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US ends era of emotional support animals on planes
US airlines will no longer be required to transport emotional support animals after passengers insisted on bringing on board their horses, pigs, peacocks and turkeys for psychological reasons.
Wednesday's rule change by the US Department of Transportation now says only dogs qualify as service animals.
The agency said unusual animals on flights had "eroded the public trust in legitimate service animals".
Airlines say the old policy had been abused and was dangerous.
The new rule defines service dogs as "individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability", and says other animals should be treated by airlines as pets that can be placed in the cargo hold for a fee.
Previously: The Confusion About Pets (archive)
"Emotional Support Animals" Riding With Owners Aboard Commercial Airlines Flights
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Friday December 04 2020, @07:17AM (12 children)
I don't personally give a fuck about this specific thing, but it's an example of something that happens with any policies or goodwill: a few assholes abuse or exploit a good thing until it gets taken away or restricted so much that it's worthless, ruining it for everybody else.
Instead of trying to close all the loopholes I prefer context-based reasoning where you just go "No, you're being a jackass trying to abuse our goodwill, go fuck off" to the obvious jackasses, but that only works at small scale; any sufficiently large company is too afraid of lawsuits or bad PR and prefers to try to rules-lawyer away all possible abuses. And if any individual shows a bit of initiative and tries to stop the exploiters themselves, they'll just end up fired the moment the asshole calls corporate or whines on twitter about it. So, in an effort to stop a few extreme edge-case assholes, nobody ever gets to have nice things for long.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Friday December 04 2020, @07:38AM (6 children)
I meant to add that people really like to abuse the whole "emotional support animal" thing in general, so this is especially unsurprising. For example, I've seen someone bring in their giant dog into a bar with a no-pets policy and let it stand up so it got its paws and tongue all over the bar top. I was bartending at the time and it was a quiet night so I didn't care at first, kind of just ignored it because the dog was nice, but when it started drooling all over the counter I told her she had to keep it under control or she'd have to leave.
She declared I couldn't do that because "emotional support animal, you can't make me" and let the dog keep drooling on the bartop, so I told her to get the fuck out, and the response was "you have to let me stay, it's an emotional support dog!" like it's some magic phrase that lets you do whatever the fuck you want. Nope, doesn't work like that, especially when you can't control the animal. When the magic phrase failed to impress me and I insisted she leave she tried falling back to the other magic phrase: "YOU'RE OFFENDING ME!" like that was going to get me to back down somehow. Why, I don't fucking know, but I just laughed at that and told her to GTFO again.
Anyway, point I'm getting at is I've never had a good encounter with someone claiming need for an "emotional support animal", it's always been people trying to use it as a way to bring their pets into places they aren't allowed then starting shit if you demand proof, so I'm not even the slightest bit surprised that people were doing ludicrous shit with it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 04 2020, @12:56PM
You pretty much nailed it right there. Working dogs are trained intensively. Training starts right from birth and weaning - rambunctious animals aren't even selected. Well socialized animals are selected for training, if they meet all other requirements, like calm, and quiet.
If the dog is treated like a pet, it's not a service dog.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @01:35PM (1 child)
Modern dog owners are the worst.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday December 04 2020, @11:12PM
Yeah, quite. Especially when those owners start drooling on you.
But, now, what do you expect of modern dogs? They lost the instinct of educating their owner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday December 04 2020, @03:02PM (2 children)
My worst encounters were when some 20something woman brought her yappy mutt into the grocery store. She put it in the basket of her cart and pushed it around the store. It snapped and growled at everyone who got within five feet of it. She was constantly trying to get it to sit down. This was the days before COVID when it was rare to sanitize shopping carts. No employees asked her to leave. I certainly didn't want to be the next poor bastard putting my food into that cart.
The next was at a Red Lobster. Although this pet was pretty well behaved, it stunk to high heaven. I have no idea what this dog had rolled in but it was sickening. I had to ask to be moved. I was ten feet away and there was no way I could enjoy a meal while the entire section reeked of wet dog.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2020, @10:20AM (1 child)
A blind friend of mine has had her service dogs attacked by untrained emotional support animals on multiple occasions. Note I said "dogs" because she had to get a new one once after an "emotional support" cat jumped out of the lady's hand at the grocery store unprovoked and clawed its eyes. The dog otherwise survived, but can't see well enough to work. So he was retired and retrained to do some other service.
My friends favorite thing though was when she sued for the money in small claims, her lawyer presented evidence of how much a new dog would cost. They lady made some exclamation like "I had no idea service animals cost that much!" The lawyer jumped all over that as even more evidence that the woman didn't have a properly trained animal, since if she did then she'd know they are expensive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2020, @11:44AM
A pet is an animal with a service human.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday December 04 2020, @02:52PM
The whole "emotional support" animal scam was all abuse. The idea was to allow ADA support animals. Bringing your dog - or whatever - along everywhere you go has nothing to do with the ADA. These were never service animals. They were always pets and the people claiming otherwise were always assholes.
I'm just pissed it took this long for anyone to do something about it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday December 04 2020, @03:04PM (2 children)
That is only possible in a society with high cohesion and cooperation. If you live in a "diverse" country with many people and many cultures, and some shared values and some values not so much shared, this type of strategy is not possible. Diversity is not our strength, generally speaking.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 04 2020, @04:31PM
Since it's overwhelmingly white people abusing these rules I say we stop all immigration from European nations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:19PM
It also depends on people showing self-restraint.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday December 05 2020, @10:10AM
I can't disagree with anything you or anyone else has so far written on this thread. Bad mannered animals, people abusing the idea of a service animal, etc.
I will provide a reason to bring animals inside the plane instead of the cargo area, though. A few years ago, I permanently move from the US to Europe and we brought our two small cats with us. It was a fucking nightmare to deal with the airline. (And they were one of the better ones for handling animals.)
First, I had one department saying I had to buy the tickets for my cats from a different department. The second department said I needed to buy tickets for the cats from the first department. I wound in a three way phone conversation listening to the two departments argue with each other for about 10 minutes. In front of me, the customer. Very inspiring as to the care and quality my cats would be getting.
As the weeks went by (as I tried to do research into how to properly deal with all this), the airline couldn't tell me how to properly prepare my animals for transport. (How big do the travel cases do they need to be in? The cases needed a certain amount of airflow, but they couldn't tell me how to properly measure it to ensure when I bring them in, they would be accepted. They didn't tell me I needed proper documentation from my vet and the state vet. Would the cats be allowed inside the cabin or would they have to go into cargo? Would the cats take different flights from us because of cargo pressurization concerns? The list goes on and on and on.)
We did get tickets for them, but I couldn't buy the tickets for them at the same I bought tickets for me and my spouse. And once I had tickets for the cats, there was no guarantee that they would let the cats on at all. Only two animals were allowed and if someone beat us to checking in on that day, then there was nothing we could do. (Thank goodness we didn't have three cats.)
I'm skipping over whole sections of the nightmare. It ended with my spouse seeing the cats being loaded into the cargo hold from her window seat. We flew to the other country and on the other side, they told us no animals had been shipped in the plane. We nearly blew a gasket. It took several hours for them to find the cats. Our cats were fine and unharmed, and they had indeed traveled in the same plane as us. "Fucking nightmare" is an understatement. Especially when you realize how high a percentage of animals are lost or killed during flight.
Again: I had done my homework. For our needs, this was one of the better ones to transport animals. It's no wonder people want to bring their four legged kids on board.