In light of the recent attack of a flight attendant by a so-called emotional support dog, it is time to ban these animals from U.S. commercial flights.
Let’s start by identifying the problem. Year after year, attack after attack, we see that emotional support animals (ESAs) constitute a safety wildcard onboard commercial flights. Most of the time, the little critters behave just fine find and pose little to no risk. But on hundreds of well-documented occasions, these ESAs have attacked other passengers or crewmembers, creating a climate of fear and hostility.
It is also appropriate to mention here that it is very simple to obtain a doctor’s note for an ESA online and such notes are routinely used to avoid pet cargo fees, as ESAs fly free under current U.S. federal law.
We should approach this issue sober-mindedly and without animus, not charged with emotion. We face a problem and there are several ways to handle it. Why is a blanket ban, a so-called bright-line rule necessary in this case? Isn’t that a draconian response?
Why Bright-Line Rules Are Helpful
Allow me to make an analogy. Bright-line rules offer a compelling alternative to vague standards, often reflecting a summary of wise decisions. If people over the age of 60 are banned from piloting commercial airplanes, it is because such policy represents a generally accurate summary of good individual decisions, and is much less costly to administer than any alternative. (Just think about the expenditures that would be necessary to assess competence on a case-by-case basis.). These rules do not summarize individually wise decisions, but rather express a social judgment about valuations and relations.
Rules facilitate decision-making by laying out the framework within which they can be made, thereby freeing up time for other matters. The purpose of a rule is not itself a rule; but rather a justification that may not settle all cases before the fact, but does ground expectations in a narrower outcome. Rules can, in short, provide the most efficient way to proceed, saving time and effort while simultaneously lessening the risk of error in a particular case.
To return to my pilot analogy, an airline may derive abundant short-term benefit from keeping an experienced pilot beyond a predetermined retirement age; but such a decision will likely lead to high long-term costs from having to monitor every pilot individually and from insuring against mistaken decisions. A pervasive problem in modern regulation is that members of a regulated class face ambiguous and conflicting guidelines, so that they do not know how to plan.
Put simply, bright-line rules are not perfect, but represent a lesser of two imperfect policy choices.
A Bright-Line Rule For ESAs
Facing the threat of continued attacks onboard, it is time for a bright-line rule banning emotional service animals…or at least dogs…from commercial flights.
What about those who truly need these critters? The veterans? The wounded. Here’s where I will willingly concede, again, that this policy is not perfect. Just like the American’s With Disabilities Act (ADA) was a necessary step to safeguard the rights of those with disabilities to fully participate in public life, so should the advantages and disadvantages of any ESA ban be weighed.
But without dismissing those who claim to need such animals in order to fly, ask yourself why most of the rest of the world manages to survive without such rights. Are Americans unique in that respect?
There are many ways to cope with stress. Just like smoking is one but is banned because it disturbs others, so should emotional support animals be banned because of their potential harm to others.
CONCLUSION
I truly want to stress that I don’t have a dog in this fight…literally or figuratively. But I do see an escalating problem that requires addressing. A laissez faire approach is not working. It is time to ban ESAs on utilitarian grounds.
Finally, please note that trained service animals (guide dogs) are not emotional support animals. My envisioned ban certainly does not cover these dogs.
What do you think about ESAs onboard airplanes? Did I convince you?
Seconded.
Another ESA dog bit a United flight attendant this morning on a transcon flight…
Agree, but until we can also say that all politicians over the age of 60 should be banned from office, we should not make any such wie statements. Surely we can all agree on removing all politicians over the age of 60 from both parties. Not sure we’d have very many left though….
Agree with you completely.
The Americans with disabilities act will make it hard to completely get rid of ESAs…
A lot of people don’t need their ESA to fly (yes Some do), they need their ESA at their destination for a multitude of other reasons…
Can’t they stick em in the cargo hold?
Yep, some breeds and sizes anyway (on some aircraft)… For the others, they should be in the cabin BUT in a carrier… There is no need for an ESA (Non-Service Animal) to be out of a cage or carrier.
Perhaps we should consider why “emotional support dogs” have become so popular among Travelers.
In the beginning we do this way allow the airlines to take our beloved dogs out of our sight and put them in holding cages where a vast majority were never seen again, died in transit but we’re simply lost. Unfortunately the alternative for small animals was to pay $200 for a 6 pound dog to sit at your feet with no airflow. Perhaps the greed of Air Lines and irresponsible actions are to blame for this intolerable situation. Yes absolutely it has gone entirely too far. Service dogs and they’re disabled owners should be protected Above All Else. Hey. Owners should also get a little respect. THEN there are those that like to complain about just sitting at next to a dog that has done them no harm and hasn’t made a sound just so they can get upgraded to a first class seat. And how about those adorable little children that will not stay away from someone’s service dog or they get under the seat and poke at that poor little six pound pup sitting in her carrier minding her own business. Why is it that childs parents seem to have no control over them. In my opinion undisciplined, seat kicking spoiled children are more of a problem then support dogs and some of them bite too.
That is not true. The ADA makes a clear distinction between ESAs and real service animals. The ADA defines a service animal according to the task the dog performs, as it relates to the disability. A dog picking up a walking cane, that their blind handler has dropped, would clearly be a task. But there is no trained task that ESAs perform. Simply sitting there calming a person’s nerves or making them feel good is not a task. The term “ESA” is really a knock-off designation, The term is to real service animals what cubic zirconia is to diamonds. It doesn’t carry with it the same amount of genuine recognition. When you consider the high degree and expense of training animals and handlers, there is no comparison. This ESA designation is purely pretentious and phony. It is a very sad and disgusting attempt of non-disabled people to seize and tag on to the rights and considerations of real disabled people. The rights of the disabled, as outlined in the ADA, amounted to some very hard fought for laws back in 1990. This is a blatant attempt of non-disabled people to falsely identify themselves for their own selfish wishes.
I have to concur. There are a lot of people who medically necessary support animals for a variety of conditions. The increase in non-medically required “support animals” creates an atmosphere where both people and businesses are less likely to properly accommodate medically necessary animals.
Although there are, I’m sure, people who genuinely benefit from their emotional support animals, the vast majority of people who travel with s0 called ESAs are actually traveling with their pets and using the nomenclature to avoid costs and restrictions they’d otherwise encounter.
What does the ADA have to do with ESAs? What does the ADA have to do with air travel accessibility?
What needs to happen is a much stricter approach to the process for determining the need for an ESA. I know multiple people who’ve “consulted” an online mental health professional to obtain ESA documentation. I also know several servicemembers with well-documented PTSD that have legitimate need/use for an ESA. We need to clamp down on how we determine such a need. It’s easier to get an ESA on an airplane than it is to get a handicapped placard for your car. Without violating privacy acts, pax need to show continuity of care by the medical professional documenting such a need. If a patient has never seen the medical professional in person, has no record on file with the doctor’s office, and/or the doctor is physically located in a different city/state than is feasibly commutable by a patient, then the ESA requirement is bogus. Full stop. The “patient” and the doctor should be held accountable for some form of fraud. This needs legislation sooner rather than later.
While I appreciate the exclusion of service animals from your proposal, and I concede that the statutory requirements for certification as an emotional support animal are easily circumvented by unethical passengers and healthcare providers engaged in malpractice by improper or imprecise approval, I believe that the bright line drawn in your essay, no more dogs, is ill-considered. The carriers’ efforts to date at making the requirements more restrictive and targeting the less-likely-to-be-legitimate animals for exclusion is a start. I’d suggest an incremental increase in the restrictions governing certification, and inclusion of explicit liability for both the animal’s owner and the certifying physician/provider. You list, but then quickly move past, a poignant and, to me, important and valid role for an ESA, the PTSD aid dogs that accompany combat veterans and survivors of violence. If these dogs can be certified through the service animal program, my argument against making them, and their owners’ collateral damage in your proposal has less relevance. It’s my impression, however, that not every person in need can access a service animal and may be, in the interim, dependent on an ESA.
Agreed. Ban them now! I know a lot of people who are truly terrified and thus uneasy around dogs. Shouldnt they be able to fly without being stressed out about these so called support animals?
A potential problem is the Americans with Disabilities Act. If they claim to be disabled, you cannot charge extra for the emotional dog. If there were a permitted charge, then fake emotional support dogs would not be a problem as they would cost the same as a pet. The way around it was for the airlines to cut the wacky emotional support animal, like pet snake.
I’m surprised that nobody has claimed that the parent is an emotional support animal because if a kid is traveling and the parents are not there, the kid becomes nervous. So that’s an excuse for the parents to fly FREE!
“.. The ADA provides no protection for emotional support animals in public accommodations”
Your editorial raises that there’s an issue, but I don’t think you compellingly made the case for why there needs to be a blanket ban and why we can’t just let individual companies manage this. Having some statistics about how many emotional support dog attacks there have been, what the trend is, what proportion of flights have incidents versus other passenger-caused incidents etc would have made your argument much more compelling. Otherwise, your argument reads very anecdotal. I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong, just that I think you didn’t make a strong case.
If passengers and staff members are genuinely terrified about dogs, then companies can choose to not allow them, and customers can make their choices on which airlines to fly based on those policies. I also don’t have
a dog in this issue but I don’t see the need for a system-wide regulation at this point either to allow or disallow emotional support animals. (Obviously, I’m very glad for the ADA which does legally require businesses to allow guide dogs).
Agree with MikeL above.
The Air Carrier Access Act addresses this. Airlines can’t simply ban ESAs. So you need to convince your senator. Not me.
Here’s an idea for the airlines:
The airline waives any responsibility for the actions of the ESA while on board the flight and anyone traveling with an ESA must purchase umbrella liability insurance coverage (or have coverage via another proven source) that would provide payment for any claims that occur if the animal misbehaves?
Not sure if the ADA people would lose their mind, since this is sort of a run-around charge for bringing the animal on-board…but being on an airplane isn’t a right, god knows we waive all sorts of other things just to get on the plane, why not load all of the risk onto the owner of ESA and require coverage like we do for those who drive a car?
So now we need someone policing the insurance policies on every bit job with an emotional support chinchilla? Yeah, that’s gonna happen.
Yes, there are a lot of people who abuse the ESA rules. But I think that there might be a bit of bias in the suggestion that we ban ESAs altogether. There are a good number of people that, for medical/psychological reasons, need their ESAs, or they won’t be able to travel. If we ban ESAs altogether, is it OK to ban people from bringing their wheelchairs or canes because they take up too much space in the overhead or cargo holds? OK to ban oxygen equipment because of the potential explosion risk? There needs to be a way to allow legitimate ESAs on a flight, and the suggestion here just is unacceptable.
I was bitten by a small dog (not wearing an ESA vest) on a United SFO-DEN flight. The same dog snapped at another passenger during boarding and bit the flight attendant collecting trash during the approach. I’ve also shared my row with much larger ESA labeled dogs who simply laid at my feet and loved to be scratched behind the ears. I ended up with pants covered in shed fur, but enjoyed their company on the flight.
I hate blanket bans imposed because of irresponsible/criminal people. My proposed solution is for the airlines to partner with training facilities that can certify that an ESA that cannot me placed in a carrier under the seat, is trained sufficiently to fly in the passenger cabin. Then just like with pre-check, that animal can be registered with the airline with a Known Traveler ID type number cross referenced to their training facilities’ databases. The ESA would have its own profile (photo, breed, identifying physical characteristics). This will cut down on the fraud from people that buy ESA vests on Amazon to avoid the animal transport charges and bite incidents in the cabin.
In general I agree but would carve out one exception. I’d allow ESAs IF they are professionally trained as a service animal, and the passenger can provide proof of the training. This would provide a way for those who really need them to bring them, while stamping out abuse by scammers trying to avoid pet fees, and avoid running afoul of the ADA. I would imagine the charities set up to help veterans with PTSD would be happy to cover the training fees.
Good point. The big concern for me is who qualifies as a service animal trainer to make such a judgement. The giant problem right now is that there are too many workarounds. If that were also the case for your suggestion, people would just have a 2 hour “professional training course” done with their animal. That also doesn’t go into who would actually regulate the certification of trainers, State or Federal government.
I think the difference is, to my knowledge, there aren’t a whole lot of organizations out there that formally train service animals. You could restrict “qualified training” to only animals trained by those organizations, i.e. no “self-trained” service dogs with the 2-hour training course as you mention. Given the cost of obtaining an organization trained service animal, I’m pretty sure that would weed out 99.5% of the fraud.
@Hoc: “If we ban ESAs altogether, is it OK to ban people from bringing their wheelchairs or canes because they take up too much space in the overhead or cargo holds? OK to ban oxygen equipment because of the potential explosion risk?”
I think it’s pretty obvious the difference between “dog that has some non-zero risk of causing harm” and “this wheelchair is taking up too much space”. You don’t need to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to be able to hold those two beliefs concurrently.
And your comparison with the O2 equipment doesn’t hold up because there are standards, regulations, audits, etc. that take place to ensure all of that stuff is safe to be out and about in the world. The same infrastructure does not exist for the certifying of dogs (and will never be at the same level since dogs are animals with free-will and not inanimate pieces of equipment).
Absolutely agree with Matthew on this…
What about simply requiring dogs to wear muzzles?
Matthew, I’m afraid that you have failed to convince me, largely because I think that your analogy is flawed. I think that a bright-line rule regarding retirement ages for pilots simply reinforces a notion that anyone under that age is safe to pilot. I would argue that all pilots, regardless of age, should be required to regularly re-certify their credentials (and I believe that this is how the FAA operates, yes?). It should be the ability to regain that certification that should, I would argue, serve as the principal discriminator in determining whether or not one is allowed one to continue piloting a commercial aircraft. I don’t buy the idea that the monetary savings to a blanket rule is adequate justification for an age discriminator. That’s not how we do it with drivers’ licenses.
So, I don’t think yours is an apt analogy. Besides … muzzles. 😉
For what it’s worth, I was VERY surprised to find a couple next to me, one which was holding a goldendoodle in her lap, on a recent flight from EWR to LAX. Goldendoodles are NOT small! It seems like a lot to put a big dog through. But I was even more surprised at how well that dog maintained its composure throughout the entire flight.
That’s not to make an argument either way. It’s just an anecdote loosely based on the topic of the blog. 🙂
Ban the ESAs, and all the emotional “pansies” who can’t seem to function in society (much less an airplane) with their little fur babies. About time this outrage gets reigned in.
You know I realize that ESA’s may provide some sort of “security blanket” for the individual, and perhaps I am being too harsh as well, but if you cannot function in the world without a dog by your side, I have to wonder if the dog is the best treatment to address the person’s actual emotional state. People went for years without having the luxury of an animal to comfort their conditions….somehow people survived. But the fact that society has more or less masked the problems by using a dog as a means of survival, rather than addressing ways to have the individual cope, whether that is therapy, medication, etc, isn’t providing them a way to overcome or correctly deal with the underlying individual issues. My Grandfather and his generation fought in WWII and surely experienced trauma or PTSD; many people experienced it, many people suffered because they didn’t deal with it properly, many people coped. But a carrying around an ESA wasn’t how they dealt with it. As a service member myself, I know many people my age who suffer and have a legitimate need. But I also know people who think “I have PTSD and I need a dog and want to be able to take it wherever I want to because I earned that right” yet they never set foot in a psychologist/therapist/etc office to actually deal with the issue.
I’m a dog lover, and a professional who traveled with a service dog for a very short time when I actually needed one. I totally agree with you! Grow up folks. We would ALL love to have our doggies in our laps… but we can’t. ALL DOGS ARE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT ANIMALS.
So people who need emotional support animals take priority over people with allergies or people who have extreme fear of animals. Nope, just ban ESA’s.
This is my thought also. When I was younger I was bitten several times by a pit bull and once by an Australian shepherd so being around certain dogs still gives me anxiety. I would think just as many people have allergies/fears vs those people with ESAs. Why are the former not given consideration?
One instance where someone is maimed by a dog should have been enough to have all dogs banned But alas we are a society that’s ruled by the vocal minority.
1. If people can easily obtain fake certicate of emotional support animal, why can they not easily obtain fake certificate of service animal? Please think in long term time frame.
2. Just because dog is a troublesome ESA doesn’t mean snake, spider, rabbit, raccoon cannot also be a troublesome ESA.
3. Why make exception for veteran or war wounded? Its their job. Along with risk that goes with the job. They’re not even defending their homeland. They invade others.
@James
Here’s hoping they invade **your** home!
All for the ban. As an asthmatic, I cannot believe we put the person with a dog above my risk for an asthma attack. Ban the ESA’s.
Delta airlines was bold enough to ban “pit bull/pitbull-like” dogs from all commercial flights regardless of the dog’s function; SD or ESA.. While they didn’t seem to differentiate whether the offending biting dogs were Service Dog or ESA, I suspect it was most likely an ESA.
I own a Service Dog who happens to wear the coat of a pit bull but performs as a hearing alert dog. Service Dogs have a level of training that is very regimented and strict, and are held to a higher standard. Handlers have specific instructions on how to command these working dogs, and have strict public etiquette which includes ignore everything except the handler. ESA have no training at all. They should, at minimum, be required to hold a Good Canine Certification.
I have flown commercial flights with this dog many times with zero issues while she “tucked” under the seat. The only people who knew she was there was the person next to me. While my dog is small enough to sit on my lap (40pds), it’s not permitted as a Service Dog with the exception of PTSD work.
I would be agreeable to muzzling every dog on every flight regardless of it’s job. Muzzle training would be an indication that the dog is tolerant. My dog would have no issue with this and would still find a way to alert me.
Clearly you have no understanding or concern for those with mental health challenges. Getting proper ESA documentation isn’t easy, and is actually a stressful process for people already having difficulty. Animals don’t attack for no good reason… Yet you never see articles about what provoked the animal to make a move. Banning ESA on flights, and limiting their rights just shows how much progress remains to be made towards mental health understanding and acceptance.
True service dogs don’t bite. Even when provoked. That’s why they have EXTENSIVE training and are not just some nut cases doggie. I traveled with a female pit bull for about a year when I required actual assistance with no issues at all. In fact one guy told me that he had sat next to Prince on a flight and that my dog smelled better. But I’m sick of fake service dogs!
Agree!
I live in the UK where only proper service dogs are allowed and yet everyone manages to fly without an animal. I love animals but if someone is so anxious they can’t fly without an animal are they fit to fly? I would ban them. I agree with the suggestion if they are proper trained service dog than that’s ok. If not what is to stop someone bringing a large very aggressive dog on board that could be a safety risk to the whole aircraft.
ESA animals on most airlines (the few that even allow them) are required to fit inside of a carrier and be able to fit under the seat. Along with weight restrictions (often goes up to 17 or 19 pounds) , dogs are required to have a muzzle and harness on.
Instead of trying to ban ESA’s on all flights because you “don’t like it” Karan, start booking with an airline that just doesn’t allow any dogs. There are many, trust me. It’s much easier finding an airline that allows ESA’s than one that doesn’t.
I thought of this immediately:
How about this? If you can’t fly without a service or support animal then find another mode of transportation where your not inconveniencing the rest of us. I love dogs, but I surely don’t want to fly next to one. Planes are cramped as is. This is ridiculous and its getting gout of hand. That or airlines needs to have a designated area on the plane for these people and their dogs ONLY.
This is horrible why would you ban dogs that littarly keep some people from killing themselve just horrible