To the contrary, I think there is significant abuse of the way the ADA is framed to pass off untrained pets as “service animals”. Everybody lies. The idea that this would be the one thing where selfish entitled people would not take advantage of a poorly designed system is just not consistent with human nature.
No, your claim of confirmation bias is mistaken. I love dogs, and I certainly do notice with pleasure every time I see a dog in a slightly unexpected place that’s clearly well trained, dealing calmly with a level of stimulation that might get an untrained dog overexcited, and assisting its owner.
Encountering dogs that are clearly not trained in inapproriate places is significantly more frequent in my experience.
Again, painting this as people someone not appreciating the importance of genuine trained service animals is a complete distortion. It’s precisely because genuine trained service animals are so important that the well-intentioned but naive ADA approach that you can never question what someone claims should be revised to prevent abuse. We can certainly make the greatest efforts to ensure that this doesn’t make things unduly difficult for anyone with a genuine service animal. But just trusting people not to abuse a system with no enforcement mechanism is foolishly naive.
A wonderful aspect of working online is that students and clients can have their emotional support heffalumps in their own room, rather than disturbing the working dogs of students and clients with ADA conditions.
What do you mean by “significant abuse”? How do you even quantify this? I know several people in my community that require either an ESA or a service animal and you wouldn’t know from looking at them that they need an assistance animal. Someone from the outside might assume they were faking it, but they’re most definitely not.
Really? Talk about confirmation bias. I choose to believe that most people tell the truth.
I can tell if someone is blind by looking at them, and if you’re not blind you don’t have a service animal, you have a pet and a narcissistic personality disorder.
The ADA definition for “service animals” and the Fair Housing Act definition of" assistance animals" are not the same , and the rules are different. The Fair Housing Act permits landlords to require documentation of the need for an assistance animal if the need is not apparent. The FHA obviously only covers housing , and has nothing to do with service/assistance animals being allowed in places of public accommodation such as restaurants. The definition of a service animal under the ADA does not include emotional support animals and doesn’t allow anyone to require documentation - they can only ask those two questions.
And while I wouldn’t assume that someone claiming to need a service animal is lying , that doesn’t mean than none of the people making that claim are lying. I will generally know if clients of my agency need a service animal and more than one has come in with what they claim is a service animal ( although no disability is noted in our records) and cannot answer the question about what task it performs. Or they simply say that the animal provides comfort - which does not qualify as a service animal. They would absolutely get away with it if they were better liars, but they are clearly counting on nobody asking questions.
I’m not talking about the people faking it. It’s not my place to pass judgment on a person’s condition. What I’m talking about it entitled assholes passing of their untrained pets as service animals. And this you can obviously see from the animal’s behavior. A chihuahua barking aggressively and defecating indiscriminately is not a trained service animal, notwithstanding the “service dog” vest that the owner bought for their precious on Amazon.
While I concur that the effectiveness of diabetic alert dogs is much more overhyped than actual study results warrant, the hypothesis doesn’t rest on assumptions of dogs’ “psychic” or other supernatural powers. It suggests that the dogs are probably responding—however erratically and unreliably—to a combination of human behavioral cues and possibly detecting elevated VOC levels in breath. The hypothesis may not be true, and even if it is true the effect may not be dependable enough to warrant relying on alert dogs, but it’s not merely “magical thinking”.
These posts are needlessly hostile and are not appropriate for MPTIMS. You can make your point (that you think diabetic alert dogs aren’t very accurate, I think) in a less abrasive way.
I am all for banning untrained pets that pose as service animals. Even most airlines are no longer allowing emotional support animals. However, there are so many invisible disabilities these days and dealing with these issues are no longer taboo. This is why we are seeing more assistance animals out in the wild. Hell, practically anyone can make their dog a service dog if they have a disability and the patience to train them. Just saying we should stop judging those that need it and focus on treating people with more kindess.
