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(c) 2010-2024 Jon L Gelman, All Rights Reserved.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Pets Allowed



The author takes an alpaca to the drugstore. There’s a lot of confusion about what emotional-support animals can legally do.

The author takes an alpaca to the drugstore. There’s a lot of confusion 
about what emotional-support animals can legally do. 
Credit Photograph by Robin Siegel

The author discusses "Service-Dogs" and "Emotional-Support Animals" [ESA]. Today's interesting post is shared from newyorker.com

What a wonderful time it is for the scammer, the conniver, and the cheat: the underage drinkers who flash fake I.D.s, the able-bodied adults who drive cars with handicapped license plates, the parents who use a phony address so that their child can attend a more desirable public school, the customers with eleven items who stand in the express lane. The latest group to bend the law is pet owners.
Take a look around. See the St. Bernard slobbering over the shallots at Whole Foods? Isn’t that a Rottweiler sitting third row, mezzanine, at Carnegie Hall? As you will have observed, an increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments, cohabiting with them in animal-unfriendly apartment buildings and dormitories, and taking them (free!) onto airplanes—simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being. No government agency keeps track of such figures, but in 2011 the National Service Animal Registry, a commercial enterprise that sells certificates, vests, and badges for helper animals, signed up twenty-four hundred emotional-support animals. Last year, it registered eleven thousand.
What about the mental well-being of everyone else? One person’s emotional support can be...
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