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Speaking as a retail worker, litigiousness is a leading factor here, and I'm shocked that no one has brought it up (EDIT: I was beaten by a minute actually). Seeing-eye dogs were the original foot in the door that made it difficult to keep dogs out of any public space like a grocery store, particularly when combined with the ADA. In theory, this might have been a workable system: seeing-eye dogs are as well-trained as dogs get, and it isn't really feasible to credibly pass off a regular dog as a seeing-eye dog. (One small hole though: seeing-eye dogs do need to be trained in the first place, these seeing-eye-dogs-in-training are definitionally not necessarily trained yet, and it's a lot easier for some schmuck to pass off a regular dog as a seeing-eye-dog-in-training. Not that big of a problem, though; people who train seeing-eye dogs aren't themselves blind, and therefore aren't really able to credibly threaten a lawsuit over something something disability accommodation. Although, really, any psychopath can get all sorts of things by insinuating that they'll file an obviously frivolous lawsuit in the right voice. Sad!)
Then the idea of "emotional support dogs" or "therapy dogs" arose and everything went to hell. The preexisting infrastructure for mandating tolerance for seeing-eye dogs was repurposed to mandate tolerance for "emotional support dogs"; instead of acting as a disability accommodation for blindness, they acted as a disability accommodation for "I am mentally ill and will throw a fit if separated from dog". Many parallels here! The small core of asshole true believer psychiatrists quickly gave way to a much larger scene of asshole grifters who marketed identification cards, medical diagnoses, legal services, etc to the whole country's backdrop of asshole dog owners who wanted to take their dogs everywhere. Even then, it wasn't as bad a problem as it is now - but eventually, the normalization hit a critical point where businesses started setting policies of "don't even bother to ask for their medical I Need Dog ID Card they got off the internet; we just have to tolerate the dogs now", and then the I Need Dog ID Cards stopped selling so much and the normalization exploded through the roof as all of the dog owners who'd like to take their dog everywhere but had too much dignity to get one of the cards and call themselves mentally ill realized that they were now free to take their dogs everywhere. And so it goes.
A cascade of collapsing Schelling points falling to Moloch; no one able to stop them because of legally-mandated norms of politeness-to-the-unpolite and such. Very American story!
What I don’t understand is why there’s no pushback on increasing the need for certification of the dogs. It’s perfectly obvious just how few of them have even basic training ,let alone specific training for a task related to disability. It seems like a fairly simple solution. In order for a dog to be allowed it must be trained by a specific organization (or at least tested by one) and require that in order to be allowed to have such an animal in public places they need to be diagnosed with a specific condition that requires a dog as accommodation.
I feel the same about other mental health issues. The accommodations are available and the systems are abused because the vetting is nonexistent. ADHD has attracted so much fakery that I just instantly think “disappointed perfectionist seeking ADA accommodations” when someone brings it up. Likewise when someone says “Autistic” I just naturally assume that the person is scamming the ADA for protection. I’ll make exceptions if the person has extremely obvious symptoms and claims a mental illness. But to me, the process of Mental Illness Gentrification (which FdB talks about) has so muddled the concept of disability and especially mental health or similar “invisible” disabilities that I instantly think “defector” when someone tries to claim one.
Until we really start to clamp down on just anyone getting ADA accommodations at basically a say so, I’d almost rather do away with the system outside of architecture concerns just because it’s actually the reverse of the intent of the law. It started as a way to get people who were too sick, disabled or injured to participate in society to be included. It’s turned into a new way to shut people out because most people with actual disability cannot afford to get diagnosed and treated. The normal people obviously are in much better position to get diagnosed because they have the disposable income to go to the psychiatrist and because they’ve done their research know what to say to get diagnosed. They’re also more normal (because they don’t actually have the disorders they claim, so they can succeed and be normal and simply get a leg up over the autistic person or the person with actual ADHD who can’t just knuckle down and be better and do better.
It's part of a more-than-thirty-year-old regulation, and the necessary parts of the Department of Justice and Department of Transportation that make
upthe relevant rulemaking processes are never going to want to get involved in the necessary levels of oversight, nevermind do so with enough clarity and consistency that normal businesses will be willing to take the risk of allowing employees to make a decision. Because a lot of actual enforcement tends to involve veterans, it's a political third rail even for otherwise regulation-skeptical conservatives.There's some Reason-style pushback, but because there's such a mess for any implementation -- who does the certifications? how do you verify that they aren't just some web template? -- there's no clear better local maxima with a path to reach it short of full prohibition, and there's no political will to do that.
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