Guest Post: Fom John

Your Pet Parrot, Rat, or Snake is No Longer a Service Animal

Almost all of the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act are perfectly sensible on paper, and were written with the best of intentions: to ensure that individuals with physical disabilities do not face discrimination in employment, when their disability doesn’t affect their ability to do the job, and to ensure that businesses that serve the public are reasonably accessible to the disabled.

Few will argue that such measures are a bad thing in the abstract. However, I’ve discussed before how these laws can be abused, often placing a significant burden on small businesses. One abuse that I didn’t discuss, however, is the practice of designating virtually any pet, whether it’s a dog, monkey, spider, or snake, as a “service animal,” allowing their owners to take them into any business they like. This is because the Americans with Disabilities Act requires most businesses which disallow animals on the premises to make exceptions for service animals.

After a flurry of complaints from business-owners, the Obama administration has promulgated a new regulation, set to take effect on March 15, which limits the definition of “service animals” to dogs, with a few very narrow exceptions.

Most business owners will probably be pleased with this, because a well-behaved dog can be almost anywhere without causing any problems. And this may just be my own personal bias, but who doesn’t like dogs? Furthermore, this regulation should have few effects on many people who are actually disabled, and in need of a service animal, since the overwhelming majority of service animals are dogs, anyway.

And for many people who try to bring their non-canine pets wherever they want under the protection of the ADA, the disability they claim to be afflicted with is often questionable, at best.

These new regulations, if they end up being enforced (and, more importantly, business owners are apprised of their rights to eject disruptive animals and their owners from their businesses), should go a long way in mitigating some of the most ridiculous abuses of the ADA, while hopefully ensuring that it still protects the people it was meant to protect.

However, the ADA is a federal law. It applies nationwide, but is meant to lay out the bare minimum level of protection from discrimination that the disabled receive. Individual states can adopt laws that provide additional protections, and several have. For example, in California, protections for the disabled go much, much farther than the federal law. These additional protections take many forms, including a broader definition of what constitutes a disability, and much greater protections for service animals.

Again, when California lawmakers created these protections for the disabled, they probably had no clue that these well-intentioned rules would be abused.

What is the solution to this? Obviously, changing the law on this subject to make it clearer, thereby making outlandish interpretations of it less likely, would help. However, when it comes to civil rights laws, any change that does not unambiguously expand their scope runs the risk of being interpreted as a “rollback” of civil rights for a particular group.

So, lawmakers will have to tread very carefully in this area, to avoid the appearance that they’re trying to curtail the civil rights of disabled Americans. However, most mainstream groups that advocate for the disabled already acknowledge that abuse of laws like the ADA is a problem for everyone, including the disabled community; such abuse makes all disabled individuals, most of whom simply want a reasonable chance at the same economic opportunities that most people take for granted, and feel that people who abuse laws for their own convenience make people with real disabilities look bad.

Hopefully, with the support of the mainstream disabled community, making laws like the ADA less prone to abuse will become politically tenable.