Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Emotional Support Animals

The New Yorker has a great story by a reporter who pretended that various animals were her emotional support animals. She showed up with a turtle, a pig, and an alpaca at various institutions - always with a letter saying the animal was an emotional support animal (E.S.A.).

She and her borrowed turtle got into the Frick Museum.

She and a small pig got on a Jet Blue flight.

The pic at the link shows here with an alpaca in a drug store.

Why didn’t anybody do the sensible thing, and tell me and my turtle to get lost? The Americans with Disabilities Act allows you to ask someone with a service animal only two questions: Is the animal required because of a disability? What work or task has the animal been trained to perform? Specific questions about a person’s disability are off limits, and, as I mentioned, people are baffled by the distinction between service animals and emotional-support animals.

Take your pig on a plane,
take your turtle among the Vermeers,
just claim it's an E.S.A.,
and you're in the clear, it appears.

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