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I have friends who need their dogs on planes. I had friends who cheated.


Donald McCaig
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I am glad to know this, Maralyn.

I guess, having never tried it, I thought that space was smaller than it is. :-)

I think part of it is FAA flight regulations, too. You never could obstruct aisles in an aircraft during flight. Now theyre just reiterating and and saying that they have the right to enforce a pet fee/revert to pet regulations if the dog does not behave according to protocol.

 

I know the the bulkhead area offers just a bit more legroom space and those are the places my friends request if they have an option.

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This situation -- a man accused of punching deaf pregnant woman and her service dog on an airplane -- should prove interesting. I hope it's followed up.

 

http://www.14news.com/story/38231905/airline-passenger-accused-of-punching-deaf-pregnant-woman-service-dog

 

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-punch-airplane-dog-pregnant-woman-20180518-story.html

 

One thing that immediately catches my attention is that the dog is still a puppy. Even therapy dogs have to be at least a year old before being certified, so I suspect there could be questions about this service dog's legitimacy. Doesn't excuse the man's behavior though.

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  • ...so I suspect there could be questions about this service dog's legitimacy. Doesn't excuse the man's behavior though.

 

Yeah, absolutely no excuse for punching anyone. But, besides the fact that the dog is only 8 months old, it's a great Dane. I get that for certain types of service, dogs need to be a minimum size. But an alert dog for a hearing-iimpaired person can be pretty small. While I would hate to try to figure out size restrictions for service animals, a great Dane is TOTALLY impractical as a service animal that is going to accompany his person in all sorts of public places. Besides the fact that they just don't fit in a lot of public spaces, their life expectancy is short, and they aren't particularly tolerant of either heat or cold. This sure looks to me like the couple decided they wanted a great Dane as a companion animal, and then decided that they could take their companion animal wherever they want if they train it (or claim to have trained it) to perform a service for them. It is really murky trying to clearly define what a "legitimate" service animal is, and I sure don't want to say what breeds or mixes can or can't be service dogs. But it seems to me that one criterion for selecting a dog as a service animal that will have unrestricted public access is whether that dog is physically suited to go everywhere in public.

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It is just not possible that an 8 month old puppy could be a genuine service dog. That person was not telling the truth.

The amount of training alone takes longer than that dog has been alive, and it also requires a level of calm and focus away from distractions that no 8 month old puppy is going to have. The youngest service dog I have known was 2 years old. Her training started at 6 months and at 2 she could go places with her person, but was still classified as "in training".

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Was it just not clarified that the dog was "in training" and not a "real service dog" yet? SDIT aren't wholly granted access in some/most states, but most businesses allow them anyway, at least in my experience.

 

I also saw in the article that "Frontier say service animals are permitted on all flights, as long as they are certified and properly harnessed." When will the education spread far enough that business will stop saying "certified?" All it does is feed the online fake "certification" companies!

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The NBC article does specifically point out that "There is no uniform nationwide certification or registration process for legitimate service animals — which receive up to several years of specialized training — making it easy for people to scam a non-existent system," which addresses both the certification question and, obliquely, the fact that this dog is too young to be a real service dog (and also mentions the fake "certification companies in the sentence following). It's possible that service-dogs-in-training are granted the same privileges as fully fledged service dogs, though I don't know that with any certainty and it's not addressed here at all.

 

It is kind of interesting to me that this incident made the news if there's a possibility that the dog in question isn't even legit. I'm guessing that perhaps the fact that the owner could legitimately be using a service dog without question blinded those reporting the incident to the possibility that they could still have been scamming the system. As others have pointed out, a smaller dog with a longer life span would be a more practical choice in many ways as a hearing assistance dog.

 

On so many levels it just reinforces my belief that we do need some sort of verifiable certification system enacted so that real service dogs can be IDed as such so that the fake ones can be weeded out.

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^^ OK, that's just nuts. Not to mention irresponsible.

 

"The women told reporters at the airport that they knew Eleanor was pregnant but did not know she was so close to giving birth."

 

Then you err on the side of caution and leave the dog home with someone who can care for her. :P

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2 intact dogs of the opposite sex in the same home and they didn't know how far along the pregnant dog was. I'm guessing it's an oops litter because they were too irresponsible to prevent this from happening.

 

The dogs are supposedly both service dogs. If so, they're not from any reputable service dog agency. They spay and neuter their dogs so that sex driven distractions don't interfere with their work. How could this pregnant dog possibly be focused on her job when she's whelping?

 

My guess is that these are either self trained service dogs or else it's just someone else scamming the system for free airline accommodations for the dogs.

 

Yeah. I'm getting more cynical by the day.

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Today I saw an adult dog with a "service dog in training" vest on but it was quite obvious that the handler was neither a service dog trainer nor was the dog a real service dog. A few (or a lot, perhaps) are ruining things for those who are real service animals and service animal-reliant people.

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  • 7 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Well, people will try anything and I am happy for him that he loves his gator, but I predict this happy union will not endure. I had a good friend one time who had a pet crocodile. She owned a reptile exhibit and had raised him from a tiny baby, never intending him to be a pet but he just grew up tame. He was a dwarf species of croc, only destined to reach 6 foot at most, and so was containable; his owner could pick him up and carry him even when he was an adult. Even so, and I knew him closely for many years, there were things I would not ever do around him.  He had his own ideas about what was appropriate in his space and if he didn't like something he would rush you and stand there in front of you with his jaws wide open. He was  civilized and tame, but that doesn't mean he was reliable in every situation. He was not a golden retriever. His jaws could take off my arm, and as much as I liked him I didn't take chances. And this was a little guy relatively speaking. The guy the article is about thinks his alligator will stay as tame as he is now, but once he starts getting his size on it is pretty much a given that he will start to think of anything smaller than he is as potential prey. And almost everything, including his owner, will be smaller than he is. That guy, (and the entity which let him to register the animal and permitted him to walk him on a leash), has apparently forgotten that alligators and crocodiles are apex predators and are arguably the strongest creatures on earth.  Interesting story, thanks for posting it.

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I just saw this on our local news this evening and was pretty POd that they were referring to it as an emotional support animal. The owner may find some relief for his depression from having something to take care of, but that, IMO, does not qualify said animal as providing emotional support.

What's worse is the guy wants to take it to nursing homes and other places to visit, I assume like a therapy pet. Yet he had a blue band around the alligator's snout to keep its jaw shut and "Henney acknowledges that Wally is still a dangerous wild animal and could probably tear his arm off, but says he’s never been afraid of him."

SMH

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No worries, I sincerely doubt that any nursing home would permit the entrance of an alligator. Keeping the animal's snout banded closed is bordering on cruelty. As I said before, this situation won't last. (His saying the alligator could "probably" tear his arm off shows how uninformed the guy is. He probably shouldn't be allowed to have the animal at all.)

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I'm not so sure about that. My experience w/ activities folks at nursing homes is that some are quite clueless, especially when it comes to things like therapy animals. I once had to pry an aggressive little dog off Bodhi's face (as Bodhi stood quietly looking up at me in a silent pleat to remove the annoyance) one time at a nursing home. This was a dog who was visiting patients at the invitation of the facility and whose owner said he "just wants to play (:blink:).

There's a zoo in this area that has a Zoomobile that travels to various facilities and community events. That's fine; the handlers are experienced zoo employees. But this guy? I wouldn't trust him to take an alligator out in public, but especially now that news media are calling it an emotional support animal, which for all its being problematic carries a certain amount of cachet among people who are ill informed on the subject.

 

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This ESA alligator guy seems to be basking in the attention. I have never, ever known a truly depressed person who seeks attention in this way. Quite the contrary, people who are clinically depressed tend to want to fade in the background; or even avoid other people entirely.

I’m not saying I’m an expert on depression, but I’m certainly not buying it in this case. Call me a skeptic, but one of the pitfalls of the “soft” sciences seems to be that they attract their share of quacks. That would explain the ESA status here. </cynicism>

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21 hours ago, terrecar said:

This ESA alligator guy seems to be basking in the attention. I have never, ever known a truly depressed person who seeks attention in this way. Quite the contrary, people who are clinically depressed tend to want to fade in the background; or even avoid other people entirely.

I’m not saying I’m an expert on depression, but I’m certainly not buying it in this case. Call me a skeptic, but one of the pitfalls of the “soft” sciences seems to be that they attract their share of quacks. That would explain the ESA status here. </cynicism>

I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. Not an expert either, but very familiar with clinical depression in myself and also in many other people I know and have known. This whole thing is a sham and really my only concern is for the poor beast, who may end up dead because he mauls someone, when he should never be in such a position in the first place. Stupid people = animals who pay for the stupidity with their lives, and it makes me angry when that happens.

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22 hours ago, Smalahundur said:

I think keeping alligators, crocodiles, pythons and so on as pets is a great idea, you know, from a Darwinian point of view. https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2182428/indonesian-woman-eaten-giant-pet-crocodile-after-falling

:P

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5 hours ago, D'Elle said:

I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. Not an expert either, but very familiar with clinical depression in myself and also in many other people I know and have known. This whole thing is a sham and really my only concern is for the poor beast, who may end up dead because he mauls someone, when he should never be in such a position in the first place. Stupid people = animals who pay for the stupidity with their lives, and it makes me angry when that happens.

From the Fatal Attractions link:


A recurring theme throughout the series is the notion that when an exotic animal attack on a human results in a fatality to the human, it almost always results in an additional fatality. The animal involved in the attack, often simply exhibiting its hard-wired instincts or prey drive, usually has to be put down as well. Experts interviewed for the show explain that sometimes the killing of the animal is to prevent it from further attacks on humans; other times, the animal is euthanized in order to retrieve the body of the victim; still others are killed as routine legal procedure, applied to any animal that injures or kills a human, in order to perform a necropsyand test for diseases such as rabies. Thus, the human's attraction is just as likely, if not more so, to be fatal to the animal as well.

I noticed the Croc in Indonesia that ate the woman was not destroyed but re-located according to the article. Here in States I beleive that would be the exception and not the norm?

 

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