The Emotional Support Animal Racket | Hacker News Reader

The Emotional Support Animal Racket

astralcodexten.com

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.

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.

Even I will still grant that some people really need them, but I think that arguing there should be no standard is selfish.

When we are talking about "service animal" status, we are supposed to be talking about animals getting certified to get special exemptions to go to places other animals are not because the animal's behavior was certified. For some reason it got twisted to certify the needs of the owner. I don't care if you do or do not need a pet alligator for support, but if I am going to sit next to it on a plane, I want to see it's certificate, not yours.

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.

I am reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_of_clergy, 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?

Sure, but some people suffer some small depression and recover and others more profound depression and need more extensive treatment. I think we can all recognize that these two situations are different.

So if there’s a pet ban for whatever reason it’s reasonable to extend an exception to help those with significant suffering while it would be unreasonable to extend the same to me.

Better to get rid of pet ban :) most are impractical. Animals are our friends and often family

It's not the good pet owners that are the problem, it's the bad ones.

The local hardware store used to allow pets in (mainly dogs) because they have a relatively large pet section.

They've stopped this after too many incidents with the dogs relieving themselves on the merchandise.

> They've stopped this after too many incidents with the dogs relieving themselves on the merchandise.

Out of curiosity, how does one housetrain a dog such that it respects building interiors other than its own home? Every dog I’ve ever know was very good about knowing not to relieve itself in its own building, but considered every other building fair play.

I think you train the owners, not the dog. Even I, as untrained as I am, have been able to recognize a dog in the "needs to go".

As for marking, that's a separate issue; it's correctly pack training the dog so it doesn't feel the need to mark everything.

I don't share your experience.

It's usually about surfaces and smells, not home vs away.

The misbehaving dogs that the GP mentions are probably not terribly well-behaved around home either.

"Every dog I’ve ever know was very good about knowing not to relieve itself in its own building, but considered every other building fair play"

That's absolutely wild. Every dog I've known, except for a few with issues, seems to know not to relieve themselves in any building if they know not to relieve themselves in their own building. No specialized training, just regular house training.

Yeah, I had the same thought - clearly dogs understand the concept of inside/outside which is interesting on its own (I've read that they "din" animals which means it is somewhat instinctual). The only dogs I've ever had were found street dogs and I also never had to housebreak them.

Do you mean "den animals"? That they instinctually know not to urinate in their den? That makes sense -- pigs instinctually urinate on one side of their pen so I'm sure other animals have similar instincts.

Perhaps a hardware store is too big and too non-den like that some dogs don't consider it a den.

I haven't had trouble in stores either though. I've noticed they like to eliminate on grass or grass-like stuff. It's actually hard to get my dog to go on concrete. Also if she gets sick in the house, it's always on the carpet and not on the hard flooring surfaces.

When you bring the dog to a new environment, you watch it like a hawk. As soon as the they get curious about any corner, you correct them immediately.

Only take a few hours of this to fix the behavior.

The problem is, first, many people don't share that attitude towards pets, and second, many places (such as grocery stores and restaurants) find reasons to ban pets that get codified in law, so getting rid of the bans becomes much more difficult.

Yeah. In the author’s words, it’s the pet bans that are a “racket” and a “disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights”.

Ultimately pet bans, in most cases, reduce to a proxy for limiting damage and repair costs. In some cases they reduce to more general liability reduction. In all those cases there is a much more straightforward way to address the intent: insurance. Renter’s insurance, travel insurance, whatever.

The only valid cases for banning pets is “you’d be introducing an allergen into a place shared by people with allergies” or “an existing pet is already present and introducing a new one would cause conflicts with the incumbent pet”.

Or contamination vector for food service areas.

Yeah good point, although I think it may be applied too heavy handed in some cases. Like… foot traffic-only areas of the breakfast service at a hotel that otherwise accepts pets? That’s not meaningfully limiting contamination, it’s just making it harder for pet owners to get a cup of coffee.

> a place shared by people with allergies

Any public place?

If by “public place” you mean “place providing services to the public”, sure. Most such places have at least the right to refuse service and no one generally objects to that excluding non-service pets. If you mean publicly owned spaces, I think it’s reasonable to discuss indoor restrictions. Outdoor? Probably not beyond certain specific circumstances and accommodations.

There would be little discussion of emotional support animals if their owners did not object to places providing services to the public excluding non service pets.

What outdoor publicly owned spaces where you believe pets should be allowed ban them?

That'd work great if people were earnestly considerate and felt like they were part of a community that they understood whose implicit norms they might consider.

You don't need bans for stuff like that if people are attentive and thoughtful. People with pets consider other customers in a shop, shopkeepers consider people who are deeply troubled without the support of their pets, and a locally appropriate and nuanced equilibrium shakes out.

Unfortunately, we've largely allowed that prerequisite sense of community to erode in many people and many social interactions have become a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, so formal and rigid policies have to take the place of subjective consideration.

Your point is valid but if it's a good reason to stick with the ban then maybe we should be employing it to enforce other rules that would have a far greater impact. Not enough people are attentive and thoughtful and yet we allow them to operate massive machines in public spaces which kill tens of thousands per year. I don't think allowing pets on planes and in restaurants could ever have such a magnitude of impact as we have allowed by letting nearly anyone drive a car.

My friends don't shit on my lawn.

"Our family" that was kidnapped off of it's suckling mother's tit?

The hypocrisy of pet "ownership" is blatant...

> So if there’s a pet ban for whatever reason it’s reasonable to extend an exception to help those with significant suffering while it would be unreasonable to extend the same to me.

The difference is, if I have a space that's not good for people with disabilities (up a flight of stairs, narrow doorways, etc) I don't have to worry about them renting it (or they have a funding source to help make improvements).

If I have a space that's not good for pets people will still force a way to bring in their pets. At a certain point it's even a welfare issue for the pets! If they are in a tiny apartment of the 4th story of a walk-up and there is no lawn or anything, that's an inhumane place to keep a dog!

We joke that I'm the emotional support human for one of our cats due to the way he favors and hangs around me.

The author makes some interesting points, but when I read this…

> 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

… 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.

My 4 year old requires an emotional support parent to travel, but unfortunately that has never gotten me a free ticket.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

> They are entirely dependent on the owner for continued existence.

They are dependent on someone but an owner moving to a new apartment could theoretically find another person to take care of them.

> But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence

> on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. 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. And the end

> result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the

> gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the

> normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.

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."

This is more of less true of many laws and regulations requiring some sort of permit.

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.

Your emotional support animal in the [airplane|restaurant|movies] causes me stress and anxiety.

Why do your rights supersede mine?

Because the pitbull moms are a reliable voting bloc.

>>> ... 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”.

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...

Looking to fund a study "Do emotional support animals prevent their owners from being selfish, and entitled"

What about,

"Do emotional support animals cause their owners to be selfish and entitled?"

The fact a subset abuses something does not mean the whole set does and should be penalized.

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