[nagdu] Ny Times Magazine Article

[Pickrell, Rebecca M. (TASCSD)]

Interesting article. 
A couple thoughts, which some of you in psychology or related fields can
probably explain. 
1. The guy with the parrot sounds down-right scary. Can somebody explain
how he can be kind to an animal, yet be so miserable to humans?
Seriously, I'd like to know the answer to that. 
2. Monkey lady sounds odd. The monkey sounds very child-like, almost
like she's treating him as a pseudo-child. I wonder why the author chose
to profile her as opposed to someone who needs a monkey to brush their
teeth or put food in the microwave? The way the author juxtiposed
monkey-lady with mention of a monkey nuking food in the microwave and
vacuming made me think "Where can I get one"? I can do all these tasks,
but why not outsource to a monkey? I don't know if the author did much
for promoting noncanine service animals. 
Truthfully, Ann was the only person who came out looking at all
compitent and normal with this article. 
In any event, I would like somebody with a background in mental health,
as well as somebody with a background in writing, so that my questions
can be answered. 


-----Original Message-----
From: nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Angie Matney
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 2:38 PM
To: NAGDU Mailing List,the National Association of Guide Dog Users
Subject: [nagdu] Ny Times Magazine Article

My apologies if this has indeed shown up on this list, but I haven't
seen it. I saw the Day to Day piece, but here's the article from the NY
Times Magazine on which it was based.

Angie


Creature Comforts
By REBECCA SKLOOT

ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT IN A SUBURB of Albany, a group of children dressed as
vampires and witches ran past a middle-aged woman in plain clothes. She
gripped a leather harness - like the kind used for Seeing Eye dogs -
which was attached to a small, fuzzy black-and-white horse barely tall
enough to reach the woman's hip. 

"Cool costume," one of the kids said, nodding toward her. 

But she wasn't dressed up. The woman, Ann Edie, was simply blind and out
for an evening walk with Panda, her guide miniature horse.

There are no sidewalks in Edie's neighborhood, so Panda led her along
the street's edge, maneuvering around drainage ditches, mailboxes and
bags of raked leaves. At one point, Panda paused, waited for a car to
pass, then veered into the road to avoid a group of children running
toward them swinging glow sticks. She led Edie onto a lawn so she
wouldn't hit her head on the side mirror of a parked van, then to a
traffic pole at a busy intersection, where she stopped and tapped her
hoof. "Find the button," Edie said. Panda raised her head inches from
the pole so Edie could run her hand along Panda's nose to find and press
the "walk" signal button.

Edie isn't the only blind person who uses a guide horse instead of a dog
- there's actually a Guide Horse Foundation that's been around nearly a
decade.
The obvious question is, Why? In fact, Edie says, there are many
reasons:
miniature horses are mild-mannered, trainable and less threatening than
large dogs. They're naturally cautious and have exceptional vision, with
eyes set far apart for nearly 360-degree range. Plus, they're herd
animals, so they instinctively synchronize their movements with others.
But the biggest reason is age: miniature horses can live and work for
more than 30 years. In that time, a blind person typically goes through
five to seven guide dogs. That can be draining both emotionally and
economically, because each one can cost up to $60,000 to breed, train
and place in a home.

"Panda is almost 8 years old," her trainer, Alexandra Kurland, told me.
"If Panda were a dog, Ann would be thinking about retiring her soon and
starting over, but their relationship is just getting started. They're
still improving their communication and learning to read each other's
bodies. It's the difference between dating for a few years and being
married so long you can finish each other's sentences."

Edie has nothing against service dogs - she has had several. One worked
beautifully. Two didn't - they dragged her across lawns chasing cats and
squirrels, even pulled her into the street chasing dogs in passing cars.
Edie doesn't worry about those sorts of things with Panda because
miniature horses are less aggressive. Still, she says, "I would never
say to a blind person, 'Run out and get yourself a guide horse,' because
there are definite limitations."
They
eat far more often than dogs, and go to the bathroom about every two or
three hours. (Yes, Panda is house-trained.) Plus, they can't curl up in
small places, which makes going to the movies or riding in airplanes a
challenge. (When miniature horses fly, they stand in first class or
bulkhead because they don't fit in standard coach.) 

What's most striking about Edie and Panda is that after the initial
shock of seeing a horse walk into a cafe, or ride in a car, watching
them work together makes the idea of guide miniature horses seem utterly
logical. Even normal.
So normal, in fact, that people often find it hard to believe that the
United States government is considering a proposal that would force Edie
and many others like her to stop using their service animals. But that's
precisely what's happening, because a growing number of people believe
the world of service animals has gotten out of control: first it was
guide dogs for the blind; now it's monkeys for quadriplegia and
agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, a
parrot for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including
cats, ferrets, pigs, at least one iguana and a duck.
They're all showing up in stores and in restaurants, which is perfectly
legal because the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) requires that
service animals be allowed wherever their owners want to go. 

Some people enjoy running into an occasional primate or farm animal
while shopping. Many others don't. This has resulted in a growing debate
over how to handle these animals, as well as widespread suspicion that
people are abusing the law to get special privileges for their pets.
Increasingly, business owners, landlords and city officials are
challenging the legitimacy of noncanine service animals and refusing to
accommodate them. Animal owners are responding with lawsuits and
complaints to the Department of Justice. This August, the Arizona Game
and Fish Department ordered a woman to get rid of her chimpanzee,
claiming that she brought it into the state illegally - she disputed
this and sued for discrimination, arguing that it was a
diabetes-assistance chimp trained to fetch sugar during hypoglycemic
episodes.

Cases like this are raising questions about where to draw the lines when
it comes to the needs and rights of people who rely on these animals, of
businesses obligated by law to accommodate them and of everyday
civilians who - because of health and safety concerns or just general
discomfort - don't want monkeys or ducks walking the aisles of their
grocery stores. 

A few months ago, in a cafe in St. Louis, I met a man named Jim Eggers,
who uses an assistance parrot, Sadie, to help control his psychotic
tendencies.
Eggers looks like a man who has been fighting his whole life. He is
muscular, with a buzz cut, several knocked-out teeth and many scars,
including one that runs ear-to-chin from surgery to repair a broken jaw.
Eggers avoids eye contact in public - he walks fast down streets and
through stores staring at the ground, jaw clenched. "I have bipolar
disorder with psychotic tendencies," he told me as he sucked down a
green-apple smoothie. "Homicidal feelings too." 

Eggers's condition has landed him in court several times: a
disturbing-the-peace charge for pouring scalding coffee onto a man under
his apartment window who annoyed him; one-year probation for threatening
to kill the archbishop of St. Louis because of news reports about church
money and molestations by priests in other cities (which the archbishop
had nothing to do with). In describing his condition, Eggers says it's
like when the Incredible Hulk changes from man to monster. His vision
blurs, his body tingles and he can barely hear. According to his friend
Larry Gower, who often serves as a public liaison for him, in those
moments, Eggers gets extremely loud. They both agree that Sadie is one
of the few things keeping Eggers from snapping. 

Sadie rides around town on Eggers's back in a bright purple backpack
specially designed to hold her cage. When he gets upset, she talks him
down,
saying:
"It's O.K., Jim. Calm down, Jim. You're all right, Jim. I'm here, Jim."
She somehow senses when he is getting agitated before he even knows it's
happening.
"I still go off on people sometimes, but she makes sure it never
escalates into a big problem," he told me, grinning bashfully at Sadie.
"Now when people make me mad I just give them the bird," he said,
pulling up his sleeve and flexing his biceps, which is covered with a
large tattoo of Sadie.

Soon after what he calls "the Archbishop Incident," Eggers got Sadie
from a friend who owned a pet store. She'd been neglected by a previous
owner and had torn out all her feathers, so Eggers nursed her back to
health. He didn't initially train her as a service animal, he says; she
did that herself. When Eggers had episodes at home, he'd pace, holding
his head and yelling: "It's O.K., Jim! You're all right, Jim! Calm down,
Jim!" One day, Sadie started doing it, too. He soon realized that she
calmed him better than he calmed himself.
So he started rewarding her each time it happened. And he has had only
one incident since: he dented a woman's car with his fist on a day when
he'd left Sadie at home.

Eggers didn't think to use any special language to describe Sadie until
he tried to take her on a bus and the driver said that only "service
animals"
were
allowed. Eggers went home and looked up "service animal" online. "That's
when it all fell into place," he told me. He learned that psychiatric
service animals help their owners cope with things like medication side
effects.
Eggers takes heavy doses of antipsychotics that leave him in a fog most
of the day. So he trained Sadie to alert him with a loud ringing noise
if someone calls, or to yell "WHO'S THERE?" when anyone knocks on the
door. If the fire alarm goes off, Sadie goes off. If Eggers leaves the
faucet running, Sadie makes sounds like a waterfall until he turns it
off. 

Eggers got a service-animal bus pass for Sadie and began taking her
everywhere. (He has special insulated cage panels to keep her warm in
winter.) For years,
few people objected. Then, in the spring of 2007, Eggers went to have
his teeth cleaned at the St. Louis Community College dental-hygiene
school, and officials there told him that Sadie wasn't allowed inside
because she posed a risk to public health and wasn't really a service
animal. "All I can say is, they were lucky I had Sadie with me to keep
me calm when they said that," Eggers told me. 

He filed a complaint with the United States Department of Education's
Office of Civil Rights (O.C.R.), which initiated an investigation. Its
conclusion:
the school wrongfully denied access based on public-health concerns
without assessing whether Sadie actually posed a risk. (Several top
epidemiologists I interviewed for this article said that, on the whole,
birds and miniature horses pose no more risk to human health than
service dogs do.) 

But Eggers is still fighting that fight. According to the O.C.R., the
school "exceeded the boundaries of a permissible inquiry" by questioning
Eggers about his disability. But that didn't change the school's
conclusion: it labeled Sadie a mere "therapy animal." If that label
sticks, it will mean that Sadie isn't covered by the federal law that
protects service animals and guarantees them access to public places.

Stories like Eggers's involve two questions that are often mistakenly
treated as one. The first: What qualifies as a service animal? The
second:
Can any
species be eligible? 

There are two categories of animals that help people. "Therapy animals"
(also known as "comfort animals") have been used for decades in
hospitals and homes for the elderly or disabled. Their job is
essentially to be themselves - to let humans pet and play with them,
which calms people, lowers their blood pressure and makes them feel
better. There are also therapy horses, which people ride to help with
balance and muscle building.

These animals are valuable, but they have no special legal rights
because they aren't considered service animals, the second category,
which the A.D.A.
defines as "any guide dog, signal dog or other animal individually
trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual
with a disability, including, but not limited to, guiding individuals
with impaired vision, alerting individuals with impaired hearing to
intruders or sounds, providing minimal protection or rescue work,
pulling a wheelchair or fetching dropped items." 

Since the 1920s, when guide dogs first started working with blind World
War I veterans, service animals have been trained to do everything from
helping people balance on stairs to opening doors to calling 911. In the
early '80s, small capuchin monkeys started helping quadriplegics with
basic day-to-day functions like eating and drinking, and there was no
question about whether- they counted as service animals. Things got more
complicated in the '90s, when "psychiatric service animals" started
fetching pills and water, alerting owners to panic attacks and helping
autistic children socialize.

The line between therapy animals and psychiatric service animals has
always been blurry, because it usually comes down to varying definitions
of the words "task" and "work" and whether something like actively
soothing a person qualifies. That line got blurrier in 2003, when the
Department of Transportation revised its internal policies regarding
service animals on airplanes. It issued a statement saying that in
recent years, "a wider variety of animals (e.g., cats, monkeys, etc.)
have been individually trained to assist people with disabilities.
Service animals also perform a much wider variety of functions than ever
before." 

To keep up with these changes, the D.O.T.'s new guidelines said,
"Animals that assist persons with disabilities by providing emotional
support qualify as service animals." They also said that any species
could qualify and that these animals didn't need special training, aside
from basic obedience. The only thing required for a pet to fly with its
owner instead of riding as cargo was documentation (like a letter from a
doctor) saying the person needed emotional support from an animal.
Legally speaking, the D.O.T.'s new policy applied only to airplanes -
the A.D.A.'s definition of service animal stayed the same.
But for those looking online to find out whether they could take their
animals into stores and restaurants, the D.O.T.'s definition looked like
official law, and people started acting accordingly. 

Soon, a trend emerged: people with no visible disabilities were bringing
what a New York Times article called "a veritable Noah's Ark of support
animals"
into businesses, claiming that they were service animals. Business
owners and their employees often couldn't distinguish the genuine from
the bogus.
To
protect the disabled from intrusive questions about their medical
histories, the A.D.A. makes it illegal to ask what disorder an animal
helps with. You also can't ask for proof that a person is disabled or a
demonstration of an animal's "tasks." There is no certification process
for service animals (though there are Web sites where anyone can buy an
official-looking card that says they have a certified service animal, no
documentation required). The only questions businesses can ask are "Is
that a trained service animal?" and "What task is it trained to do?"

If the person answers yes to the first and claims that the animal is,
say, trained to alert him or her to a specific condition (like a
seizure), additional questioning could end in a lawsuit. And in many
cases, according to Joan Esnayra, founder of the Psychiatric Service Dog
Society, the outcome of those lawsuits depends largely on the words
people use to describe their animals.
"If you say 'comfort,' 'need' or 'emotional support,' you're out the
door,"
she says. "If you talk about what your animal does in terms of 'tasks'
and 'work,' then you stand a chance."

Case in point: When the dental school questioned Eggers about whether-
Sadie was a service animal, he said she kept him "calm." If he had said
that she alerts him to things like attacks and doorbells, his case might
have been stronger. 

According to Jennifer Mathis, an attorney at the Bazelon Center for
Mental Health Law, "A lot of times when people with legitimate service
animals lose these cases, it has to do with the fact that they don't
explain their service animals well."

Rather than risk a lawsuit, many business owners simply allow the
animals, even if they doubt their legitimacy. Then they complain to the
Department of Justice that the A.D.A. is too broad in its definition of
"service animal,"
and too restrictive of businesses trying to protect themselves from
people who fake it. Which many people do. 

In October, a man in Portland, Ore., took his dog on a bus, claiming
that it was a service animal. While getting off the bus, the dog killed
another dog that was riding as a "comfort animal." (In Portland, comfort
animals are allowed on public transportation.) A few days later, an
editorial appeared in The Oregonian with the headline "Take the
Menagerie Off the Bus." It opened
with: "No offense, ferret lovers. . Your pet . may offer emotional
support.
But it shouldn't be roaming the aisles of a . bus or train." It argued
that the story of the dead comfort dog was proof that people had
stretched the legal definition of service animals to include a virtual
zoo of animals. 

Lex Frieden, a professor of health-information science at the University
of Texas  Health Science Center at Houston and a former director of the
National Council on Disability, sees the issue differently. "People
shouldn't be able to carry their pets on a plane or into a restaurant
claiming they're service animals when they're not," he says. "But that
has nothing to do with what species a service animal is." The
appropriate response in those situations isn't a species ban, he says,
but rather strict punishments for people who pose as disabled.
"It's fraud," he points out, "and it results in increased scrutiny of
people with legitimate disabilities."

In June, in an effort to clarify the confusion surrounding service
animals, the Department of Justice proposed new regulations to
explicitly include psychiatric service and exclude comfort animals. This
was part of a sweeping revision of the A.D.A. intended to increase
protection and access for the disabled, which was widely applauded. But
tucked into that proposal were a few lines that worry advocates and
people with disabilities: the D.O.J. proposed limiting service animals
to a "dog or other common domestic animal," specifically excluding "wild
animals (including nonhuman primates born in captivity), reptiles,
rabbits, farm animals (including any breed of horse, miniature horse,
pony, pig or goat), ferrets, amphibians and rodents." 

This summer, the D.O.J. held a public hearing in Washington and invited
anyone who would be affected by the proposed changes to argue for or
against them.
Many pleaded their cases in person, others by letter. The arguments in
favor of species restrictions came primarily from businesses concerned
about having to alter facilities, rebuilding seating areas, say, to make
room for miniature horses. Several service-animal organizations and
people with disabilities argued that banning reptiles and insects was
fine but that excluding miniature horses and primates simply went too
far. In their defense, they cited things like dog allergies, the long
life spans of several species and monkeys'
opposable thumbs. After considering the arguments, last month the D.O.J.
submitted
a final proposal to the
Office of Management and Budget
. Until there's a ruling, neither office will comment on the issue or
say whether the species restriction was removed or revised after the
public hearings.


Jamie Hais, a spokeswoman for the D.O.J., said she couldn't comment on
why
the department suggested the species restriction. But its proposal
expressed
concerns about public-health risks and said that when the original
A.D.A.
was written, without specifying species, "few anticipated" the variety
of
animals
people would attempt to use.

"That's simply not true," says Frieden, who was an architect of the
original
A.D.A. While drafting the regulations, he said, Congressional staff
members
had long discussions about defining "service animal" and whether- a
trained
pony could qualify. "There was general consensus that the issue revolved
around
the question of function, not form," he says. "So, in fact, if that pony
provided assistance to a person with a disability and enabled that
person to
pursue
equal opportunity and nondiscrimination, then that pony could be
regarded as
a service animal." They discussed the possibility of birds and snakes
for
psychiatric disorders, he said, but one of their biggest concerns was
that
the A.D.A. shouldn't exclude service monkeys, which were already working
with
quadriplegics. Since then, however, monkeys have become the most
contested
assistance-animal species of all. 

On a rainy day in November, I walked through a T. J. Maxx store in
Springfield, Mo., with Debby Rose and Richard, her 25-pound bonnet
macaque
monkey - one
of the most controversial service animals working today. Rose was
wearing
brown pants and a brown-and-gold-patterned shirt. Richard was wearing a
brown
long-sleeved polo over a white T-shirt with jeans and a tan vest that
said
"Please Don't Pet Me I'm Working." Richard stood in the child seat of
Rose's
shopping cart, facing forward, bouncing up and down, smacking his lips
and
grinning as Rose pushed him down the aisles.

Richard is a hands-on shopper. If Rose pointed at a sweater or purse she
liked, or a pair of shoes, his hand darted out to touch them. As we
passed a
pair
of tan, fuzzy winter boots that Rose particularly liked, Richard leaned
out
of the cart and quickly licked one on its toe.

People stared as we walked. "Why do you have him?" they'd ask.

"He's a service animal trained for my disability, kind of like a
seizure-alert dog," Rose told them, again and again.

"Can I pet him?" 

"He doesn't like to be touched," she'd say, "but you can give him five."

People raised their hands, and Richard gave them five.

That Rose isn't bothered by people looking and asking questions is
impressive, considering that she has agoraphobia and severe anxiety
disorder
with debilitating
panic attacks. Until getting Richard four years ago, she required heavy
doses of anti-anxiety drugs just to go out in public. "I couldn't have
come
in
this store before Richard, let alone handled all these people talking to
me," she said. "Now I like it."

Rose adopted Richard in 2004; he was badly neglected and near death. She
and
two of her six children - whom she raised as a single mother - run an
exotic-animal
shelter. Rose says she believes that Richard was trained as a service
animal
for his previous owner, an elderly woman whose son gave Richard away
when
she died. He had been neutered, and his tail had been surgically
removed.
He'd also had his large and potentially dangerous canine teeth pulled, a
procedure
commonly done with service monkeys for safety (and often cited as one of
several ethical concerns with using wild instead of domesticated species
for
such
jobs).

As Richard returned to health, Rose realized that he had begun to
recognize
her panic attacks before she did. Her doctor suggested that she train
him to
help with her disorder, then wrote a letter approving of him as a
service
animal, saying that Richard was "a constructive way to avoid use of
unnecessary
medications." Rose took that letter to the Springfield-Greene County
Health
Department, got permission for Richard to accompany her in public and
has
been
drug-free ever since. She ordered a service-animal ID certificate
online;
she even got a restriction on her driver's license saying that she can't
operate
a car without a monkey present. Now he sits in her lap with a hand on
the
wheel while she drives, and she never leaves home without him.

But the number of places Rose and Richard can go is decreasing. In
September
2006, after receiving complaints that Richard was sitting in highchairs
in
restaurants, touching silverware and going through a buffet line with
Rose,
the Health Department sent a letter to all local restaurants announcing
that
Richard was a risk to public health and not a legitimate service animal.
It
instructed businesses to refuse him access and to call the police if
Rose
protested.
Businesses posted the letter on their doors and in their bathrooms; soon
Cox
College of Nursing and Health Sciences, where Rose was attending nursing
school,
refused Richard access, too. Stories- started appearing about Rose and
her
monkey in the newspaper and on TV. "Suddenly," she told me, "everyone
knew I
had a mental disorder."

Rose dropped out of school and filed a lawsuit against her local Health
Department, the nursing school, Wal-Mart and several other local
businesses
that
had forbidden Richard access, saying that they violated the A.D.A. Kevin
Gipson, director of the local Health Department, told me that he had
asked
Rose
to show him what "tasks" Richard performed that would qualify him. "She
couldn't," he said. 

Defining "task" is often a point of contention in these cases,
especially
with psychiatric service animals, whose work generally can't be
demonstrated
on
command. Before going to T. J. Maxx, I saw Rose begin to panic while
sitting
in her lawyer's office talking about her case. Her face flushed; her
voice
quivered. Richard, who had been dozing in the chair beside her, leapt
onto
her arm and began stroking her hair. He hugged her, rubbed her ear and
cooed
while she talked. She immediately calmed down. "He snaps me out of it
before
the attacks happen," she said. "If they start at night, he'll turn on
the
light and get me a bottle of water."

For Gipson, that's really beside the point. "Even if Richard is a
legitimate
service animal," he told me, "if he poses a public-health risk, the
A.D.A.
says he can be excluded. And we believe primates pose a significant
health
risk." 

Rose says that Richard is perfectly safe and immaculately clean. She
showers
and blow-dries him every day and uses hand sanitizer on him regularly,
and
he always wears diapers. But that doesn't impress the Health Department.
Monkeys can carry viruses, like herpes B, which are essentially harmless
to
them
but usually deadly to humans. Those viruses can be transmitted through
saliva and other bodily fluids. In 1998, the 
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
 published a study titled "B-Viruses From Pet Macaque Monkeys: An
Emerging
Threat in the United States?" saying that 80 to 90 percent of adult
macaques
like Richard carry herpes B. It's possible to test them for viruses,
which
Rose does every year with Richard, but those tests often give false
negatives.
Plus, Gipson told me, "he could catch it any time from contact with
other
monkeys, which we know he's had." Five days before the Health Department
banned
Richard, a local newspaper ran pictures of him and several other monkeys
hanging out at Rose's family's sanctuary.

According to Frederick Murphy, former head of viral pathology for the
C.D.C.
and co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, the threat that viruses from
service
monkeys present to humans is essentially unknown. There have been a few
cases of primate-lab workers contracting herpes B from macaques - mostly
from being
bitten - but no cases of people being infected by service monkeys, which
are
usually capuchins.

The bigger concern, according to several experts, is potential
aggression.
"People think monkeys are cute and like humans, but they're not," says
Laura
Kahn, a public-health expert at the 
Woodrow Wilson
 School of Public and International Affairs at Harvard. "They're wild
animals, and they're dangerous."

Critics of noncanine service animals tend to focus on disease perhaps
because that's the only way to legally exclude any service animal under
the
current
A.D.A. But on the whole, Bradford Smith, former director of the
University
of California Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, says, "I would
tend
to think the disease argument is really a proxy for other concerns, like
having to let any person who says their parrot or horse is a service
animal
enter
into public areas." 

Rose's case is sometimes held up as an example of why the A.D.A. should
be
rewritten to exclude primates as service animals. But in fact, Frieden
says,
it's an example of how the original A.D.A. works well as it was written,
since it allows broad use of service animals while still leaving room to
protect
the public health. "Some situations have to be dealt with on a
case-by-base
basis," he says. "You can't legislate fine lines - that's just not a
functional
law." 

Frieden is very clear about his belief that it would be a huge loss if
concerns about specific cases jeopardized the use of all noncanine
service
animals,
especially the capuchin monkeys trained to help quadriplegics. The
capuchins
attend "monkey college" at Helping Hands, a nonprofit organization in
Boston,
where they fetch remote controls, put food in microwaves, open
containers,
vacuum floors and flip light switches, all in exchange for treats.
Helping
Hands
capuchins are captive bred, which minimizes the risk of picking up
diseases,
and they're provided specifically for in-home use. The proposed species
restriction
might make it impossible for people to transport capuchins or keep them
in
their homes because of zoning restrictions. The thought of this makes
Helping
Hands's founder, M. J. Willard, shudder. "There ought to be a more
nuanced
way if somebody just thinks it through," she says. "Even just minor
requirements
of verifying the legitimacy of a service animal would solve a lot of the
current problem."

Frieden agrees. He suggests that perhaps a national committee could be
appointed to develop certification standards for all service animals as
well
as a
formal process for preventing and punishing service-animal fraud. Doing
so
might solve part of the controversy, he says. But not all of it.
Particularly
when it comes to species questions. 

"Many people try to make this issue black and white - this service
animal is
good; that one is bad - but that's not possible, because disability
extends
through an enormous realm of human behavior and anatomy and human
condition," Frieden told me. In the end, according to him, the important
thing to remember
is this: "The public used to be put off by the very sight of a person
with a
disability. That state of mind delayed productivity and caused
irreparable
harm to many people for decades. We've now said, by law, that regardless
of
their disability, people must have equal opportunity, and we can't
discriminate.
In order to seek the opportunities and benefits they have as citizens,
if a
person needs a cane, they should be able to use one. If they need a
wheelchair,
a dog, a miniature horse or any other device or animal, society has to
accept that, because those things are, in fact, part of that person." 

Rebecca Skloot teaches nonfiction at the University of Memphis. Her
first
book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," will be published by Crown
in
spring
2010.





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