Service animals can be extremely helpful for adults and children who have certain kinds of special needs. Legally speaking, stores, hotels, restaurants, and schools, must allow people to bring their service animals with them when the person is going into a public place. Not all animals can be considered to be “service animals”, however.
When people hear the phrase “service animal”, they tend to think of a black or yellow lab dog that is guiding a person who is visually impaired or blind. While this is one situation where service dogs can help people, it is not the only one. Now, service animals can be trained to assist people who have a wide variety of special needs.
There are children who have an autism spectrum disorder that can benefit from being assisted by a service dog. Kids with severe and life threatening allergies can use service dogs that are trained to prevent the child from coming in contact with an allergen. Some people with high levels of anxiety use service animals in order to be able to go into public places.
Most stores, restaurants, and hotels understand that some of their guests and customers will be using a service animal. Public schools are just beginning to accommodate for the needs of students who use service dog.
It is often very easy to tell the difference between a service dog, who is working, and a pet that is accompanying his or her owner into a public place. Service animals wear vests that make it obvious that this animal is not a pet. Owners or users of service animals will have official paperwork that can be shown to sales clerks and restaurant servers as proof that their dog is, in fact, a service animal.
Unfortunately, not everyone in this world is an honest person. I spent a few years working in a retail environment, and I have had people insist that their pet was a service animal, when it clearly was not, just so they could bring the animal into the store with them. One woman was pushing a tiny dog around as it sat atop a pillow inside of a cart. The dog did not have a service animal vest, and the woman got extremely angry when asked to produce papers that proved that this puppy truly was a service dog.
Another problem comes when a person declares that something other than a dog is their service animal. Could it be possible that a person could really be using a cat, or a parrot, or a boa constrictor as a service animal? Not according to a new definition that has been made official by the United States government.
As of March of 2011, there is a more specific definition of what, exactly, can be called a service animal. “Service animal means any dog that is individually trained to do work or preform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including a physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other disability. Other species of animals, whether wild or domestic, trained or untrained, are not service animals for the purposes of this definition”. The only exception is for miniature horses, and that is only allowed under very specific circumstances.
Image by Lisa Norwood on Flickr