I moved into my community with the assurance that pets were not allowed, but it turned out that was a meaningless promise–anyone who wanted a dog or cat or rhinoceros could simply classify it as a 'service" animal or even as a “companion” needed for psychological well-being, and they were exempted from the prohibition.
I don’t have anything (much) against a blind person requiring a seeing-eye guide dog (though there are plenty of communities they could choose that do allow pets) but how could this regulation be improved to discourage people claiming psychological needs?
I actually used to date a woman with an MSW down here who made her living writing out “psychological need” letters to anyone who had a pet and $200. She was a big pet-lover who didn’t see anything wrong with what she did for a living and had very little sympathy for my point of view on this matter. So I know that it’s a scam, beginning to end, to sidestep the regulations. After all, it’s practically a definition of having a pet that it makes you feel better psychologically or provides you with needed companionship. or something of the sort.
So how can I rewrite this codicil to exclude someone without a real need who simply wants a pet and has $200 to pay for a psychologist’s note?
Dogs are inevitably noisy, it’s in their nature. It bothers some people more than others. When living in close proximity, people should surely be free to choose a community without dogs if that’s what they prefer.
I have a hard time understanding why anyone would object to the presence of other pets that are kept inside that you’re not even aware of - aside from a landlord’s concerns with the damage they might cause, of course.
In the US under the Americans with Disabilities Act, only dogs (and sometimes miniature horses) are legally service animals. If you fly commercial in the US, ADA does not apply here. Instead, service animals aboard commercial flights are governed by the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA).
A seeing-eye dog is not a pet. There is no reason that anyone who needs a service animal should be impacted by pet restrictions. Service animals perform specific tasks, are well trained, have documentation, and are covered by the ADA and other laws.
Support animals are a whole different things with no codified protections in law. They are not service animals, you can’t just declare an animal is one. There’s no requirement that communities make allowances for support animals, but apparently you community has elected to do so. Take it up with them.
This is how it works in theory. But the ADA includes psychiatric service animals; and has no requirement for professional training - you can train the dog yourself. Of course nobody would dispute that seeing-eye dogs are incredibly well trained, but there is no procedure to ensure that all purported service dogs meet any objective standard of training. Nor does anyone have much interest in enforcement, since the risk of being sued for discrimination against people with genuine disability far outweighs any desire to police people with ordinary pets abusing the system. The system is still flawed and widely abused.
I don’t think this is correct with respect to OP’s situation. Emotional support animals are no longer allowed on planes, but under federal law landlords cannot exclude them from no-pet buildings.
And the process for registering your ordinary pet as an emotional support animal lacks even the minimal rigor of the service animal system.
Legally, the ADA could be updated to only require accommodations for animals that had a particular license and an official process to obtain that license could be made as strict as required to get the people who just want to take their pets places that don’t allow pets to sufficiently low levels. There are downsides, though. In addition to stopping people who don’t really need a service animal (as defined by the law), it will also stop people who do really need a service animal but are unable to convince a licensor of that fact, or have difficulty dealing with the additional paperwork or red tape. And plausibly people who have legitimate service animals will be regularly challenged to produce documentation. It already kind of sucks to be blind. Do we as a society want to make it harder?
As economists are fond of saying “The optimal amount of fraud is not zero”.
Okay, what about people who discover their pets are so attuned to them that they alert on impending seizures or low blood sugar? This tends to be an ability that any dog might turn out to have naturally and then extra training on HOW to alert would be in order but without that closeness to the owner nobody might ever have discovered that dog is sensitive. Seizure alert dogs are incredibly helpful to their owners and help protect their person while they’re checked out lying on the ground unable to do anything about it. And for people with wildly fluctuating blood sugar, a dog alerting them could save their life. How do we go about regulating these critters?
Well, the other way of looking at this is that if I were a disabled person with a genuine well-trained service dog, I’d be concerned that the level of abuse by pet owners might lead to public backlash (as we have seen with airlines) and create a hostile environment for my own dog. So I think I might be in favor of greater oversight and enforcement.
I will say that a system where anyone willing to lie gets away with it but honest people get screwed over really bothers me. I can imagine being a parent in such a community, trying to explain to my kid that we couldn’t have pets even if much of the neighborhood did. That would make me pretty angry.
This is the part of your post that really bothers me. Since blind people can’t drive, it does limit where they can live. Living within walking distance to stores, medical services, etc. is important, as is proximity to public transit. And seeing eye dogs are trained not to bark except under certain limited circumstances. A seeing eye dog owner may be just as eager as you are to avoid communities where noisy dogs are allowed.
I haven’t heard anybody complain about the necessity to have an official process that requires proof of need in order to get handicapped parking placards/plates/hangtags/ or eligibility for paratransit services , etc . I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the details of the process, but I have never heard a handicapped person say they should just be given the services on their say-so, the way someone can bring a service animal to places that don’t allow pets on their say-so. Yes, I know the questions I am allowed to ask if someone wants to bring a service animal into my office building. Many people either don’t , or are to intimidated to ask - and anyway, since I know the questions, I could easily bring a dog anywhere by claiming it detects an impending seizure or falling blood sugar.
Legally, the problem here is that “discouraging” people from exercising their statutory rights to accommodation is called “disability discrimination.” You cannot legally discourage people from claiming they have psychological needs, because, you know, they do. The law recognizes that.
Don’t even worry about morally, since the legality of the matter serves as restraint enough.
You haven’t told us what the codicil says. But assuming that the codicil says something like “no pets allowed, except service animals as required by federal and local law,” you can’t rewrite it. You can make sure that the process is robust in terms of making sure that each person who attempts to move in with an animal has documentation that they are a qualifying individual with a disability, that the animal is medically necessary to support them in living with a disability, and that the service animal’s presence will not create an undue burden on the property.
If that process already exists, and your problem is that people who have documentation from a health care provider that they are disabled and that the presence of an animal is medically necessary, in circumstances where you can’t demonstrate that allowing the animal is unreasonable, see above. You’re asking how to legally and morally discriminate against the disabled. You want to put a person with a disability in the position of having to convince not a medical expert, but you, a guy who has a little problem with seeing-eye dogs for the blind, that they require the support of an animal. The process that exists for that is they go to the doctor and get documentation, and they give it to you, and you say OK thanks.
Generally speaking, to be ADA compliant, the animal must be trained to perform a specific task or tasks to assist someone with a disability. A dog trained to notify someone when their blood sugar is low, assist a blind person in traversing the environment, or even a dog trained to help someone keep their balance are all examples of service animals. The key word there is trained. A dog trained to keep an individual calm during an anxiety attack is a service animal. If it isn’t trained to perform a task then it isn’t a service animal according to the ADA. The vast majority of emotional support animals are not service animals.
I’ve only dealt with service animals in two broad areas. The first was when I worked at a museum and occasionally people wanted to bring their dogs inside. I had absolutely no problem with people bringing service animals into the building. And even if I did have a problem, it would have been illegal as hell for me to deny them entry. But on occasion I’d have someone who claimed their dog was a service animal and while I thought they were lying I was faced with a decision. Do I press the issue and possibly see the museum in the news or just let it go? The two or three times I found myself in that position I just let it go.
Now that I’m in HR, I’ve had occasion to deal with it at work. In one odd case, an employee showed up to work with her German Shepherd in tow claiming it was her emotional support animal. We sent her home for the day and told her in no uncertain terms that the dog wasn’t welcome unless she went through the ADA accommodation process with a note from her doctor telling us why the accommodation is necessary. She didn’t go that route. We have also denied other employees’ requests to bring in emotional support animals.
Once again, for those who can’t be bothered to read the thread - any discussion of service animals is unhelpful for OP’s situation when Federal law also requires that no-pet housing admit assistance animals, a category that includes Emotional Support Animals. From the site I linked above:
There is no official certification or training for assistance animals, and they can assist in a wide variety of ways. Breed and weight restrictions do not apply to assistance or service animals.
An assistance animal can be a cat, dog or other type of companion animal, and does not need to be trained to perform a service. The emotional and/or physical benefits from the animal living in the home are what qualify the animal as an assistance animal. A letter from a medical doctor or therapist is all that is needed to classify the animal as an assistance animal.
Again, I find it rather surprising that disabled people with a genuine need for service/assistance animals would not themselves favor much tighter regulation and licensing rather than a totally unregulated and unpoliced system that’s so obviously going to be abused and create resentment when people use it as a loophole to get their antisocial pets into places where they are not welcome.