Happy Walk Your Pet Month! Whether you're a dog parent or one of the rare cat parents able to leash your dear feline, let’s celebrate the outdoor bonding experience connecting humans to their loving pets every day. For some, though, this pedestrian act serves a far more complex purpose, as facilitated by service animals.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) defines service animals as dogs specially trained to work or perform tasks for people with disabilities. Of approximately 61 million people with disabilities in the United States, there are about 500,000 working service animals today lending a helping paw. Let’s talk about the many ways service animals can be helpful, and what it takes for a dog to become one.
What it takes to be Service Animal
Becoming a service animal is no simple task. It requires a strenuous and expensive 14-18 month training program that 50%–70% of dogs do not end up completing. Service animal training can cost more than $17,000 and is paid for in a number of ways such as by nonprofit organizations, out of pocket, or with insurance.
While any dog can participate in this training, labradors, poodles, and golden retrievers have proven to have the best temperaments for successful completion. This is because they are known to have the most compatible personalities for challenges that may arise in a service animal job. A service animal must have the right amount of discipline and patience, while still being dynamic enough to handle the often stressful situations involved in the training process. For example, the main reason dogs tend to fail training programs is due to leash pulling, a common issue among dogs that could actually be detrimental to the life of a person requiring a service dog.
How Service Animals help
The ADA defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that considerably limits one or more major life activities. With that said, every individual is different, and disabilities translate in varying ways depending on a number of factors. This is why no service animal’s training is exactly the same. Service animals are most known to assist people with visual impairments, those that are deaf, people with autism, veterans (for several reasons, including Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and mobility issues), and older people in need of mobility assistance.
While service animals have much of the same basic training, no two service animals train exactly the same after being paired with a human. Service animals have been known to help pull wheelchairs, protect individuals experiencing seizures, alert people who are deaf, and even help soothe a person experiencing an anxiety attack. Each service animal is trained explicitly for its humans’ needs.
Service vs. emotional support animals: what’s the difference?
The primary difference between emotional support animals (ESA) and service animals is that the latter is a job that requires training, and the other is a pet, with no training required at all.
An emotional support animal is defined as any pet able to alleviate one or more symptoms of a person’s disability simply by being present, providing cuddles, or affection.
Emotional support animals can be dogs, but they can also be cats, pigs, frogs, or even snakes. In fact, any domesticated animal may be considered an ESA. However, the ADA, as of 2011, maintains all service animals must be dogs.
People with disabilities may benefit significantly from emotional support animals and may even opt for ESAs as opposed to service animals for many reasons, including the high cost of service animals or lack of insurance able to cover it. However, it’s important not to conflate the two as they are very different descriptors.
Since service dogs are working animals, often needed wherever their human goes, these dogs are allowed in typically more places than emotional support animals. It may be tempting to claim an emotional support dog is a service animal so that you may bring them into areas they aren’t typically allowed, but this very act is what’s led to stricter laws surrounding such a distinction. For example, while emotional support animals have been allowed on airlines in the past, new restrictions further separating ESA from service animals make that option less viable. Currently, 22 states have laws against wrongfully claiming a pet is a service animal, and the number continues to grow.
Service animals have a daily job that helps people with disabilities move through their daily lives. It’s important to know that a service animal’s position is quite different from what it means to be an ESA. However, emotional support animals can benefit humans greatly in other ways.
Don't forget to walk your pet, emotional support animal, or service animal this month!
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