Tagged with: ADA service animals
New ADA rules may only protect dogs and miniature horses as service animals due to progressively more people buying bogus Internet-based National Service Animal Registry credentials to declare their pets as service animals.
It is becoming increasingly common for people with disabilities to own service animals such as seeing eye dogs, as helpers to cope with seizures, monitor meds, and for minimizing behavior problems for children with autism. Yet there are creatures of all types working as service animals such as Capuchin monkey helpers, and even more unusual service animals like ferrets, parrots, pot-bellied pigs, and snakes. If these peculiar animals have service-animal credentials, businesses could face $55,000 civil penalties for asking about disability or denying access and thereby violating a person’s civil rights.
However, starting on March 15th, only service dogs and trained miniature horses will be protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, reports The Wall Street Journal. Why this drastic change? Because some people believe there are too many bogus service animals – people who are taking advantage of the system in order to keep their beloved pets handy at all times.
WSJ mentioned two service iguanas which freak some people out. Cosmie Silfa has a large iguana service animal called Skippy. When Silfa takes his iguana on the bus and for walks in the park, he totes around a letter from his psychiatrist stating that Skippy “helps him to maintain a stable mood” which helps his depression and helps to keep him clean and sober.
Roy Mair works at the front desk of the subsidized housing unit where Silfa lives and stated that Silfa “cradles him like a baby, a big scary baby.”
Yet Skippy may truly help Silfa, unlike Rhonda Kimmel who has no disability and bought her terrier, Maxx, a therapy dog vest online. She takes Maxx everywhere she goes; Rhonda gets by with it because businesses don’t risk the $50k penality by suggesting Rhonda is neither disabled, nor is her dog a service animal. She told WSJ that she “hates to ‘take advantage.’ But she lives in such a hot climate, she argues that the only place Maxx can get some decent summer exercise is in the air-conditioned mall.”
People such as she, pretending to have a disability and passing off bogus pets as service animals, are the ones who may ruin therapy and service animals for everyone. In Rhonda’s case, it’s a dog which will for sure still be an ADA safely declared service animal in which businesses still will take great risks to asks about disability or reason for the service animal.
Some people use the excuse of service animals to take their pets on planes and to avoid shipping them as cargo. Airlines are only allowed to ask passengers with physical disabilities how the animal assists them, but people with psychiatric or emotional-support animals are required to “submit a letter from a licensed mental-health professional that documents their mental or emotional illness.”
President of the Psychiatric Service Dog Society, Joan Esnayra, said, “We are forced to disclose we are mentally ill in order to fly. It’s un-American. Everyone with a service dog should be treated the same.”
Although I’ve yet to see a miniature seeing-eye horse inside the grocery story working as a service animal, they – like dogs – will be ADA approved in businesses where food is served or sold for human consumption. Other species of trained service animals are expected to be permitted in some other public places. If peculiar animals are truly certified as service animals but the ADA bans them, then aren’t we moving backwards in people with disabilities rights and in their abilities to live a “mainstream” life?