So you’d have no problem with me bringing a polar bear with me to a restaurant? It’s my helper bear. Because it helps; that makes it a helper.
– Dieter
Sure you can call it a helper bear. But you can’t bring it into the restaurant. Like I said “helper monkey” is perfectly appropriate because it’s just common English and has no legal implications. It’s not related to the ADA or its definitions of a covered “service animal”.
And my feeling about the monkey lady also has nothing to do with the ADA. I’m just disappointed that so many people would prefer a routine and uneventful meal to seeing a woman with a monkey at the buffet. And almost nobody who just wants her to have the monkey for the evening if it makes her feel better.
Where did she get the dog from? Was it trained? I’m sure there are plenty of dogs who would do well in restaurants, but that doesn’t mean they belong there. Our pet dog is as well behaved as our guide dog puppy, but we treated them very differently.
I’d be curious as to where this woman got the monkey from, and how it was trained. Guide dogs get trained in a home for a year, with mandatory meetings weekly and then twice a month to help train and check progress. Then, for Guide Dogs for the Blind, they go to the campus for intensive training, with I think ten different levels of checking. Then the blind person comes and they train some more together. 50% of puppies get career changed. Guide dogs are also bred to be good guide dogs. Raising a guide dog puppy is very different from raising a pet puppy.
We took our puppies all over, but the purpose was to familiarize them with the situations they might find themselves in. If they had acted up in a restaurant, we’d take them out. (Never happened, I’m happy to say.) They go through all that effort because someone is going to depend on that dog for his or her life, and because it is important that the dogs be allowed everywhere.
Maybe the woman should try a stuffed monkey.
I am quite sure that never in my entire life has the phrase “helper monkey” come up in casual conversation. Although I now intend on using it as often as possible.
A woman brings her dog into the Kenmore Safeway grocery store. She claims this dog is a ‘service animal’, though the dog wears no vest nor harness. The dog also has been seen to lick the counters in the bakery department. The store employees have tried to make her keep it out, but she claims it’s a service animal and makes vague legal threats if they make her remove it.
I wouldn’t care so much about the dog if it had any manners. 
I, personally, would get a huge kick out of it. In fact, if I knew of a restaurant that had a pet monkey in it, I would frequent it. Honestly, I don’t see what is so horrible about having an animal in a restaurant as long as it isn’t screaming or flinging poo or anything. If it bothers you, sit on the other side of the restaurant. Would you object to eating in a park with squirrels nearby? I know, I know, but what about the RULES?! Pah. Bring on the monkeys. IMHO, of course.
It gests worse. The pig shit and pissed in the jetway. and Not only wasn’t it a helper pig it turned out to be a helpless pig. The “owners” had to practically drag it off the aircraft. If you dig around you’ll find out that it was a couple of hicks delivering a pig to its owner. It was a total scam on the airline. What’s sad is that the captain had full authority to reject the animal because of its size (they lied about the weight). It could not be restrained in a manner that was safe.
Hey, at least they weren’t flying El Al.
Ba-dump!
I’m inclined to agree with Jodi’s assessment of the situation.
I would challenge her on it. There are things you ARE allowed to ask, as a shopkeeper.
- is your dog a service animal
- what tasks does it perform for you?
- where did your dog come from?
You ARE allowed to exclude a service animal if it is disturbing others, or the experience of others. A service dog licking counters is a big-ass no-no, and no service dog I know of would EVER do that. You could exclude it on the grounds that it is engaging in unsanitary activity AND putting the health of your other patrons at risk (and making you lose business at the same time.)
There are fines associated to misrepresenting a dog as a service dog. Most cops and police departments in general don’t know them. We’re encouraging shopkeeps to start raising a fuss about these dogs - they are starting to cause serious problems for legitimate service dog users out there. It won’t change until policies tighten up, or until enough lawsuits are lost that people don’t want to “risk it” anymore.
When in doubt, I’d call the ADA’s hotline WHILE the patron is in your store and ASK them what to do. Tell them you feel this patron is taking an untrained, non-service dog into your store claiming it IS a service dog. Tell them the animal was seen licking counters (or whatever).
I don’t know her, so I don’t know where she got the dog. As I mentioned earlier, I have NEVER seen the dog do ANYTHING other than walk and lie down. EVER. It is of no discernable breed. There has never been any doubt in my mind that the dog is not a trained service dog. I just wasn’t sure what the legality of the dog being in restaurants was. He seems like a nice enough dog, as I said, and I’m sure makes a great pet. But her insistence that he is a service dog is a bunch of B.S., IMO.
And the problem is that Jodi doesn’t have the option of insisting that the monkey be kicked out (as the restaurant staff should have done immediately), and if she doesn’t like eating next to monkeys that are most likely infected with human-transmissible diseases (as has been pointed out already) she isn’t even allowed to leave herself? Jodi is now morally required to finish her meal in the restaurant next to the monkey? Gee, that sounds fair.
It’s not “common English” by the remotest stretch of the imagination. It appeared in an episode of The Simpsons, but it’s certainly not “common English”.
Suddenly things become clear.
My life is not so unbearably dull that I need to pray to see exotic animals at the buffet in order to relieve the misery. I certainly don’t need to take the risk of getting ill because the woman’s monkey isn’t properly behaved - which, not being a service animal, it almost assuredly isn’t - in order to have a few minutes respite from the horror of my life.
Your mileage obviously varies.
I look at it this way: if the monkey is cool and helps the lady with her anxiety, no problem. A monkey at a buffet would be interesting to see at any rate and would add fun to my dining experience.
However, if the monkey went nuts and ran through the food and jumped on people’s heads (hopefully not mine) and stole their purses and stuff, that mayhem would be even finer.
As far as I’m concerned it’s win / win for me.
That’s sort of how I feel about pets in public I general. If that ill behaved German Shepard mix manages to make a buffet item out of the small fluffy kitten - as long as it isn’t MY small fluffy kitten, I get entertained by the chaos of the kitten owner having a fit in the direction of the German Shepard owner while both yell about their right to take their pets into public.
Service animals have gone through tons of training to be able to control themselves in public. Two service dogs meeting each other don’t have “normal dog behavior” and a service dog passing a cat or a squirrel shouldn’t even notice. When you get multiple animals in a place, they need to all be trained to those standards in order to keep complete chaos from breaking out. Unless you are training your pets to the level of service animals, police dogs or the like - they don’t belong inside public buildings. MOST animals are not trained to this level. Therefore certification is required and laws are required.
Ok, hater-of-strange animals, why not?
So where IS the line drawn? Is there some sort of list of types of animals we all need to agree upon as OK to bring into a restaurant? Or…and maybe this is crazy…instead of drawing some sort of arbitrary “type of animal” line, we should draw a “reason for being there” line. Like, if the animal is trained to help someone perform a taks, then there is a reason to be there, regardless of what kind of animal it is.
To each his own, I guess. Personally, having a monkey in the restaurant is not really the way I would choose to make my evening more exciting.
You just have to spoil our monkey fun, don’t you, Miss Voice of Reason. Some people like eating in a zoo, you know.
I’ve had service dogs lick my feet while I’m teaching, but I wouldn’t put up with a dog licking the bakery counter.
Enough is enough. I have had it with these motherfucking monkeys at this motherfucking buffet!