Maybe. But just perhaps - it’s the best thing in there! It would take a lot to get me to go to a McDonalds, and kangaroos would make it only more appealing.
I never thought about her as a support animal, but that’s basically what my rabbit was. Telling people that my best and only friend was a giant white rabbit probably evoked shades of “Harvey” for some people, unless they met. She died last year at the ripe old age of 7.5 years, which I was rather devastated by. But she was elderly enough for a large female rabbit that her passing did not surprise me. She was very loving and fought with her last breath to stay with me. But in the time we had, we did everything together.
Why I think having friendships with non-human animals can be crucial is that it bypasses a lot of dysfunctional linguistic and ritual activity which many people are deeply attached to. Most spoken communication with people I observe is not very topical, but various forms of smalltalk. And mostly people are wary of having human friends on a purely non-verbal basis. Most other animals still have their games, but they don’t sublimate them into grand, contradictory structures. They tend to be direct in precisely the ways most humans aren’t.
Completely agreed. And as I mentioned upthread, my buddy will readily tell anyone who will listen about the medical/social/emotional difficulties his dog has helped him surpass via her clear and abundant love for him. She obviously considers him to be the alpha dog of the pack and treats him accordingly, going so far as to deliver rabbits caught and killed in the fields directly to his feet and keeping everyone/everything at bay until he essentially accepts the gift. So I get the strong emotional attachment humans develop with their animal companions, most definitely.
Maybe it’s a cultural thing for me? I wasn’t raised in Australia and I have no experience dealing with kangaroos, so I’m not aware of how they bond with or tolerate humans, or how well they might handle a crowded establishment with all its audial/olfactory/tactile sensations. Dogs have long been trained to handle such situations, and I’m aware of horses and dogs being used as therapy animals in hospitals and recovery centers, but I have no experience with kangaroos.
Would it be different if it was a rat? An alligator? A boa constrictor?
Part of the point of service animals is that they let people with certain disorders go places and do things they might not otherwise be able to do. Are blind people not suposed to go in to fast food restaurants if they are being helped by a dog? Are paraplegics not allowed because they have helper monkeys? If the animal is behaving badly (biting, throwing feces, or bouncing people’s burgers out of their hands) sure, eject the animal and patron. But otherwise I don’t see a reason to make an issue out of it. And yes, “good sense” might suggest that one not bring an animal everywhere, but sometimes good sense is precisely what is lacking in someone who needs a suport animal. I for one am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to those who need them for whatever reason, be it agoraphobia, PTSD, spectrum disorders, whatever. If that person has a doctor’s note, I don’t need to question their decision to eat at MacDonald’s any more than I would question their right to use a public bathroom.
Yes, some people abuse the notion of service animals. But that doesn’t mean that for a lot of people, they provide important, legitimate support and that should be respected not ridiculed.
I have attended events at which people brought “support animals”. Do you know why service animals are legally protected? In part, because they undergo extensive training to make them compatible with being in public. The “support animals” that I’ve seen are, more or less, pets, and their ability to socialize in a large public event has been all over the board. In absolutely no case that I’m aware of did the support animal undergo any professional training to help it behave properly in public. Listen: there’s a reason that cons and music festivals ban pets. It’s bad for the pet, and it’s bad for a lot of people that the pet interacts with. Saying your pet is a “support animal” doesn’t make it not-a-pet.
Sounds like something of a double-standard, since human laws are drafted to apply only to other humans. There doesn’t seem to be any fair reason to expect other animals to socialize according to human standards - other than humans finding this to be convenient.
There are two categories of animals that help people. “Therapy animals” (also known as “comfort animals”) have been used for decades in hospitals and homes for the elderly or disabled. Their job is essentially to be themselves — to let humans pet and play with them, which calms people, lowers their blood pressure and makes them feel better. There are also therapy horses, which people ride to help with balance and muscle building.
These animals are valuable, but they have no special legal rights because they aren’t considered service animals, the second category, which the A.D.A. defines as “any guide dog, signal dog or other animal individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including, but not limited to, guiding individuals with impaired vision, alerting individuals with impaired hearing to intruders or sounds, providing minimal protection or rescue work, pulling a wheelchair or fetching dropped items.”
You’re just making a meaningless semantic distinction here. Whether the law applies to the animal, or to the human that is associated with the animal, there are laws that affect what humans can do with animals. We expect animals that exist in public to behave in certain ways, or there are legal repercussions. Dogs must not bite. Horses must not kick people. Etc… You can say that this isn’t “fair” to the animals. Maybe you’d like to live in some Jungle Book fantasy where humans and animals sit around in trees hooting at each other. That’s not the world we actually live in.
Speak for yourself! Your operating under this presumption does not make anything else “meaningless”.
This is about me now, is it? People don’t get to choose in what world they live, this would be delusional. Laws are handy, but they only form an agreement, a contract, a set of expectations. And for a number of practical considerations, they can only apply to humans themselves. Where we can suppose I’d rather live is irrelevant. In this world, human interests are a subset of those of other animals, whether they like it or not. Unfortunately, this offers no easy answers, but it is the cost of sharing a biosphere, and humans will likely not survive without coming to terms with this.
Although the ADA significantly expand freedoms for persons with disabilities, it also expands freedoms for people who wish to lay false claim to a disabilty for temporary benefit. Want to avoid lines at the airport? Rent a wheelchair. Want to skip the lines at disneyland? That can be arranged. Meanwhile, those who are not disabled are inconvenienced by a scammer, and those with real disabilities bear the brunt of the invitable indignation.
The ADA provides that persons cannot question the scope of a claimants disability. While this provides a measure of privacy for the disabled, who best know their own limitations, it also allows a far broader class of abled individuals with dubious motives to claim these privileges as their own.
With dogs for the blind, the implication was that the dog was
trained to behave in a least disruptive manner
trained to perform specific tasks
and that the trainer implicitly guarantees that the animal was worthy of an exception to the general rule against animals in restaurants and grocery stores.
Such implicit guarantees are expensive, and beyond the means of a great many people with disabilities. It is cheaper to “self certify”, which, in the case of a seeing eye dog, is propably worse than useless, but in the case of an anxiety support animal, might be plausible, but then there’s no implicit guarantee that the animal will act in a manner befitting a professional service dog.
This is not a presumption. The ADA specifically prohibits business owners from denying access/service to individuals service animals, except when the service animal behaves in certain ways. From http://ada.gov:
Q: What if a service animal barks or growls at other people, or otherwise acts out of control?
A: You may exclude any animal, including a service animal, from your facility when that animal’s behavior poses a direct threat to the health or safety of others. For example, any service animal that displays vicious behavior towards other guests or customers may be excluded. You may not make assumptions, however, about how a particular animal is likely to behave based on your past experience with other animals. Each situation must be considered individually.
What is not a presumption? You are not being clear.You backed up your remark about me making “a meaningless semantic distinction” by saying that “We expect animals that exist in public to behave in certain ways”. I wasn’t aware that either of us, nor any of the others participating here, were affiliated with the ADA. Also, expectations for public behavior need not be equivalent to standards for service of a private business.
Unfortunately, even though it seems you dismiss it out of hand as being too inconvenient to consider, the problem is more fundamentally one of jurisdiction - that non-human animals are not recognized as citizens, and are thus not bound to the terms of human law. They have no obligation to be controlled by people, nor to recognize human claims of territory.
