This is a frustrating topic for me. Me and my friend were attacked by dogs as children and I still have a deep seeded fear of them (I'm mostly okay around them now). And then my own child had a bad experience with an "emotional support dog" at a young age, and is still deathly afraid of all dogs.<p>So I take this issue a bit more personally because I still get actively traumatized by dogs. But society has decided I don't get a choice in the matter so I was just forced to suck it up. Just try to telling an American in 2024 you don't like being around dogs.<p>Even I will still grant that <i>some</i> people really need them, but I think that arguing there should be <i>no</i> standard is selfish.<p>When we are talking about "service animal" status, we are <i>supposed</i> to be talking about animals getting certified to get special exemptions to go to places other animals are not <i>because the animal's behavior was certified</i>. For some reason it got twisted to certify the <i>needs of the owner</i>. I don't care if you do or do not need a pet alligator for support, but if <i>I</i> am going to sit next to it on a plane, I want to see <i>it's</i> certificate, not yours.<p>There is a strong need for a nation/international governing body with clear requirements. Once that is in place, we can work on providing cheaper, non-profit, or even insurance-covered options to comply. Unfortunately it's a wild west out there, where people are just exploiting the actual disabled in order to sneak their 80lb pitbull into an Airbnb without having to pay for it.
> The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants.<p>I am reminded of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_of_clergy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_of_clergy</a>, which started out as separate courts for clergymen and ended up being a way for folks to escape execution for their first felony. Along the way, there was a whole time period where if one could simply read a passage from the Bible, then one was assumed to be a clergyman — so anyone literate could claim the benefit. Hardly the original intent!
At the end of the day, most pets are emotional support animals (I mean, unless you use your dog to herd sheep or hunt, in which case I would say it's not really a pet either, or your cat to keep your barn free of mice). Why would you go to all the trouble of owning a cat or dog if having them wouldn't make you feel better?
The author makes some interesting points, but when I read this…<p>> But I’ve had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake. Sorry, I refuse to believe a snake can help you with ADHD<p>… I have more confidence in their class analysis than their clinical understanding of their own patients. I mean, I don’t personally have a snake, but I don’t see why it’s far fetched that having one would be helpful for managing my ADHD. It seems so obviously plausible that I don’t even know where I’d start trying to chip away at the refusal to believe it.
I can see the author's perspective I think but the argument comes out like a little rant at the world and how things are than any real objection.<p>Places say no pets, which keeps out 99% of the pets, but then a more responsible or at least more determined 1% came up with a way to excuse their pet presence. They "earn" the ability to take their pet into areas otherwise restricted. Is that a class system? I wouldn't relate the two since it isn't something assigned at birth. However I know I'm woefully ignorant on these matters.<p>Pets are responsibility. They are entirely dependent on the owner for continued existence. I do not agree with relating them to Adderall prescriptions in any way shape or form.<p>------<p>Or! Can this be related to the viewpoint of "It is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent man be convicted." and we just put up with all the bad actors for the good of the people who really need it. Given my bad experiences in medicine I'd side with this argument if nothing else.
> But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence<p>> on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is<p>> a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking<p>> someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end<p>> result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the<p>> gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the<p>> normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.<p>What a fantastic point. Well put, and it rings true for so many systems I interact with in life.
"it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep."<p>This is more of less true of many laws and regulations requiring some sort of permit.<p>I had to get an electrical permit for some simple work. I had to pay a permit fee and the inspector would come out to check it. Of course it's rubber stamp approved by the secretary who has no knowledge of electrical work. Then the inspector came out and had no knowledge of electrical work (he didn't even know what questions to ask). All they cared about was the fee. I could have run 30 amps with 14ga wire and they wouldn't have caught it.
>>> ... nobody has a rubric for this evaluation that makes sense. ... I’m saying that when you take out all the legalese, the executive summary is “think really hard about whether this animal really helps this person, then think really hard about whether it will cause trouble, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble, sign the letter”.<p>Shoddy, unreproducible, not backed up science... is not science. There are plenty of blind people, handycapped people, seizure dogs and all sorts of legitimate service animals out there...<p>Looking to fund a study "Do emotional support animals prevent their owners from being selfish, and entitled"