Where are you getting your definition? Mine comes from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development:
What Is an Assistance Animal?
An assistance animal is an animal that works, provides assistance, or performs tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability, or that provides emotional support that alleviates one or more identified effects of a person’s disability. An assistance animal is not a pet.
(Bolding mine. Note that the term “assistance animal” is an umbrella term that includes both service animals and ESAs, and they clearly both apply only to persons with disabilities.)
https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/assistance_animals
Here’s a better analogy. If my friend is disabled and I borrow her placard to park in a disabled space, that’s fraud. If I lie to my doctor and say I’m unable to walk more than a few feet to get a placard, that’s also fraud. If I’m genuinely disabled but then fully recover and keep using my placard for convenience, that’s also fraud. It doesn’t matter that the placard is the only thing I need to park in a handicapped spot without getting a ticket; the fraud is in how I got it. With those fake ESA letters, someone is committing fraud–either the “patient” for pretending to be disabled, or the doctor for giving them a letter even though they admit they aren’t.
That is one of the problems I was pointing out. There are laws that limit who can have a service animal or ESA (persons with disabilities), and there’s a legal definition of a disability (a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities), and there are laws against lying about having a disability in order to smuggle your pet into places they aren’t allowed (see link below), but when it comes to enforcement, options are limited because there’s no official process for verifying any of this. Another problem is that, even if you’re truly, indisputably disabled, and your dog truly performs a life-saving service, there’s still no requirement that he be trained to do (or refrain from doing) anything else.
Penalties for Using a Service Dog or Emotional Support Animal Under False Pretenses | Nolo.
Seems to me that if a municipality can exclude a service animal based on that particular animal’s history, I can probably refuse to allow the dog that bit a customer on Tuesday to come into my store on Wednesday. ( and TBH, it’s almost certainly a fake anyway)
Right now, the law does not specifically grant you that right. I do like your chances in court if you got sued for denying entry to a dog that just bit someone yesterday. And if he’s a fake, all the better; it’ll likely come out in discovery. But this goes back to the issue of “what you can get away with” vs. “what is actually allowed, right now.” I anticipate that, with enough dog bites, we’ll see a reckoning and change in regulations similar to what happened with ESAs on airplanes.