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Creature Comforts and Other Weekend Reads

Lauren

CREATURE COMFORTS: We see a working dog at the grocery store about once a week that has really fascinated my son Ethan. The dog has shown up over the last few months with various folks who appear to be training or actively working with the dog in his harness to navigate the bazillion carts clogging the aisles and get his subject through checkout and back to the car.

Because it’s been such an interest for E, it was serendipitous that an article on the very subject showed up in the NYTimes this week about the apparent controversy over working animals. The controversy surrounds the definitions of “disability,” “working animal” and the “tasks” they perform, as well as the ability of the animals’ subjects’ ability to describe why the animals are necessary on outings to stores, restaurants, and on public transportation, even though their subjects may not be the most qualified to describe their needs and tasks in clinical terms. Dogs appear to be most socially acceptable to public officials, over other working animals such as miniature horses and primates, and are doing what they can to make dogs the only acceptable working animals.

My most pressing question after reading this excellent article is why an animal who is not a dog but is trained, disease-free, happy, and well-treated, should be prevented from helping an individual with a mental or physical disability gain better access to equal opportunity?

*** UPDATE: Evil Fizz points out in the comments that the author of the article, Rebecca Skloot, is also a blogger who is updating and answering questions about the article here and here. Of particular interest is an impressive video on the training of Panda, the working horse pictured above. ***

ALSO ON ANIMALS, but really about shitting on single moms (again), Dear Prudence rounds up her best and worst of 2008 and singles out young, single moms as irresponsible rubes that don’t understand their own impulses even as she’s being criticized for doing just that in the original article. If you read the original, the subject is “Pitbulls and Toddlers Make Me Nervous When They Hang Out Together,” but Prudence reads, “The Real Issue is That The Toddler’s Mom Gave Birth Before I Am Socially Comfortable With Single Parents, So Let’s Make The Dog Thing About That.”

The biggest lesson learned is not to write Dear Prudence if you’re a parent before the age of thirty.

WHAT WOMEN WANT: At Jack & Jill Politics, the results of a survey by YWCA on what women want from the Obama administration.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE?: At Body Impolitic, thoughts on porn and the passing of Bettie Page.

WOMEN, AGING, AND WORK: Octogalore on Jennifer Aniston “feeling at ease with her age” when that means getting naked for a photo-shoot, and on women in positions of political power when they are placed there rather than being elected.

MENSTRUATION RULES MY SHOPPING HABITS: Marketing brown diamonds as “chocolate diamonds,” because women will buy anything chocolate.

A CLASS ABOVE: A college education may move out of reach for most of the U.S. Also, an international conversation on women, motherhood, and workplace mobility.

DO IT FOR THE KIDS: For nature-lovers and ecoists, this picture- and trivia-heavy blog may become one of your new favorites. My nine-year-old and I talk about the pictures and ideas featured on an almost nightly basis.

ONO, RACISM, AND SEXISM, OH MY!: And finally, if you haven’t been following Cara’s series on Yoko Ono, you really should be. Even though I’m not a die hard Beatles fan like Cara is, I’m absolutely fascinated by her analysis of Yoko Ono’s place in history and how easily Ono’s story narrates commonplace sexism and racism in action that ultimately colors Ono’s own legacy as well as that of John Lennon’s. [Intro, Part I, Part II, Part III, and more in queue.]

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27 thoughts on Creature Comforts and Other Weekend Reads

  1. Aarugh, that stupid Prudence article. I wrote about it when it first appeared. The reader who said “you lost me when you basically called her a slut,” has it pegged. (Not to mention it’s about the toddler’s impulse control and inability to understand that the dog might not like having its tail pulled, not anything to do with the mother’s impulse control.)

    No, I did not call her a “slut,” and, yes, I agree she is too young to be a mother. The “So what?” is that it’s a tragedy that so many young women with no education, prospects, or partner are raising children alone.

    This part just makes me irate. And where exactly should we direct our “concern” about this tragedy? Obviously at women who are making an effort to do the best they can under trying circumstances! Sneering at their inability to understand that sex might lead to an unplanned pregnancy is beneath contempt. Gah.

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  8. Oh dear, Prudie again… Sadly this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit anymore.

    Just read the article about sevice animals. I think many people are just uncomfortable with service animals because except for birds, cats and dogs, most animals aren’t visible in cities. And humans are easily afraid of things they are not familiar with. Also, there’s this ridiculuos belief you could get sick because animals are commonly considered dirty and thus germ-ridden, even if they’re not. Not mentioned was the possibility of allergic reactions to some animals by other customers (even though that would probably be mostly contact allergies). And of course every a**hole who takes his or her untrained or spoilt pet somewhere, creating havoc, lets people see animals more as a threat than as a help.

    In my opinion some system like drivers’ licences would be good idea. Maybe with a certificate of the training the service animal received so if a pony or bird is passed on, the new owner can be sure about the animals qualifications. Incidents such as killing another dog would lead to loss of the licence. (At that point I wondered what happened to the dog and the owner? Not intervening when your dog is killing someone elses cannot possibly be legal and sure is punishable anyway, is it?)

  9. “In my opinion some system like drivers’ licences would be good idea.”

    If we’re going to take seriously the idea embodied in animal cruelty laws, that it’s possible to wrong animals, shouldn’t we have such a system for all animals? People need to show that they can take care of an animal before being given it.

    But of course that won’t happen because animals are property.

  10. You know, I can understand how people have problems with any sort of animal being taken anywhere — I used to work retail in NYC, and having people bringing in dogs of all sizes which would bark at each other and fight and get in the way was an issue. I’m sure there are lots of jerks out there who take advantage of service animal laws in order to just take their pets places.

    But I think the article made a good point that the solution isn’t to punish people with disabilities; it’s to crack down on people who fraudulently claim that their animals are service animals (and I would include therapy animals as service animals) when they’re actually just pets. I don’t see why that’s hard to do.

  11. on a lighter note:

    Marketing brown diamonds as “chocolate diamonds,” because women will buy anything chocolate.

    I’ve always referred to them as shit-brown diamonds. No thanks.

  12. But I think the article made a good point that the solution isn’t to punish people with disabilities; it’s to crack down on people who fraudulently claim that their animals are service animals (and I would include therapy animals as service animals) when they’re actually just pets. I don’t see why that’s hard to do.

    Exactly. The article hints that the boards in charge of this don’t want to set up the infrastructure to do so, so they’ll punish the disabled in the meantime.

    Also, the concentration on the verbiage of tasks and duties that the animals perform, whereas the subject would generically say, “My pet calms me down,” a clinician would say, “The service animal helps monitor panic attacks and has reduced the number of public outbursts by X percent in the last year,” or “The service animal fetches water, turns lights on and off,” etc.

    And also, I’m really charmed by the idea of a service pony. (I want one.) It makes sense! Dogs are great animals that the public is generally comfortable with, but only have a working life of (I think the article said) 6-8 years plus training time and retirement, whereas a miniature horse lives for around thirty years and can develop a better personal and working relationship with their subjects over that length of time.

    The whole controversy just seems unfairly slanted against the disabled, and particularly the mentally/emotionally disabled, mirroring the public view that mental and emotional disorders aren’t as serious or real because they can’t necessarily be witnessed (and judged) all the time by outsiders.

  13. “I think the article made a good point that the solution isn’t to punish people with disabilities; it’s to crack down on people who fraudulently claim that their animals are service animals (and I would include therapy animals as service animals) when they’re actually just pets. I don’t see why that’s hard to do.”

    The reason that’s hard to do is because the effect on other people is the same. The service animal and the pet look and act similarly to other customers.

    I think a big part of the issue is that people are simply uncomfortable with change. They’re used to shopping without animals around and they don’t want that to change. Well, I think people need to just get over it. Animals are part of nature and that’s not going away. Just like you can’t go shopping without encountering a screaming baby or two, smelly or rude customers, cashiers without math skills, obnoxious music playing, etc etc etc. Just get real. It’s reality. Animals are here to stay.

  14. Oft-demonized hipsters are the only people, it bears mentioning, who have stalwartly defended Yoko Ono. Maybe not all, of course, but it’s been true for a long time that art rock fans have loved her, and that she’s a large part of the reason that John is the cool Beatle. Dissing Yoko Ono has been, to my mind, a marker of someone who is out of it for a long time. Underground DJs remix her, Bust magazine idolizes her, and Le Tigre cut a track with her. So the universal Yoko hatred stops with the hiperati.

  15. Yoko’s solo work is often very hard to absorb, because it’s Art Rock and deliberately inaccessible. But for people who want to support Yoko Ono for being awesome, and learn more about her music, you can check out a remix project called Open Your Box. Her early 80s stuff is very 80s, too, so even though it’s very artsy in a New Wave style, it’s pretty accessible, too, I think.

    John Lennon quite possibly wouldn’t have been near the cool motherfucker he was in the 70s if it wasn’t for Yoko Ono. As it was, while the rest of the Beatles spun their wheels and were unable, in my opinion, to move forward in any substantive way, Lennon was cutting records with David Bowie, partying at Max’s Kansas City, and the reason that he got back into making music after his hiatus was he heard the B-52s, and realized that some of Yoko’s sound was about to hit big.

  18. Elaine-

    The point is that if you publicize the laws well, that’s something of a disincentive in itself; beyond that, if something did go wrong, it would allow greater leeway for prosecuting abuses.

    Animals may be part of nature, but not all animals are safe. Not all animals are clean. As the article explained, there serious diseases that can be transmitted between humans and animals. It violates health codes to have animals around. If I’m out to dinner and someone next to me pulls out their pet rat or their wild monkey, that’s a problem. If I’m an employee and all of a sudden it becomes part of my job to deal with someone’s poorly-trained and aggressive dog, or some idiot’s loose snake, or animal feces, that’s a problem. And it’s not just because I don’t like “change.”

  19. My mom has a working dog (and as the law says she does not have to disclose to anyone what illnesses she has). The dog training was extensive, over a year, and expensive, about $12,000. She rarely encounters any problems, though she has filed a complaint with the ADA/Civil Rights in Albany, who are very helpful for one argument with employees and a manager at a store. The dog is incredibly well behaved. Children (and sometimes adults) run at the dog and give it a hug, the dog is a German Shepard and does not respond (stands still) as it was trained to do. (The dog of course wears a vest that says “Do not touch me, I’m working”). Would I support registration? or would my Mother? Maybe, though it would be impossible for many people to pay $12,000 and people should not be discriminated because they are unable to pay that amount. Though I’ve never heard of anyone bringing their dogs around saying they’re service dogs, and my mother is very active in the service dog community.

  20. There’s no need to base treatment of PWD on the snap judgments of ignorant strangers, with service animals or any other access issue. Regulatory agencies can handle this; the question of knowing when one sees crops up everywhere. People without visible (or well-understood) disabilities use exclusive parking spaces, and there’s no movement to dismantle them because some assholes break the law to take advantage of it.

    For me, the most interesting thing about the article was the predominance of stereotypes even in discussions of policy. And the insistence that stereotypes were useful tools in and of themselves. It makes perfect sense that people with mental-health issues should be ignored; that’s an ableist trope elsewhere, too: not visible to outsiders, not real. And it makes perfect sense that acknowledgement of service-animal utility is based on the same reductive impulse. A dog is a white-tipped cane, whereas a pony is a circus act. Even people who know nothing about service animals insist that they can judge their owners.

  21. So politicians’ kids have a path into politics, just like kids of high-level athletes and coaches have a path into athletics, or plumbers’ kids have a path into plumbing. That’s just how the world works. If experience is so important, why not just have a computer total up everyone’s experience and pick a senator?

  22. Jill, not sure if you say the Time Out stats article where they said New Yorkers bite more people than dogs do.

    Just saying… I think the hysteria over pets in public places is unfounded 🙂

  23. Honestly, I don’t give a flying fuck about basketball. The makeup of any given sports team, even on the national level, has little to no effect on my life. And even legacy plumbers need certification and real-world experience before they can really build a practice. It’s like the difference between Dr. Whosis Junior getting a partnership in her mommy’s practice and Dr. Whosis Junior getting to perform neurosurgery because her mommy does, too. The path in many of these situations may become much smoother, but not much shorter.

    The problem with political legacies is that they are even more subject to branding than many other careers, and sometimes less equipped with industry checks. For a politician, a surname is not merely an in. It can become a substitute for education, training, apprenticeship–a degree and a residency, in other words. I doubt, as you seem to, that nepotism can be formally destroyed altogether. I still think it’s important to try to overcome a tendency towards promoting a name above other qualifications.

  24. Even if an animal is officially a certified animal, it doesn’t mean that the person it serves will do the work to keep its training up and its behavior appropriate.

    An acquaintence of mine is blind, and has a trained service dog. This is her second dog. For both this dog, and her previous one, when she got it, it was properly trained and well behaved. She went to all the classes on how to work with the dogs, and keep the training going. But once she was home, in both cases, she quickly let the training slide, and the dogs’ behavior deteriorated badly.

    I’m allergic, and don’t care to be around dogs. I’m generally quite happy to have someone with a service animal around, however, as the service animals are supposed to be well trained, and focused on their owner completely, so that others get left alone. Once the training is gone, however, a “service animal” is not any better than any other.

    Requiring certification wouldn’t mean that the people who got the certification would keep up with the work it takes to have a properly behaved working dog.

    (It’s a shame about these dogs, because they’re donated, and there is a long waiting list. To have them go to someone who doesn’t take advantage of the heavy investment in training that they’ve had seems a waste. If she just wanted a pet, )

  26. It’s true that service animals are unique in their training and maintenance needs; an elevator requires a mechanic, not an alpha. And of course, they’re not like adult people. And it is sad that a huge amount of specialized training gets lost completely.

    But this seems like a level where regulatory agencies might not be able to interfere much, at least not without unfairly burdening the owner. I don’t know. I’m wondering, home visits? Monthly cert requirements? Loss of license after two spoiled dogs? How would something like that work? And if the animal became a service animal via field promotion–like the parrot in the story–how would you match up idiosyncratic training with an official idea?

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