to sign the letter was based entirely on weighing against :dubious: and , and that I was able to disregard considerations of :eek: and :D. Hopefully, I would have been able to say no to someone who just wanted to take her pet Yorkie on a cruise.
Background - we have raised four guide dogs (for the blind) and have the last at home as a breeder. I’ve been to quite a few seminars at Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael.
Guide Dogs work not just because they are providing a service, but because they have been bred to do this while interacting professionally with the community. A blind person doesn’t take a dog to guide dogs to get certified - guide dogs raises and trains a dog, and then assigns those that pass the program to a blind person. This has nothing to do with deciding one needs Poochie to feel better. We’ve also certified our breeder as a therapy dog, which required a test of how she behaved. That lets us bring her to nursing homes and the like, it doesn’t let us bring her on trains.
Just to give an example of how guide dogs are different from regular dogs, dogs in training come once a year to Fun Day. There are well over 100 dogs on the grounds of GDB - and you never hear a single bark.
If people who feel they need a dog for depression want to accept trained dogs, I’m fine with it. I’m not very fine with getting a letter saying their untrained dog should be allowed to go everywhere.
On the other hand, GDB has stopped using German Shepherds as guides in part because they were too intimidating for some people. I doubt many Rottweilers would pass the program.
Looking, or intimidating-acting?
At GDB, the labs seem to be evenly split between yellow and chocolate ones, and there are also Golden Retrievers, but not as many as they want, which is why our little breeder is so valuable to them. That’s based on seeing all the puppies in the kennel (more cuteness than many can stand) and the dogs who come back for fun day.
Looking. No dog who acts the slightest bit intimidating would get through the program. There were also some problems with inbreeding, and the litters were decreasing in size.