In reading this threadthere are opinions expressed about whether a dog should be grasping items from a Walmart shelf in helping mobility impaired persons to shop.
Several years ago for a few months I occasionally assisted a person training rescue dogs specifically for this purpose. While I hugely admired the trainers dedication the number of tasks these dogs (mostly retriever sized) could perform effectively in a store were very limited. The dogs pulled a wheelchair (poorly) and getting retail items correctly identified and retrieved was really hit or miss.
The dogs had on a service animal ID jacket and the store personnel did not harass us, but honestly the dog was a pretty ineffective wheelchair puller and shopper. A motorized wheelchair or scooter and a grabber would have been 10X more useful for the mobility impaired shopper than the dog.
To it’s credit the dog could open round residential door knobs OK, but that left a pretty healthy slathering of saliva on the knob. In the end the dogs could do a few useful things around the house for a person in fetching this and that after extensive training, but (IMO) as retail shipping assistants the dogs were not all that useful.
As long as the dog wasn’t selecting loose produce with its mouth and then returning it, I wouldn’t mind. Anything else, it’s really a crapshoot as to what has been scurrying around on it or touching while you weren’t looking. Anything I bring in from the store gets washed or wiped down before it’s put away. Who the hell knows what was touching that product before you bought it. Booger fingers, mouse pee, ass scratcher, rat, didn’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom e-coli spreader, roach, toe jam cleaner, you name it. Dog slobber is the least of it.
If a disabled lady feels the dog is helping her, I wouldn’t make an issue of it. Maybe it’s not that much of a helper, but if it makes her feel better and she is really disabled, what’s the real harm in it? The only thing that worried me was the biting insinuation, but the article was lacking the rest of the conversation and had only that isolated quote, so it could have been very much out of context.
I’ll admit when I was posting in that other thread, I was picturing me using a dog when I’m shopping at WalMart.
“Darn it, Rex, I told you to get a copy of The Avengers. This is Iron Man 2. I specifically told you to look for Captain America and Thor on the cover. And this is the dvd version not blu-ray. It’s like you’re not even paying attention.”
That little dog was more attentive and focused than the somewhat hyper service dogs the trainer used, but in viewing the job the dog did it she was tooling around in a motorized chair, and it was basically picking stuff up from the ground she would knock down with a stick and handing it to her. The way she was wielding the stick it appears she would had more than enough arm strength to be operating a grabber which would have obviated the need for the dog to be handing her stuff, and been more efficient to boot.
If you have enough arm and hand strength to be operating a one handed knock down stick and guiding a wheelchair the need for a dog to be helping you vs simply using a grabber is pretty minimal. Dogs can be useful in certain scenarios but their utility as grocery store and dept store shopping assistants is (IMO) somewhat questionable.
