NEW YORK — When Adam Yoblon, the founder of a Los Angeles-based fashion company for dogs, decided to hop a flight to New York City in January, he wanted his favorite girl with him. Sophie, the light of Yoblon’s life, is an 11-pound Jack Russell-Papillon mix with silky blond hair and brown eyes.
The problem was that the airline would have forced Yoblon to pay $125 and Sophie would have had to stay in a small carrier under Yoblon’s seat for the entire flight. That was more than Yoblon could bear, so, armed with a letter from his psychologist, Yoblon was able to spend the entire flight with Sophie, aka his “emotional support dog,” resting comfortably in his lap, free of charge.
Yoblon is one of a growing number of pet owners who are exploiting a loophole in the nation’s ambiguous definition of support and service dogs. They are turning to an expanding number of websites and mail-order outfits that sell fake certificates and even DayGlo doggie vests that help pet owners give the impression that their dog is official.
And who is to say that it is not? According to the U.S. Department of Justice, there are no requirements for licensing or certifying service dogs. The Americans with Disabilities Act explicitly makes it unlawful to require proof of a disability or identification for a service dog, because it aims to protect the disabled from discrimination. So while pets are barred from many indoor and outdoor spaces, service dogs have unfettered access to any public place that pets are normally excluded, including restaurants, museums, movie theaters, hotels, buses, planes and trains. Anywhere their handler wants to go.
The likelihood that a service dog is officially accredited is very small. There are only two recognized “accrediting bodies” in the United States. Combined, they graduate fewer than 500 service dogs per year for an estimated population of 54 million disabled Americans. The cost of professionally training a service dog for a specific disability, like a guide dog for the blind, exceeds $20,000 and the waiting list often stretches for years. As a result the ADA allows people to train their own service dogs with only one qualifying rule: that the animal provide a service to help with a disability.
That proviso has proved ripe for exploitation.
“People are selling drugs, evading taxes, and I’m simply trying to take my dog to get a cup of coffee,” New York-based blogger, Stacy Fromgolds, wrote under her pen name in an entry, “Confession: My Service Dog is a Total Fraud.”
“I simply paid $50 on the United States Service Dog Registry website to get a kit that provided me with incredibly official-looking credentials,” she explained.
Paul Bowskill, the general manager of Service Dogs America, which, for $249, will sell you a kit identifying your dog as a service animal, says that while his company has no way of ensuring that the identification kits it sells go to actual service dogs, most dogs provide some kind of service regardless of their “service dog” status.
“Some people don’t even know they have a service animal,” Bowskill said. “But that dog is already a service animal; they just didn’t know it.”
Advocates for the disabled worry that the trend may provoke a backlash that will hurt those legitimately in need of their dogs. “There are an estimated 30,000 people in the U.S. that have guide, hearing and service dogs,” said Joan Froling, chairwoman of the International Association of Assistance Dog Partners, an organization that advocates for disabled people partnered with service dogs. “Do they get punished because people are out there with their pets?”
In some places, there are penalties for misrepresenting a pet as a service animal. In New York, it is punishable by a fine of $1,000, or imprisonment for 15 days. In California, it is a $1,000 fine and six months’ jail time. But enforcement is rare and many pet owners believe the benefits outweigh the risk.
A frequent traveler might spend thousands of dollars a year transporting a pet. Airlines like United, Delta and American charge $125 for a small dog to travel with its owner inside the cabin. If the dog is traveling in cargo, the fee can be upwards of $250. Hotels can charge anywhere from $50 to $100 extra a night to keep a dog in the room. But for both airlines and hotels there is no charge for service dogs.
For a dog owner like Yoblon, who views his animal as his child, buying a service dog vest or claiming a disability diagnosis is just a way to keep the family together.
“It’s frustrating when your dogs are your kids,” Yoblon said. “And you always have to leave them at home - especially when they are better behaved than many actual kids and babies who enjoy limitless access.”
But for Froling and other advocates for the disabled, a crackdown on service dog qualifications, even just to weed out the fakers, threatens to restrict the public access of thousands of legitimate working service dogs and the people who rely on them.
“There are consequences for bringing fake service dogs into places,” Froling said. “Very real consequences.”
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