In your patient's apartment, I wouldn't feel bad about. 'They get to take their pet into restaurants,' I'd feel medium bad about. 'They get to take their pet to work, regardless of the allergies of other people in that workplace, and everyone else just has to figure out how to live with it' I'd feel real bad about.
Can vouch for Scott here. Restaurants that do not want non-service animals in their restaurant/are interested in actually enforcing the health code don't care if they are an ESA. Restaurants where the staff go "I'm not paid enough to tell people to take their beloved dog outside" don't even ask, so the ESA status also never comes up.
Restaurants I think I've heard of, but only second-hand. Workplace we're about to be dealing with from a transfer. I am not looking forward to it, or to the avalanche of other employees wanting to bring in their pets since X gets to.
If it's a legitimate service animal/ESA animal for a real psychological or physical problem, it shouldn't be too bad (the animal should be trained or the person knows what is involved to make this work). If it's someone who finagled a letter from one of these online services because they want to bring Mr. Snuggles to work, that's a problem. Any news from the previous workplace about how it went?
I think Scott makes it pretty clear that it isn't possible to sort the situations in to the two neat buckets you describe.
Moreover we can even imagine cases where the animal is *genuinely a huge help* to the person's mental state, and still has weird or terrifying downsides for other people in the vicinity.
This is definitely not a service animal (amongst other things, I don't think they've even got seeing-eye cats). I haven't circled back with the other workplace, because this isn't my problem and I'm worried that the more I look into it, the more it may somehow become my problem 'EC-2021, you've looked into this, why don't you--' Nope, not my monkey, not my circus. Figuratively or literally.
I think we all agree the status quo is absurd. I guess it speaks to my particular world view that I think we should resolve this by forcing landlords to accept dogs.
My understanding is, legally, private businesses don't actually have to accommodate emotional support animals. Practically speaking though, many people get emotional support animal documentation under the misapprehension that this entitles them to take them into private businesses without restriction, and will argue over this point with business owners. I suspect that this is only a small proportion of all people who seek ESA accommodations though; at least, anyone who'll hold that kind of argument in public probably isn't suffering from anxiety.
This seems about right to me. I've seen a lot of people bringing dogs into businesses where they probably shouldn't be the past few years, for instance. Though it's hard to know if this is because they consider them emotional support animals ("rightfully" or not), or if it's just because they see other people bringing dogs everywhere and assume it's ok. Also hard to disentangle from the more general breakdown in rule following, though that's another issue itself.
I've seen that movie in restaurants more than once. I've also seen signs on restaurants informing patrons that the ADA does not obligate them to accommodate their emotional support animals.
I think in New York at least, it's technically illegal to take any animal other than a trained service animal into a place where food is served, and the state law doesn't make an exception for emotional support animals? A business who allows them anyway could potentially get sued by another customer.
I think you're conflating general clinical anxiety with social anxiety. I'm fairly at ease in social situations but that doesn't stop me from having to go to the emergency room every now and then due to chest pain stemming from my anxiety disorder. Anxiety has many faces.
A decade and change years ago I worked in reservations at a large hotel. As part of the training we had to do a module on service animals and ESAs, and it was always a point of humor that we were legally required to accommodate dogs, cats...and miniature horses.
According to http://www.guide-horse.org/faq_horses.htm, the limit is 26 inches. But that seems to be the size they accept for training, I don't know if there's a legal limit
Edited to add: Also it turns out that horse height is an idiosyncratic measure: it is to the withers (shoulder) so the head is higher than this.
> Also it turns out that horse height is an idiosyncratic measure: it is to the withers (shoulder) so the head is higher than this.
Most animal measurements are stupid in this way. For example, animal length is conventionally measured from something like nose to anus. Though for some reason humans are measured differently.
This looks especially bad when the animal is a whale. The part of a whale that you would think of as the tail comes quite a distance after the anus.
In defense of the horse measurement, I imagine the position of a horse's head can and does move, making the measurement we actually do much easier to perform.
34 inches at the withers (top of the shoulder / base of the neck) to qualify for the American Miniature Horse Association, though the American Miniature Horse Registry will accept up to 38 inches
Miniature horses for the blind is a thing. Some people are allergic to dogs or dog phobic, so there are fully trained guide horses, and apparently they work pretty well.
Horses are infamous for their fragile dispositions and tendency to spook at inoffensive, inanimate objects.
Those traits seem like they'd be absolutely disqualifying in a guide animal. Do you know anything about this? Have docility and stoicism been ruthlessly bred into the guide horses?
under "How do you train a Guide horse not to "spook"?" which is that they desensitize them - and the problem is not new, since cavalry and police horses have the same issue. I would guess that a decent fraction fail out for this reason. Guide horses do not seem to have been around for long enough to be bred for stoicism, but I don't know what was criteria were used to breed from the miniature horses that they source from - other than size.
The problem isn't new, but it's also not easy to deal with. To my understanding, one of the primary strengths of war elephants was that they can't be charged by cavalry - regardless of how easily the cavalry could beat the elephants, horses just won't approach them.
You can solve that by accustoming your warhorses to elephants. That works and it was done. But to do that, you have to have elephants to subject the horses to.
I've seen someone in a discussion of horse behavior complain about the tendency to spook at things like "the old rusted-out tractor that hasn't moved in six years, but it's extra scary today" (paraphrased), which drew a lot of commentary along the lines of "yeah......". This kind of thing makes me squeamish about the idea of relying on a guide horse.
Surely if they managed to get horses to do useful tasks in WWI, they must be pretty trainable with loud mechanical noises around? I think there were also mine horses?
My neighborhood has feral horses, which seem indifferent to cars, but spook if a person approaches on foot, so it seems to be very much dependent on what they're most used to.
Yes, but I've already mentioned sidethread that warhorses still spook at unfamiliar circumstances, and this was a common cause of military problems. Obviously there was a lot of investment in preventing this, but it happened anyway.
Oh I didn't question it - horses seem pretty smart. But the image of a dainty little shetland with a yellow "service animal" harness on, clip-clopping through the lobby and leaving little shetland horse-poos on the shiny floors as it guided its blind owner was so incongruous as to be really funny. Plus, someone would inevitably suggest installing a hitching post and water trough next to the valet station with all the Teslas and other fancy cars.
Funnily enough this kind of happened on the office park I used to work in - this was before Tesla, but there were plenty of mercs and BMWs. It was a tech hub, but there was a traveller pitch site nearby, and one of the travellers used to illegally graze his horses on the green areas in the office park. It was only on a tether, and sometimes used to escape.
They actually built a new route with a separate cycle/footpath/bridleway connected to the park, and I used to joke about commuting by horse.
I don't know if this is the place to link Limerick's contribution to world culture, but (note the warning about "this video is intended for a mature audience") - Horse Outside:
Horses actually have some decent advantages over dogs for guiding the blind or helping people with mobility issues. They're a bit larger and sturdier, for one, and they also live about twice as long as dogs, so the money/time it takes to train them has better ROI.
I fly a lot (30-50 flight segments per year) and have seen maybe one animal on a plane and two in an airport over the last 3 years, though I wasn't particularly looking out for them. I guess if you're very allergic that might still be slightly annoying but the biggest problem is that people still -- even after covid -- like to violently cough all over you inside the airplane.
Yeah ~6 years ago a guy had a fucking LARGE German Shepherd (not even a normal one) in the middle seat with him. In coach. So the thing was literally all over my legs/feet and the other passengers. And he was jsut like "this isn't bothering you is it?" Which was fucking ridiculous.
I have hated these people ever since, but luckily since COVID I have barely seen any.
I was so disappointed when I couldn't take my snake with me on a plane when moving from California to Pennsylvania. I ended up having to send her in the mail (presumably, shipped on a different plane).
How do you move on a plane? As someone who's made similar cross-country moves a few times, it's always involved driving for me, if for no other reason than "if I don't drive, I have to ship my car, which will cost a lot and then I end up at my destination without a car for the crucial first few days." Add up the costs of shipping the car, taking a plane, and renting a car at the other end, and you're probably not saving money over just moving by car.
In Florida, there are prominent signs in front of grocery store entrances indicating that ESAs are not service animals and not allowed in, citing the relevant state law. It’s definitely become an issue in other businesses.
If the human leaves the ESA home alone, isolated, naked and afraid (when the Roomba fires up), could that not potentially make matters worse (for the ESA *and* for the guilt of the ESA's human)? And should that scenario be part of the rubric for the emotional support animal evaluation?
The ESA may not care the human works, may even experience relief, but may not. Potential solutions to ESA isolation include ESA daycare (but then the human is left working for daycare), or one of those Roomba things on Kickstarter that provides stimulation for pets instead of doing housework (but what if the KS campaign goes long- or fails?).
An ESA that needed stimulation but left home during working hours may come to wish someone would just take it and a 12 gauge out behind the shed.
It only officially applies in a few places like those two. But normal people don't memorize the complete list, and normal people in low-level public-facing service or retail positions really internalize "the customer is always right, or else the boss will yell at me".
Result, I distinctly recall a news magazine article by a woman who went around seeing if she could get increasingly ridiculous "emotional support animals" into increasingly ridiculous places. E.g, and IIRC, an Emotional Support Llama in a restaurant. Almost nobody offered a hard "No" until the ridiculosity reached the level of e.g. an Emotional Support Crocodile.
When I tried to find this article via Google, I learned that Emotional Support Llamas are now a Thing.
"Laws prohibit employment discrimination because of a disability. Employers are required to provide reasonable accommodation. Allowing an individual with a disability to have a service animal or an emotional support animal accompany them to work may be considered an accomadation." https://adata.org/guide/service-animals-and-emotional-support-animals
Not vouching for accuracy, merely what is being stated by advocates.
A lot of that is leaning on the word "may" to cover what's lacking. There is an interactive process when dealing with the ADA, and an employer can suggest or even require an alternative accommodation that allows the employee to complete the job. If the employee *can* complete the functions of the job without their requested accommodation, the employer doesn't have to offer the accommodation.
A lot of people have been pushing those boundaries and it's easier for employers to give in when the requirement is not too intrusive.
The employer can also determine that a function of a job is required, and deny employment to someone who cannot complete that function.
For an easy example, a person who worked at heights who said they needed an emotional support dog could almost certainly be denied, as the dog working at a height would be an issue. Even clearer, working in a clean environment (manufacturing clean room, allergy department at a hospital) could absolutely deny the accommodation.
I don't doubt any of this, but in our situation another office made the 'sure, we can accommodate that' decision and now the employee is transferring to our division. It's going to be really hard to claim we can't accommodate it, as it's the same job, just in a different office building. And I'm not massively concerned so long as it remains this one person, but then again, I'm not allergic to cats...
If you were allergic to cats, that would be extremely relevant. You don't have to offer accommodations that are literally incompatible with other employees' health. That's the sort of situation where any sane HR department will bend over backwards to offer an alternative accomodation.
Yeah, from an overall employer perspective that's going to be very difficult to deny, unless there are relevant factors different between the two areas.
One potentially relevant factor would be allergies among existing employees. At that stage the employer is dealing with two potentially incompatible accommodations and may need to find a significantly different solution, such as offering one or both employees alternate assignments, or something like an air purifier.
Did you read Scott’s article on Civil Rights laws? Reasonable Accommodation law is by far the most complicated and confusing of them. Any time an emotional support animal is requested, you need to do an interactive process with the employee to determine if the accommodation would be effective or if a less disruptive accommodation is possible. This involves getting documentation from the doctor, and bargaining back and forth on whether another accommodation would be effective. Would a stuffed animal work? A room with better lighting?
The employer can also argue it is an undue hardship, which is the most common route, but the law on that is very complex. Coworkers having dog allergies is a good one, hygiene is another good one, nowhere to have it urinate and dedicate is another. But that is also interactive. The employee could reply, what if I stayed at work an extra half hour and then in the middle of the day lengthened my breaks by 15 minutes so I could walk to the park and back. Oh and this whole process has to be done in 30 days.
In truth, I’ve never even seen a case where an employer denied an Emotional Support Animal, and then lost a lawsuit over it. But you never know if you will be the first and just the pain and expense of litigation is substantial.
There was a blind guy worked for the local council and he brought his dog everywhere (including, I imagine, to work) so in some cases I think the employer *would* have to permit the animal or make accommodations for the employee to have it around.
But just asking if your ESA crocodile can come to the office does seem like it would be in the employer's favour to refuse.
Yes, I was specifically talking about Emotional Support Animals. Service Animals, such as for blind people, are even harder to restrict, though theoretically possible
The main thing I know about disabilities law is ~20 years ago I was working somewhere where the ground floor was all showroom with a half dozen offices upstairs and only stairs to get up to them.
And this woman applied for a job there, came and interviewed and walked up and down the stairs just fine for the interviews, proceeded to be bad at her job and do no work. When called on this and put under discipline she then sued the company and they had to spend ~$2million putting in an elevator for her (because of debilitating back pain allegedly), and halt disciplinary proceedings despite her still not having done her job after like six months. And then another six months after that when the damn elevator was finally finished at great cost/disruption she abruptly quit and maybe had only ever used the damn thing like twice.
Well, a math professor of my acquaintance was presented with a letter from a student and a demand that he allow the student to bring her emotional support bat to class. An emotional support bat, not gonna lie.
What I want to know is how this works with another student who is terrified of flying mammals and gets triggered by the mere presence of the emotional support bat? I get triggered by dogs.
Too long, I tell you, too long has the feline community been forced to confront this injustice! Right the wrongs!
Ah, sweet flittermouse! But yeah, bringing your bat to class is taking the piss. Though the bat could well be smarter than the student and thus gain more from the lectures.
So which is the owner and which is the pet, then? If Bat Masterson wants a university education, let them sign up for it in their own right and not be exploiting a poor dumb college student!
What's more exciting about this is the prospect of student-student units. "Hi, we're Johndoug. We're taking four math classes this semester as a student-student unit, here's one standard tuition." And then they walk off, stuck together from hip to ear.
"What I want to know is how this works with another student who is terrified of flying mammals and gets triggered by the mere presence of the emotional support bat? I get triggered by dogs. "
The conservationists might be able to help here!
"When One Protected Species Kills Another, What Are Conservationists to Do?"
Technically yes, but practically speaking, if you're using it to bypass landlord bullshit, once you've shown them paperwork when you move in, nobody ever asks for it again, so in reality it expires once every however frequently you move.
Presumably if using it for flying you would need to keep it more up to date, but that seems like such an excessively stressful situation that I'd bet less than 1% of people who get an ESA use it for that.
At least in California, the letters are only good for a year and the professional has to say that the patient has been under their care for at least 30 days.
But if you try to get rid of a tenant with an expired ESA letter (or force them to get rid of the pet), you are really playing with fire. I've done it once and it thankfully settled.
There was an incident in RI last month where an ESA pitbull killed and partially ate another dog at an apartment complex. No doubt one of many such incidents. I hadn't heard of the aspect of evaluating safety before. It seems like there must be some sort of protection for the authors of these letters, particularly those churning them out for such low fees, or the lawyers would have bankrupted them by now. Is that the case?
My understanding (IANAL) is that the prescribing doctor isn't liable. The sites I read say that the doctor just prescribed a pet, and it's the patient's fault that they picked a bad one. But all the psych literature says you should also evaluate the patient's specific pet for behavioral issues. Maybe this is just a courtesy and not legally necessary?
My ESA letter has language about the pet and its behavior being my sole responsibility. Presumably this is them covering their asses, but I'm unsure if it has any legal weight.
I looked up some sample letters online (all from sites swearing they're legit and all others are fakes) and it seems a very grey area.
One site's sample letter did require you to put in the name, breed and weight of the pet, so if you are trying to certify that Patient really does need their Emotional Support rhino, I think that the emanation of a penumbra of "why the hell did you give a letter for a rhino in a small apartment up five flights of stairs?"responsibility might hover round your head:
On the other hand, another site's letter is just "Patient needs their pet" with no mention of what type of pet it is, so I suppose you might get away with "but they never informed me they were going to go out and get a rhino":
"An ESA letter should also contain the licensed healthcare professional’s signature and license number. It’s important to note that an ESA letter does not name the client’s specific diagnosis or provide detailed information about their condition or medical history. Under HUD’s rules, tenants have a right to privacy regarding sensitive information regarding their mental health.
An ESA letter may or may not have specific details regarding the ESAs themselves (i.e., their names, breed, size, etc.). This is because not all healthcare professionals are capable of verifying these characteristics of the client’s ESA. An ESA letter can also be issued prior to the client actually adopting their emotional support animal. An ESA letter is a recommendation on the part of the licensed healthcare professional, not a verification letter of the specific attributes of the animal that will serve as the client’s emotional support animal.
An ESA letter should be signed but does not have to be notarized. Housing providers also cannot insist that licensed healthcare professionals use a specific form or insist that the healthcare professional make statements under penalty of perjury. HUD instituted these guidelines to stop landlords from denying ESA accommodations by putting up additional barriers to tenants who had submitted appropriate ESA letters."
So you're not obliged to put in "I recommend that Jon Jonnson get his Emotional Support rhino", just that Jon would benefit from having an ESA. If he then goes out and gets a rhino, well, that's nothing to do with you.
This notice explains certain obligations of housing providers under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) with respect to animals that individuals with disabilities may request as reasonable accommodations."
This is more to help landlords deciding if an animal is a pet or not, but there is sample of what is considered a reasonable animal (if you really need your rhino, you need to make that case) and what the mental health professionals should include in the recommendation letters. They're very adamant that an assistance animal is *not* a pet, and that merely companionship, etc. are not reasons to get the classification as an assistance/therapeutic support animal, but there seems to be a little bit of wiggle room when it comes to the "therapeutic" part:
"Assisting a person with mental illness to leave the isolation of home or to interact with others,
• Enabling a person to deal with the symptoms or effects of major depression by providing a reason to live, or
• Providing emotional support that alleviates at least one identified symptom or effect of a physical or mental impairment."
"As a best practice, documentation – typically a short letter - that is being requested as part of a reasonable accommodation is recommended to include:
Patient name
Whether the health care professional has a professional relationship with that patient/client involving the provision of health care or disability-related services
The type of animal(s) for which the reasonable accommodation is sought
Whether the patient has a physical or mental impairment
Whether the patient’s impairment(s) substantially limit at least one major life activity or major bodily function, and
Whether the patient needs the animal(s) to do work, provide assistance, perform at least one task that benefits the patient, or provide therapeutic emotional support related specifically to the disability. For example, a dog that is trained to detect the onset of a seizure for a person who has seizure disorder, and helps that person remain safe during the seizure is an example of an animal that does work to benefit that person specifically related to their disability. Alternatively, a cat, while not trained to perform a specific task, may provide assistance to a person with anxiety by helping the person deal with the symptoms of or alleviate disability-related stress—this is an example of an animal that provides therapeutic emotional support specifically related to an individual’s disability."
You would not be able to sue for much anyway. Sadly, the law treats pets as property, and their value is limited to the actual money value, irrespective of emotional value.
Well, in this case it was a dog that was attacked but 4.5 million times a year it's a human. The incident in RI reminded me of that somewhat viral video from a few years ago in Colombia where she was also attacked in an elevator by a pitbull and almost lost an arm, then the vid from last week in Philly, etc. It seems like even if it was a dog on dog attack the owner here would have a strong case for suffering/distress civil damages after her watching her dog disemboweled and eaten in front of her.
I also think it would be difficult to sue the doctor who authored the ESA certification, because the doctor is not qualified to evaluate, nor is she or he assuming a duty to evaluate, the safety of the dog itself. The only “treatment” being provided by the doctor is answering the question of whether this patient requires an emotional support animal. The responsibility for an attack and injury rests with the dog’s owner- who many times doesn’t even have insurance so you’re SOL even if you successfully sue.
I would hope that these doctors aren't dumb enough to prescribe a specific pet, as opposed to something vague and general like "my patient needs to have an emotional support animal for X reason and under Y circumstances." By not endorsing the specific animal that should alleviate much, maybe all, potential liability. Case law around pets is pretty clear that some pets are considered safe and normal, so there's no presumption that, for instance, all dogs are potentially a menace and lead to liability concerns.
From Scott’s description it sounds like part of the process is evaluating the specific animal; nobody gets “prescribed” a new pet, but rather a certification for an existing pet.
The HUD gave guidance on what kinds of animals may be classed as service or assistance animals:
"Animals commonly kept in households.
If the animal is a dog, cat, small bird, rabbit, hamster, gerbil, other rodent, fish, turtle, or other small, domesticated animal that is traditionally kept in the home for pleasure rather than for commercial purposes, then the reasonable accommodation should be granted because the requestor has provided information confirming that there is a disability related need for the animal.
For purposes of this assessment, reptiles (other than turtles), barnyard animals, monkeys, kangaroos, and other non-domesticated animals are not considered common household animals.
Unique animals.
If the individual is requesting to keep a unique type of animal that is not commonly kept in households as described above, then the requestor has the substantial burden of demonstrating a disability-related therapeutic need for the specific animal or the specific type of animal. The individual is encouraged to submit documentation from a health care professional confirming the need for this animal, which includes information of the type set out in the Guidance on Documenting an Individual’s Need for Assistance Animals in Housing. While this guidance does not establish any type of new documentary threshold, the lack of such documentation in many cases may be reasonable grounds for denying a requested accommodation. If the housing provider enforces a “no pets” policy or a policy prohibiting the type of animal the individual seeks to have, the housing provider may take reasonable steps to enforce the policy if the requester obtains the animal before submitting reliable documentation from a health care provider that reasonably supports the requestor’s disability-related need for the animal. As a best practice, the housing provider should make a determination promptly, generally within 10 days of receiving documentation.
Reasonable accommodations may be necessary when the need for a unique animal involves unique circumstances …
Examples:
• The animal is individually trained to do work or perform tasks that cannot be performed by a dog.
• Information from a health care professional confirms that:
o Allergies prevent the person from using a dog; or
o Without the animal, the symptoms or effects of the person’s disability will be significantly increased.
• The individual seeks to keep the animal outdoors at a house with a fenced yard where the animal can be appropriately maintained.
Example: A Unique Type of Support Animal
An individually trained capuchin monkey performs tasks for a person with paralysis caused by a spinal cord injury. The monkey has been trained to retrieve a bottle of water from the refrigerator, unscrew the cap, insert a straw, and place the bottle in a holder so the individual can get a drink of water. The monkey is also trained to switch lights on and off and retrieve requested items from inside cabinets. The individual has a disability-related need for this specific type of animal because the monkey can use its hands to perform manual tasks that a service dog cannot perform."
The worst ones are probably fly-by-night operations that just take the money and give you a letter, no questions asked, so good luck trying to track them down for legal liability afterwards (and they probably have some fine print that they were relying on what the applicant said and it was up to the applicant to be honest, in order to dodge responsibility).
The respectable or semi-respectable ones probably aren't venal enough to write you a letter for your ESA pitbull.
I actually got denied adderall from one of those online services because I was naive enough to answer honestly. I actually do seem to have ADHD since I now have adderall and it helps exactly the way it’s supposed to. But doctors don’t prescribe for ADHD if you are depressed even if the depression is obviously caused by winter and Covid lockdowns.
Popular claim: Adderall causes Focus in ADHD people.
Reality: Adderall causes Focus in everyone.
Galaxy-brained but wrong claim: If Adderall causes Focus in you, you do not have ADHD (which is the same as the negation of the popular claim, that Aderall *doesn't* cause Focus in ADHD people).
When I was in college, I saw this made as a completely serious claim, along the lines of:
* Painkillers kill pain in people who are in pain.
* Painkillers do not kill pain in people who are not in pain.
* The effect is different depending on whether or not you have pain.
* ADHD drugs have the exact same effect on ADHD people and non-ADHD people.
* Therefore, unlike pain, ADHD is not a real condition.
This was one of many arguments presented by this article in favor of the thesis that ADHD is not a legitimate diagnosis. (Not so much "you don't have ADHD" as "no one truly has ADHD because it doesn't exist.") It was interesting stuff, and I wish I could find it again now.
Sounds to me like it's psychiatry that's the racket. Or, at least, **the practice of psychiatry under the social and legal conditions that prevail in the U.S. necessary entangle it with many rackety things**, emotional support animals merely being one of many examples.
Lawyers are essential to a huge number of rackets, including every racket in this post (since that's who drafts the laws). Is the law therefore a racket?
I think the law and the government that enforces the law are both rackets. And I also think there is no alternative. Unlike libertarians, I don't think reducing laws will necessarily help anything, because most of them were put in place to prevent private rackets. There is no solution, or rather, the solution is to learn to live with suffering
Maybe 60% of it? A huge amount of legal work is literally just protecting you from enemy lawyers. If no one had lawyers there would be wildly less need for them.
As with the often fair attacks on civil rights law, I think takes like these don't give enough consideration to the problems with the status quo ante that caused the current protection measures, imperfect though they are, to be implemented.
Absolutely. This is why I reject libertarianism and minarchism, in a nut shell. Reducing the size and power of the government will just open the way for worse, less accountable people to seize that power.
"For someone who doesn't like lawyers, you sure keep a lot of them around."
"Listen, lawyers are like nuclear weapons. You got yours, so I gotta have mine. But the minute one of us pulls the trigger on them, the whole world goes to shit!"
--Dialogue exchange (roughly paraphrased) from "Other People's Money."
I'm assuming they're talking about the plethora of entitlements given to the "disabled" under flimsy pretenses? Legally mandated accommodations, anti-discrimination laws, stuff like that.
When we were looking for a landlord while owning a cat, our landlord said they had police people living there and it's much worse than just a small cat. (not USA)
It seems pretty clear to me that violent people make for bad tenants, both due to property damage (e.g. putting a fist through a wall) and due to making other tenants feel unsafe.
My experience is that the best tenant is a reputationally-motivated rule-follower with a secure salary who stands to lose when colliding with the established authorities. Having law enforcement in the building and neighborhood also makes other tenants and neighbors feel secure and drives off the sorts of tenants you really don't want—criminals.
Certainly there is an argument that the guy who has a maybe-not-entirely-genuine medical marijuana Rx, or the lady who is keeping a cat that isn't permitted under the lease, will be made uncomfortable. But these are fringe tenants, not very desirable even if they have other good qualities.
The claim many libertarians will make is that most people engage in some behavior that is legally questionable, and are made uncomfortable by the presence of cops. Same way that kids are embarrassed by having their parents around.
The majority of housing where landlords are involved is the sort where the tenant next door having a dog is bad for one's mental health. Having a dog, oneself, only compounds the problem.
If the law were that every ESA has to have its vocal cords surgically removed, we could debate if that's humane but at least it would be in the 'mental health' direction.
When I found miniature ponies are a legitimate service animal (but that you need two or they become distressed)… well, thank God I met my wife shortly after that and she doesn’t find that as funny as I do.
I'm quite certain there are people who keep a pony in their 300 square foot apartment, judging by the number of inappropriately-sized dogs in apartments.
Apparently miniature horses can be the size of large dogs, so if you can wangle it to keep a large dog in the rented property, why not a miniature horse?
Its very appropriate that this follows the discussion about discrimination law because it seems to stem from the same issue with overregulation and failure to fully consider all the costs and imperfect implementation that go along with legally mandating something.
Unfortunately, I fear this may be an insoluble problem in a democracy. The issue is that it's just not in the voter's interests to vote based on what policies make the world better but, rather, to vote based on what best advertises their values and expresses their feelings. A problem social media has only made worse. You advertise that you care about disabled people by supporting laws which make it illegal not to accommodate them or, when the pendulum swings back, laws which signal you think emotional support animals are bs by completely banning them and at no point to the incentivizes favor really weighing likely consequences much.
My best solution is to make voting more indirect (eg original electoral college but make electors your actual city/state legislators so they can't become purely a formality). But that's still not great.
I wish. For cultural and personal reasons I would be racked with guilt if I left my family behind in this country. Hell, It would feel very weird to live more then 500 miles away from my siblings, even if I was in the same country. Enjoy your freedom.
I'm not sure it does - in the areas where local laws control things we end up, rather than getting a diversity of approaches, getting some municipalities in a race to be maximally exclusive (e.g. Atherton) while others are either stuck with the poor people and problems (e.g. detroit) or just too ideological to function (San Francisco). There's relatively little race for comparative advantage in preferential policies going on.
Is your assumption that no one getting to have pets in their apartments is a better world?
This seems to me like a case where capital is making the world a lot worse, and regulation is opening a loophole to help some of those people.
As Scott said, this would be less of a problem if the housing industry were so healthy that landlords were competing for tenants and had to offer attractive perks like allowing pets. But that's far from the state of things in most cities.
People would be better off if they were not owned by capitalists, and instead by the occupants.
And if your next line is something like 'but they wouldn't have been built if the capitalists couldn't make money off them'... then yeah, that's part of the point.
Wealth inequality is so great that only a tiny cabal of elites can build anything of value, and they will only do so if they can use it to exploit everyone else to their own gain. The result is that our societal wealth and productivity is directed towards building systems that benefit the populace to only the barest level required to get their money.
Which, again, can work ok in very liquid markets with lots of competition. But works very poorly for things like real estate and housing.
I'm honestly trying to understand your point, but I'm confused. You said
"People would be better off if they were not owned by capitalists, and instead by the occupants."
I interpreted that as meaning "People would be better off if the occupants owned the apartments."
That's home ownership, albeit not a single-family home.
But home ownership doesn't always make sense. People may not have enough cash on hand to buy a home, even if that is just one apartment. They may not want to get a mortgage at that particular time in their lives. And even if they do want to get a mortgage, doing so comes with its own costs (fees and taxes). If you can't or don't want to commit to owning the same home for a while then you may not recover those fees and taxes unless housing prices go up considerably. In some markets that might be the case, but it's still risky. The housing market is weird.
Plus, when you own a home, you liable for all the repairs. The cost of repairs goes into rent, of course, but it can still be time consuming and stressful to find a repairman that you trust, and sometimes costs go up unexpectedly. Having a landlord that is responsible for dealing with all of that can provide peace of mind.
Then you say that your point isn't really about who can afford to buy a home, but who can afford to build new housing. But all of the above still applies. You still have to have a lot of cash on hand or be willing to take on a mortgage, with all that entails. And if we are talking about multi-unit dwellings and not single-family homes, then you have to have even more cash, or take on an even bigger mortgage, to build a bunch of units you won't occupy (in which case, you become a landlord), or somehow coordinate with people who are willing to share the cost of construction and then occupy all the units. But that's a huge coordination problem, because everything I said above about home ownership still applies, except now it applies to dozens, if not hundreds, of people who are strangers to one another and who may not want to enter into the type of legally binding cooperative agreement to build an apartment build that would be required to make that work.
A modest proposal going in exactly the opposite direction: split the concept of home ownership down the middle. Specifically, decouple responsibility for the bricks and mortar from the right to collect the rent.
Hear me out: the tenant shouldn't be forced to move out before the landlord can sell. Short of altering the structure of the building, the tenant should be able to do what they like to the property they live in - the cost of restoring it to a sellable state when they end their tenancy can be priced in and/or insured against. It shouldn't matter to the tenant whether their landlord is a rich individual, a giant faceless corporation or a government.
Meanwhile, it shouldn't matter to the landlord whether a tenant wants to paint their room red or yellow, pin up a poster, change the curtains, have their friend stay over, or own a pet; or, indeed, who the tenant is or whether it's the same person paying rent today as yesterday (provided they do pay rent).
When a landlord buys to let, to a first approximation, they have a lump sum and/or leverage that they want to put to work - what they want is to turn this into a revenue stream; that is, they want to buy a recurring payment and also some risk, a bet on being able to sell the revenue stream to the next landlord along in the future for a profit.
When a tenant rents a place, meanwhile, they want to live their life there - they want to be able to decorate and furnish their living environment as they please, they want to be able to share it with who and what they please, and they don't want to be kicked out and have to find another place on the landlord's whim.
Maybe not all tenancies should look like this. It's reasonable for the retired person renting out their spare room to want a say over what goes on there. But when a house is purchased by someone who do not themselves plan to live there - indeed, only interact with it between tenants, if at all - they really shouldn't get much control over the people who do.
Let landlords buy and sell the revenue streams they actually want to, without having to bother with the burdensome reality of owning a physical house and dealing with the actual people living in it. Let tenants live in rented property how they want, for as long as they want, without being unreasonably restricted or kicked out, provided they can afford the rent. It's simpler all around.
Georgist economics says letting landlords buy and sell revenue streams is the root problem, proposes fully centralizing that sort of rent-collection in a form that's accountable to the voting public, and decoupling it from more personalized property-management services. Possibly redistributing the revenue as UBI.
Historical experience shows over and over that free markets work better for making resource distribution decisions than central planning.
The worst problems arise when some of the participants are not free to shop around or walk away (as, e.g., with urgent healthcare decisions); the property market, tight and terrible as it currently is, is not yet in that place. The way forward, therefore, is surely to manage externalities and reduce the trade to its essence as much as possible.
As a user, when my ISP, telephone company, credit card provider etc tells me another company has bought them, I don't actually care: I still get the same service for the same price.
Meanwhile, the ISP shouldn't get to control what sites I visit, the credit card provider shouldn't get to control what I spend money on, the telephone company shouldn't get to control who I call; if they attempt this, I walk away. My ability to do so depends on there being a market for these things, with many participants; if there was only one, centralised, supplier, they would have more control over what I can do, not less.
If I am a tenant, I am buying housing as a service, and a change of landlord shouldn't affect me. The extent to which it does is a failure of the market and legislative environment. The landlord shouldn't get much say in how I use the service. The extent to which they do is a failure of the market and legislative environment. At least, though, if it gets really miserable, I do still have the option to look for somewhere else. Having only one, centralised, landlord would remove this.
Meanwhile, given the current shape of the world and the experience of the last decade or two of politics, I have very little trust in accountability to the voting public being any kind of strong driver of outcomes that align with my preferences. IME I am much more likely to be able to get things closer to what I want if there exists a large set of things to choose between than if there is one thing I allegedly have some tiny nebulous influence over.
IMO the problem with the housing rental market is that we treat it as one market, whereas it should be two separate ones. The landlord market for trading lump sums and revenue streams should be decoupled, as much as possible, from the tenant market for housing-as-a-service; just the same way that when we buy anything-else-as-a-service we don't have to concern ourselves with who the shareholders of the company we're getting the service from are or what trading decisions they make day to day; and neither do they care about us, save perhaps in aggregate.
> Georgist economics says letting landlords buy and sell revenue streams is the root problem
As a card carrying Georgist, this isn't correct. The root problem is that the price the landlord is able to charge for rent is in large part a product of the land value cause by the improvements created and paid for by the community surrounding the parcel of land. ie, if a parcel of land is next to a train station it will be worth a lot more, but what the landlord is effectively charging rent for is proximity to public transit that they didn't build (read: aren't taxed on proportional to the value they're able to extract from the improvement). Georgists have no complaint with a property developer building a massive apartment building next to a train station and then selling that building to a landlord. The issue is that the revenue stream for that property is a combination of the land rent and the building rent. We have no issue with the landlord acting as a property manager and charging the rents required to cover the loans for the construction, property upkeep, some profit margin, etc, but it makes no sense that they capture the land rent from the train station.
The prototypical case of this is the landlord who finds out that a train station will be built in X location in 5 years, and buys an empty lot next to location X. The next year when the construction of the train station becomes public knowledge, the value of their land doubles because the market correctly prices in how much more demand there will be to live there. At this point they sell the empty lot to a developer for a tidy profit, having done absolutely nothing to create value in the process. A Georgist economist would say that the land speculator's profit in that case should be taxed at 100%.
The problem is that a lot of tenants will just completely trash a place then move out after a few years and actually getting the money out of them to pay for returns is legal hell even if they have it (which they often don't).
This happens already and is independent of the renting mechanism.
The market prices this risk in. In addition to the rent, typically there is a deposit, which is kept to pay for cleanup if the apartment is trashed.
For people who find the risk of cleanup/repair costs for a place exceeding the deposit and whatever profit they make from rent to be unacceptable, there already are management companies that keep a larger portion of the rent but in return undertake to cover maintenance / cleanup during and between tenancies, and also cover the rent payments in the event of a large gap between tenancies.
I do feel that there is a gap between those extremes that is waiting to be filled - some kind of end-of-tenancy insurance, perhaps - but that is by the by.
" the cost of restoring it to a sellable state when they end their tenancy can be priced in and/or insured against.
...Meanwhile, it shouldn't matter to the landlord ...whether it's the same person paying rent today as yesterday (provided they do pay rent)."
Do you not see that the second part contradicts the first? "Oh, it wasn't me knocked a hole in the wall, it was the previous tenant who was a friend invited to stay by the original tenant who is now in Australia", good luck chasing after the money to do the repairs, and insurance companies will charge an arm and a leg in premiums to cover "so your tenant trashed your property then disappeared and now you have to repair it".
If I wake up in the morning and find that my car has been vandalised overnight where I parked it, I don't need to work out who did it before my insurance covers the repairs (which is great, since the police round here lack the capacity to do anything of that nature).
Why can't this work the same way?
The landlord shouldn't have to chase the tenant for the repair costs. This is a thing that's broken in the current system and shouldn't stay that way. Either they already have the deposit, or there is insurance in the picture (or a management company, which performs the same function and balances risk across their portfolio internally) or they've deliberately decided to bear the risk themselves so they get to keep more of the rent and therefore now have to pay out of their own pocket I guess.
If we expect landlords to give tenants more rights than presently, we do need to help balance their risk accordingly. I don't think we particularly need to invent anything new for this, though, we already have tried and tested mechanisms for this sort of thing.
That said, if we're imagining new possibilities, an insurance package tied to the tenant could also work - landlords could reduce rent / lower deposits to tenants with such a package, and tying it to the tenant would let insurers price discriminate based on risk assessment / past history just like they do for cars, including no claims bonuses etc.
"Short of altering the structure of the building, the tenant should be able to do what they like to the property they live in - the cost of restoring it to a sellable state when they end their tenancy can be priced in and/or insured against."
Would you consider a requirement to put about 10% of the value of the property in escrow an acceptable way to ensure the ability to restore the property to a sellable state?
No, because around here 10% of the value of a property is twice the annual wage for a cleaner, and I don't believe it's physically possible to do damage that will cost that amount to fix without doing things like breaking down load bearing walls.
No, sometimes you just want to live in a certain place for a couple years (like going to college), and buying a house and then selling it again is not worth the hassle compared to just renting one for a bit.
Buying and selling is a hassle in the current market where most people only do it once or twice in their life and it only applies to separate houses which are huge purchases.
If we had a system where people could buy their apartments, it would create a market for much more frequent and smaller transactions, and the market would respond with appropriate financial implements to that situation. Like car loans.
I don’t think that makes sense. There’s a lot of fixed costs in transferring real estate ownership, and a lot of specialized tasks in maintaining real estate, and so there are real efficiencies and social benefits in having some people specialized to do that while others just rent, particularly for short term situations. It’s a lot of the same advantages for why restaurants exist instead of all cooking being done in individually-owned kitchens.
I don’t think owner occupancy solves the problem. You still have to decide whether the building allows pets in the individual unit, or doesn’t, and instead of an owner-operator for the whole building, you have a community of owner-occupants that need to set a collective policy. Any way that policy is set will be bad for some owner-occupants. What matters is having sufficient buildings that there is a market niche for some to do each policy, more than how ownership of those buildings is structured.
There's a big difference between passing a rule that applies to you and passing a law that only applies to strangers. To say nothing of democracy vs dictatorship.
Assuming that the co-op model is what would happen for apartment complexes, sure, every rule will be bad for some occupants. But the rules should be much better on average, because they're made by and for the people they affect. And it should be much easier to find a co-op that matches your preferences, because different people with different preferences can cluster, but all landlords have basically the same incentives.
Honestly I don't think pets belong in apartments at all, with the possible exception of fish. If you don't have a proper backyard you definitely shouldn't own a dog and probably shouldn't own a cat either. Animals shouldn't be cooped up indoors 23 hours a day.
...this sentiment in one ear, and "the outside world is dangerous and full of cars, and also pets have a huge, terrible effect on the ecosystem; they should never ever be let out; keep them indoor only!" in the other. Net result: no-one should have pets,ever.
I'm sympathetic to both of these, so I took it out of my own hands by getting a cat with serious health problems that means it can't be let out, both for its own health (needs meds twice a day) and that of other cats (FIV+).
Unless you're vegan, this argument doesn't make any sense to me. The animals we eat can sit cooped up in cages for basically their entire lives, and that's okay, but people can't have pets that they love and play with in their own apartments?
There also lots of small pets, like rats, hamsters, pigeons, snakes, lizards, etc that can get everything they need in a small amount of space. I mean, just look at how small the enclosures for some creatures are even at zoos.
As far as I can tell, its 1) They accelerate degradation/increase maintainance cost of the building 2) Other tenants are annoyed by them.
Both of those are still problems with some kind of collective ownership. In general I dont get how capital is supposed to profit off something like that: Whatever money the ban makes them, why dont they just make that into an upcharge for getting a pet allowed, if that was so attractive?
The housing market is a lot better over here. Still, most appartments dont allow pets.
For a furnished apartment, there is also 3) the risk of the pet destroying an apartment's worth of furniture. The cost of replacing that (or the loss involved in moving from the furnished to the unfurnished rental market) can be much higher than the cost of cleaning and repainting an empty apartment that an animal scratched up / excreted in.
In a rental, there's a pernicious principle-agent problem (or maybe that's not the exact term, but related).
The renter doesn't care what happens to the property or property values as long as they can keep renting (indeed, they directly benefit from falling property values).
The landlord doesn't care about quality of life for the tenant, as long as they can keep their rooms full at market price (indeed, they can save a lot of money with various QoL-lowering measures, and having more churn makes it easier to increase their prices to keep up with the market/inflation).
So the renter and landlord have an oppositional relationship with wildly divergent incentives about how the unit should be used and treated. This encourages landlords lowering QoL and tenants disrespecting the property and neighborhood in a constant downward spiral.
That includes, in this case, landlords outlawing all pets, even ones that are likely to not be costly to them in terms of damages and property values; and tenants not caring about whether their pets will cause damages or lower property values, and not caring to give them the proper training/clean up after them quickly/etc to avoid that.
There's a reason pets destroy rented apartments faster than owned homes. When you own your own property, all the incentives fall on you and you can balance them optimally. When the incentives are misaligned because of an adversarial renter/landlord relationship, dumb shit happens.
I do wonder how much of this is (a) stated policy compared to actual policy and (b) a lack of "reputation."
Specifically, I rented an apartment for a while and was a "good" tenant. My rent was always on time, management didn't have to come talk to me about loud parties, the police didn't show up at my apartment late at night, etc.
Eventually I acquired a girlfriend and we decided to move in together to a larger apartment. Also, she wanted a cat. I explained to management that we wanted a larger place (which they had) and that moving there would be easier for us (short distance to move stuff, we know the management company and neighborhood, etc.). But we wanted a cat. Policy for the apartment complex was: No pets.
We were permitted a (single) cat in exchange for a slight increase in the rent.
>indeed, they can save a lot of money with various QoL-lowering measures
That only works if they can surprise the tenants. Pets/no pets is known from the outset and will be priced in. This was my point: "Capitalist greed" is rarely a reason not to offer something, only to change price.
>When you own your own property, all the incentives fall on you
Yeah, for some reason I thought you were talking about collective ownership of the building rather than condos. What might also contribute though is that in many places tenants cant be held accountable for anything except not paying the rent, if that. I mean, you said that landlords will decrease QoL to increase churn, instead of just... kicking people out. Thats kind of symptomatic.
For 1, you're describing how things work in an efficient market with lots of competition and high consumer information and low friction costs. Maybe there are some lucky cities where the apartment rental market looks like that, but it doesn't describe any of the cities where we talk about the problems with housing all the time.
> you said that landlords will decrease QoL to increase churn,
I'm saying churn doesn't hurt them, they lower QoL mostly to save on costs.
>For 1, you're describing how things work in an efficient market with lots of competition and high consumer information and low friction costs.
I dont think so. What would be the incentive against offering your building with pets allowed and a correspondingly higher price? It seems to me that even a monopolist landlord would have some of his buildings like that.
>I'm saying churn doesn't hurt them, they lower QoL mostly to save on costs.
You said that it helps with raising prices. And with that too, why cant they just do that? It seems very much like youre trying to fix the side effects of fixing the market, rather than a problem with the market itself.
The real issue is that it's very difficult to deal with an irresponsible pet owner. In terms of the harm to the building or stuff that's easily handled by the deposit and/or a monthly pet fee. And most people are pretty responsible with their pets so don't impose much (if any) net harm to their neighbors.
The real issue is what about the person who leaves their giant husky home barking all day. Eviction is a crazy expensive process for a landlord and especially in this situation where it's hard to have a clear rule about what constitutes excessive barking so you may need to pull in the neighbors to testify in any eviction hearing.
It depends what you mean by "democracy." If you just mean "people elect legislators to figure out all those 'law' thingies for them" and don't pay any more heed, then yeah, a known failure mode is "I demand you vote for all the nice-sounding things, and talk about trade-offs and complications is just defeatist!"
But "democracy" as it was practiced in its Tocquevillian heyday isn't just voting or legislatures. It means that ordinary people - not specialist legislators, bureaucrats, or other "public servants" - are the primary agents tasked with identifying, reviewing, and solving their community's problems, either through voluntary and fraternal organizations, or through communal participation in formal government bodies like town meetings.
(It's not quite as crazy as it sounds. I think filling up ca 600 member parliament, like the English Parliament or the German Bundestag with uniformly randomly selected willing participants might actually work.)
I'm not completely confident in such a model but would certainly be willing to give it a try. How about a multi-stage system? Town councilors who serve a term without being caught in any work-related felonies become the selection pool for state-level positions, then a term at state level without disgrace qualifies for federal. Simplifies the problem of fair random selection from an enormous population, mitigates risks of someone with poor impulse control being given vast power with no warmup.
That's why I suggested you fill up parliament at random. If you have 600 positions to fill, the law of large numbers is your friend. Then run parliament as per the established rules of your country. A few irresponsible individuals won't damage the system.
(And if 10% of people in the population have poor impulse control, I guess it's only fair that 10% of your members of parliament also have poor impulse control..)
I wouldn't want to pick single positions like president completely at random. The law of large numbers doesn't help you there.
A slightly more sophisticated version: instead of picking people directly at random, have everyone who's interested fill out a ballot. The ballot nominates one (willing) person.
To fill up parliament, draw 600 ballots at random. If multiple ballots drawn name the same person, use your favourite resolution method. (Eg you could give that lucky person multiple votes in parliament, or you could let people put second and third etc choices on their ballot, or you could pick the choice from the lucky person's own ballot (and so on in a chain), or you could just draw another ballot at random, etc.)
This is a bit of a cross between normal voting and sortition.
I like these randomised methods, because they ensure perfect (probabilistic) proportionality along any axis (eg left handers vs right handers, litte-endians vs big-endians), instead of just proportionality along party lines.
In Germany's current system, chancellor and president are picked (more or less) by a majority vote in parliament. Something like that would work in our sortition system as well to fill up individual appointments.
You could also pick a president at random. If you want to do that, I would suggest the random-ballot method outlined above, instead of directly picking people at random.
> A few irresponsible individuals won't damage the system.
> (And if 10% of people in the population have poor impulse control, I guess it's only fair that 10% of your members of parliament also have poor impulse control..)
There's a small but potentially non-negligible chance that the random draw of 600 parliament members has a run of bad luck, pulls *more* than 60 who are in the bottom 10% with regard to impulse control, plus a few malevolent narcissists eager to take advantage of the resulting chaos. Probably less risk of that than in a system directly based around the sort of popularity contests that narcissists train hard to excel at, but, maybe still worth being careful about?
Aside from egregious failure modes, tiered sortition would also ensure that, to the extent there are learnable skills involved in being a legislator, or unexpected personal challenges, anyone considered for the top spots has already had chances to find out what they'll be getting into and practice those skills in a lower-stakes environment, thus holding "willingness" to higher standards of informed consent for higher offices.
I am similarly sympathetic to sortition, but it's worth noting what happened in Athens. It came to be ruled by its generals, because the generals were (a) not chosen randomly, and (b) not term-limited.
There are good reasons that generals were exempt from those constraints - their performance matters.
But still, that effectively made them the government.
I don't think that was really the case. Athens had ruling officials *called* generals, but power always resided with the Assembly. At least until the Assembly led Athens into one too many wartime defeat and the city had a new constitution installed at spear-point.
All that would end up doing is strengthening the government bureaucracy at the expense of the parliament, since you'd have a crop of legislators with little or no institutional knowledge.
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The problem is writing laws to make people act civilized. Accommodating people is the moral thing to do, if you aren't unduly burdened by it, which you could judge yourself by whether you're harmed more by accommodating than the person you would be helping is harmed by being denied (service, a product, access to something, etc.). When you write a LAW to enforce this, it never works correctly, since the wording is pretty much impossible to get right.
What about charging a fine for trying to get into an elevator before the people in the elevator leave?
It would be fine if claims were legit. But it’s precisely because of the rampant abuse, as you’ve described, that screws it up for the folks who might have legit claims.
Keep it to seeing eye dogs. Clear….testable….verifiable disability with an objective benefit from the animal in question. For everyone else….get an app or a VR headset for your emotional comfort instead.
Animals really do work better than apps or VR headsets. I'm not saying that therefore anyone in poor health mentally or physically gets to have one for comfort no matter who it inconveniences. But you're making the situation simpler than it is by believing that little electrical entertainments work just as well. If only it were so simple!
You realize that service animals span way more legitimate functions than just "seeing eye dog", right? e.g. for people with fainting disorders, seizure disorders, mobility impairment, hearing impairment, schizophrenia, etc.
"Usage creep" is a very loaded way of observing that the medical profession has found more uses for animals than just seeing eye dogs (by that broad brush, all of medicine has usage creep). Service animals are generally strictly trained and have specific purposes they serve, and generally there are very clear cases for each such purpose. There's very little "abuse" of the system, afaict.
The OP is about ESAs, not service animals. They are not the same thing (and are, in fact, legally distinct), and the OP even makes that clear 4-5 sentences in. Almost nothing said in the OP applies to service animals.
Which is why my point is to keep it to service animals for legit indications, like seeing eye dogs, and do away with all the soft (give or take bogus) indications that are ripe for abuses….like just about any ESA “indication”.
No. "Service" animals, unlike emotional support pets, are highly trained to perform a specific task, like alerting diabetics to blood sugar changes before symptoms occur, alerting to on-coming seizures and blood pressure problems, etc. This allows the owner time to stop and address the issue before it becomes critical.
Arguably, these dogs are even more useful and necessary than seeing-eye dogs, as smell-based alert dogs are detecting conditions *before* their owners experience symptoms. Blind people know they're blind and the vast majority already have strategies for navigating the world.
Likewise, there's a small population of highly trained and necessary dogs who aren't Labs-with-grab-bars, like the Border Collie avalanche rescue dog belonging to a guest who routinely stayed in my hotel as he traveled to and from ski resorts. She absolutely didn't *look* like the usual medical or disability service dog, but she saved several people's lives over her "career."
The high bar for "service" that you're is "Does the animal *proactively* perform a specific task to address a specific problem?"
And funny enough, that's already the legal definition of a service animal!
The US only recognises dogs and horses as service animals, even though many other species are trained to perform service tasks. It would be nice to expand (or entirely get rid of) the species limit, and focus on what task the animal performs.
I'm aware of at least one case of a schizophrenic person who hallucinates people. They have a service animal trained to respond to a doorbell or knock. If the person hears someone at the door, and the animal doesn't respond, they know the visitor is not real.
> For everyone else….get an app or a VR headset for your emotional comfort instead.
Exactly! Why bother with the complexities of accountability and love for a flesh and blood creature that relies on you and reciprocates affection when you can download an app can play a comforting hum as it offers prompts for you to sit quietly writing about your loneliness?
Really, there's no reason why tenants should be allowed guests or roommates either; something like 99% of all neighbor/neighborhood disturbances stem from in-person social interactions, often between people who aren't even paying rent! Imagine how much we could cut down on both landlord expenses and annoyances to neighbors who hate knowing that other creatures exist without their consent by just giving landlords a little more discretion over what they'll allow in their properties.
And with how much the mediation of phones and the internet has already improved our social relations at scale (did you know only 0.04% of homicides or assaults over the past 10 years have occurred between people on an active skype, facetime, or zoom call? And that's worldwide!), there's not event really an opportunity cost here in terms of overall social/cultural health. We just need to get people a little more time on their phones, and the really serious issues like dogs barking and landlords having to paint between tenants will take care of themselves. Or. Well, as long as we also ban things like that in favor of phones, I mean.
The question isn’t “are pets awesome?” (They are). The question is how much special treatment, accommodation, privilege, or dispensation one can reasonably expect from others. Cuz if you want to bring your pet into a situation where pets are not permitted, that is what you’re asking for. My personal barometer is to always minimize imposition on others in pursuit of my “wants” and “nice-to-haves”. Ymmv.
>The question is how much special treatment, accommodation, privilege, or dispensation one can reasonably expect from others.
But before you can answer this question, you need to have defined a default from which special accommodation, etc. diverges. I'm not saying "pets are awesome;" I'm saying that the default state from which we're working here (i.e. nearly all US landlords get to ban pets for any reason) is what is absurd and needs to change in this arrangement, not the system for exceptions, as you were suggesting.
It simply shouldn't BE an exception to bring your pet with you to the place you move in. The onus should be on landlords to prove that they have a special need for their units to be pet-free, and they should handle pets that become an imposition on others on a case by case basis, similarly to how they already do with tenants themselves.
I was trying to at the very least highlight that there are two competing perspectives for who is imposing upon whom in the tenant-pet issue at hand (i.e. landlord vs tenant) and that to resolve the tension between those perspectives into coherent, effective policy, you need to consider even more basic questions like "what creates a flourishing society that reduces overall human suffering?" Which your suggestion of apps as a replacement for companionship led me to believe you did not consider particularly important.
Not really fussed about other situations like restaurants, bars, planes, etc.; they should for the most part be able to say no pets. As always, though, housing is different and needs different rules.
I agree the discussion is one of balance, and where that inflection point should be.
Your model only considers landlord vs tenant. However, more of the time, “all other residents/tenants in the building” is a third party that should not be ignored. And in a strata/multi-dwelling situation, I’d say let it be democratically decided. If the majority in the building want to allow pets, fine; if they do not, also fine. Any prospective tenant/resident knows the rules going in. If you choose to live in a building that does not allow pets…you’ve made your choice. If you then choose to acquire one, that should in no way obligate everyone else to modify their choices, simply to accommodate yours.
I actually love that solution for multi-unit complexes, tbh, but I think it's unfortunately a lot more likely for legislatures to succeed in passing a simple regulation that "you must rent to people with pets" than in forcing landlords to imbue an organization of their tenants with any legally-recognized decision-making capability.
The whole discussion feels surreal to me, because landlords simply can't forbid you to have a pet where I come from (unless it's a dog from one of the officially dangerous breeds). The whole issue seems to be more about tenants rights than ESA.
Are there pretty strong rules about how the pets must behave?
It is extremely unpleasant to live next to a poorly behaved dog -- at least babies eventually grow up, and can't be left alone without a responsible adult.
Being eaten by your neighbor’s pet lion must be pretty unpleasant, too. It’s not a dog, so, _a fortiori_, it’s not a dog from one of the officially dangerous breeds.
You are missing the point I think. The spirit of the rules, in France, is that the tenant has in his house or apartment the same rights and duties as if they were the owner. There are general regulations on noise, they apply the same way if you own your place or if you rent it.
Reasonable accommodation laws do a lot more than just help tenants with pets. I've seen lawyers try to use them to get landlords to allow smoking in buildings, to allow tenants to violate noise restrictions, to have the landlord pay to move the tenants' stuff, etc. The laws are pretty terse, so virtually every case is a guessing game.
That's the upside to overregulation - the answer to your question is usually buried somewhere in thousands of pages of law.
>The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.
While I don't disagree about these things happening, I think I disagree with the idea that this is *all* that happens.
Basically: it's not my impression that 100% of people who want a pet in a pet-free apartment and can afford one of these letters will get one. It's not my impression that people without mental illness are as likely to know about these sites as people with mental illness, and it's not my impression that among people who know about these sites, the mentally ill and the not mentally ill will use them in equal numbers.
I feel like our community is sometimes too rules-lawyery about looking at rules and seeing what they hypothetically *could* allow, and then saying *that* is the result of the rules. Instead of looking at what they actually cause, in reality, in context.
'No pets' policies eliminate a whole lot of pets, even among the contexts where someone has the ability to potentially circumvent them with these sites. These sites are more likely to be used by the average mentally ill person than the average not-mentally-ill person (is there a less ableist word for this than 'sane'? cis-mental?).
There's a mushy middle of people abusing these sites to get pets in cases the law didn't intend, sure. But even controlling for wealth and savviness, I'd expect that the rules still accomplish what they're supposed to in most cases.
I think it's more that most people here WOULD this loophole without even thinking about it, and the only reason they think of for someone NOT doing that is a lack of knowledge about how to exploit it.
I would like to think that most people (even here) have a modicum of pride which would prevent them from pretending to have a mental illness to get some kind of benefit.
The only people I know who have ever used this loophole have been people who are already a bit iffy in the head, to the point where they're happy going to a psychiatrist and saying that they have some issue or other.
Why would pride prevent someone from using this? Everyone knows it’s a bullshit loophole. Everyone wants to have their dog with them in the place they want to go for free. So they use the loophole, they know it, and everyone around them knows it. People aren’t even thinking about pride, nor are they worried about appearing mentally ill when they use it, because it’s obvious to everyone they are using the loophole. It’s quite normalized. I’ve heard the term “just get one of those emotional support animal letters and be done with it” countless times when someone is complaining about not being able to take their pet somewhere.
If not pride, then perhaps integrity. Being willing to say only what is true, even at cost to yourself. It is frustrating when you're a person of your word and encounter various ways that society would make things easier for you if you were willing to bend the truth. Or it's frustrating if you wish you could stick to your word, but there are various ways society is dysfunctional and you do things the simpler way that involves lying. Which is what Scott is getting at when he says he suffers "a little bit of spiritual damage each time" he prescribes an ESA.
I think it's plausible that this is the case, but I do think there's a way that the equilibrium you're describing can break down: If everyone else is circumventing a system, then there's the additional motivation of not wanting to feel like a chump. When faced with the choice of gaming the system or following the rules, the pain of feeling like you're the only one who's being had might even be worse than the pain of having to pay the extra rent for the apartment that does allow pets.
And there are always people who are willing to start the process, even if only for the bragging rights (and the opportunity to condescend to the chumps who aren't clever/shrewd/man enough to to do the same). As more people start to follow suit it becomes harder to resist. If you were the last person on earth to not get an ESA letter, would you really not just get one eventually?
I think this sort of thing does happen, but I wonder under what circumstances it does or doesn't. Maybe if the process involves an amount of friction which exceeds some threshold compared to the anticipated benefit (unlike what seems to be the case now for pets with those 24 hour ESA letter websites) the ball doesn't get rolling. It could also be that if there aren't enough people who the system applies to the social factor doesn't get strong enough. How many people who have pets and rent from places that don't allow them would a given person know? Social media can affect this though.
This, so much. I do think there's a certain social technology that help prevent such spirals: being a high-trust society, where such things are "just not done". Where how you handle yourself in public still has some sort of emotional meaning to people.
The requirement for this to work is that society feels fair overall. I've spent a large part of my life living in a country where people are really nice, generous and kind, but there's this widespread belief that "they" (the government, the ruling class, whoever) is out to get you. This belief is unfortunately true to some extent. And that little bit of truth pushes the equilibrium of how people behave waaay to the side of "rule following is for chumps".
An underappreciated horror of the Harry Potter universe is that animals are widely known to have human or near human intelligence and the full suite of emotions, but people eat meat anyway.
Well, our official Canon includes Harry freaking out that '"SNAKES ARE SENTIENT?"' and subsequently worrying a lot about what other life forms might have gotten an uplift by wizardry.
>Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier.
Yup. As I've said before, free markets great, capitalists bad.
It's not surprising that the rules made to deal with a crazy situation end up themselves being imperfect and weird, and not producing perfect solutions. When the world is this far out of whack, you can go into a legislative session with the best possible intentions, and still not be able to do any better than a weird half-measure full of holes that vaguely satisfices across a bunch of different interests and concerns. The best possible solution will probably look like that, too.
Not so clear to me we need the second half of this. If we could build as much housing as is profitable to do so, this problem seems reasonably likely to just go away
I think part of the point of "capitalists bad" is that housemaxxing gets continually opposed by owners of existing housing for obvious incentive reasons
I don't really get the argument that the incentives of owners cause the NIMBYism, actually. Tenants generally outnumber landlords, since tenants rent one home, while some landlords rent out multiple ones. Tenants normally vote in the local elections, and they have an interest in increased housing supply; they should be able to outvote the landlords. Meanwhile, owner-occupiers who are neither landlords, nor tenants, have no clear interest: increased home values drive up their home value, but also the implicit cost of their housing, as their wealth is tied down. They may have an interest in housing shortage if they are considering moving to a different town, or they may have an interest in cheap housing if they are considering saving up for a bigger home.
And there is the argument that more housing allows more population, which drives up the desirability of the town (for the same reason bigger cities are more expensive in the first place), increasing rents (but also benefitting tenants, at least on average: housing becomes more expensive in this model because it's worth paying more for).
Owner-occupiers have an interest in driving up the cost of the home they currently own, which outweighs any realistic prospect of saving up for a bigger one. Even more so, they have an interest in preventing the real-estate bubble from popping, since that would mean they take an enormous loss - and possibly end up deep in debt, depending on how heavily leveraged their house is.
Tenants outnumber landlords, but have less time, energy, and money to throw at political engagement, since they're generally working themselves to exhaustion and then handing all their pay (beyond subsistence) to a landlord.
I don't see why owner-occupiers have an interest in driving up the cost of their home. Again, if the home you live in is worth $100,000 more, it doesn't matter (as long as you aren't moving) if at the same time you also need $100,000 more of your wealth tied down to have a place to live. Likewise if prices crash, and your home value halves, it doesn't affect you if it also means you only need half as much wealth as before to own a home. Even if you end up with more debt than equity, it doesn't change how much you have to pay each month, does it? I don't know much about how mortgages work, though.
How much an asset is worth affects how willing banks are to loan you money with that asset as collateral, and at what interest rates, which very much can impact how much you pay per month.
More generally, lots of people think of their net worth sort of like a score in a videogame, to be maximized as an end in itself - and that's not exactly an irrational strategy, since it provides solid strategic guidance in a variety of other contexts. Landlords can take advantage of that to establish a common interest with owner-occupiers in "improving property values" - often by legitimately socially beneficial means, making the area more desirable to live in - and then that existing political coalition is also leveraged to restrict housing supply.
Sabotaging some other community to drive property values down so you can afford a house there more easily would be more difficult (hard to influence policy in a place you don't live), likely involve doing things the locals don't like because they make the place less desirable to live in (thus provoking resistance, and defeating the point of you wanting to buy a house there in the first place), and is generally too Machiavellian for most people to think of.
Capitalists that specialize in owning and operating housing have a mixed interest here - they want more opportunities to own and operate more housing, but they want their competitors not to do so. It’s exactly the same situation as owners of shoe factories or massage parlors or whatever - they have an incentive to expand their own production but also want to cut competitors.
*"You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people! You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real! You should believe that people experience auras - see eg Paranormal Misinterpretations Of Vision Phenomena, Colored Halos Around Faces And Emotion-Evoked Colors: A New Form Of Synesthesia (note first author!), the many stories of people seeing auras while on drugs, and my own Lots Of People Going Around With Mild Hallucinations All The Time! You should believe that people experience John Edwards - I think my parents voted for him in 2004!
I’m just not really in the business of coming up with convoluted explanations for why everyone who reports weird mental experiences must be lying in order to sound “quirky""*
I'm not sure how you read me as contradicting that.
My problem isn't that people who want emotional support animals are *lying*, exactly - I maybe made fun of the person with the snake, but probably she does feel better in some vague way when her snake is around.
My problem is that I am being asked to place them in a special class of people who get more rights than other people, whereas in fact they're just reporting the normal experience of having a pet (that it makes them feel better). This special class is supposed to outweigh other people's rights (eg the right of someone who doesn't want their neighbor to have a dog) and I don't feel like the process establishes that. You can imagine (as Scott Aaronson mentioned below) an equal and opposite process where someone certifies the neighbor as being "genuinely" "phobic" of dogs and therefore having a special right *not* to have dogs near them. Both could be true! But right now we interpret one person's desire for a dog as special, and the other person's desire to avoid dogs as non-special, and I'm asked to be complicit in that determination.
See also my last few paragraphs:
"Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.
But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.
I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever."
I agree that most everybody loves and enjoys their pets, and overall feels better because they have them. But if some mentally ill person has a terrible time loving and enjoying anything *but* their pet, and feel miserable most of the time except when they are with their pet -- then their situation seems importantly different to me. Analogous situation: Everybody enjoys eating, but somebody malnourished and underfed needs that food in a different and larger way from regular well-fed people.
I'm not convinced ESA standards are that high. Certainly I don't think they're that high as enforced. Maybe this is my fault for enforcing them poorly, but I think my experience is typical, and inevitable given the system.
Knowing several landlords and having listened to one of them complain about this literally a few days ago, I suspect your experience is indeed typical.
No, I agree that in general therapists will write letters for people who are not that bad off. I happen to see a lot of people who especially bad off because McLean Hospital's a referral source. But my observation is that pets do most people a lot of good. They're sort of in the same category as exercise in my mind -- something that helps most problems. Here are 2 stories from the last year of patients of mine who have never been hospitalized, and have benefitted greatly from animals they adopted:
A young guy with a work-from-home tech job was spending many hours a day on porn sites, smoking weed while doing it to intensity his experience. He had been the friendless, smart, weird guy fro 1st grade all the way through high school, then began doing a better in college -- had a couple girlfriends, a small friend group -- then became isolated again after college. He surprised me a couple months ago by announcing that he had adopted a kitten. Has seemed markedly better since then. Showed actual emotion when his cat was sick for a few days. Reported that he was spending way less time online, and only masturbating once a day instead of 3x, because his kitten demanded lots of attention. Enjoys playing with the kitten with his housemates. Overall seems less unhappy and more optimistic.
A middle-aged man who has lived through several sieges of panic disorder and OCD, now chronically depressed and anergic, one of the worst couch potatoes I've even seen in several decades of seeing avoidant people, decided to adopt a puppy. It was entirely his idea. He researched breeds online very carefully, as is his way, and bought a beautful little purebred pup. Had a big crisis in the first month because she disrupted his sleep, needed attention and activity all the time, and posed problems he was not able to solve. (One of the things that keeps him avoidant is the belief when he cannot do a difficult task that it's his own damn fault and a demonstration of how incompetent he is.) He was convinced life with the pup would never get better and yearned to give her back to the breeder, but could not bear the thought of how sad she would be if he abandoned her. So then he turned a corner and instead of sitting on the couch trying to figure out whether he could stand to deal with the puppy, he started "throwing things at the wall" -- just trying everything he could think of to keep her happy and occupied more of the time, and to get her to sleep thorugh the night. Some of them worked. She is now past the super-needy stage, and he really has extracted some great lessons from his experience, and that's what he's talking about now: Things that seem impossible to him aren't necessarily really impossible. Ya gotta keep throwing things at the wall til something sticks. Oh year, lovely bonus: My patient is I think dyspraxic -- has poor motor coordination. As a child he was not able to run -- the closest he could come was a weird-looking super-fast walk with stiff legs, body bent forward. And of course the other kids mocked him terribly for that. So the dog breed he got is one often trained for dog agility contests, where dogs do a timed run through an obstacle course. He's found someone near him who runs classes in training your dog for agility contests, and is going to enroll when his pup's old enough.
Neither of these people live in a place where they needed at ESA to have a pet, by the way. They're just striking examples of how much difference a pet can make. and yes it's an N of 2 (though I could definitely give you a higher n if we both had more time)
What if I pick an apartment because I know the building does not allow pets and I have a very strong dog hair allergy and therefore want to make sure that I'm not exposed to dogs?
What if I pick an apartment specifically because I'm a very light sleeper and dogs barking at night in the apartment next door is something I really want to avoid?
But then someone gets approval to override the building regulations and moves in next door. Then what? They get what they want and I'm out of luck. So there are consequences. Just not to the psychiatrist and not to the pet owner, so they are very easy to ignore and just say "haters gonna hate" or whatever.
Yeah, pretty much. What ends up happening is probably that people who say "no pets means no pets" eventually get mad and organized enough to fight back, and the pendulum swings back until such a time where the "I need my ESA" crowd becomes sympathetic enough again.
Those are the genuine people, though. The racket part comes in where it's a woman with her stupid little yappy dog that she fakes up the ESA thing for, because she wants to bring it everywhere with her - not because she's emotionally dependent on it but because she doesn't want to spend the money on a dog-walker or inconvenience herself.
Those are the ones that impinge on "person who dislikes dogs" and "person who really does need their pet as their sole companion" alike, and make it worse for everyone.
Yes, I know. But there are always people who take advantage of special allowances intended for people with genuine need. I have written I believe 3 support animal letters, all in the last few years after they became a thing. Two were for people who genuinely fit the profile of someone who benefits greatly from having a pet. The third was for someone who is doing fine in life, but seeing me to discuss a very difficult situation in his family of origin. He is a kind and considerate person, if anything *too* worried about bothering other people, and if a neighbor told him his cats were activating the neighbor's allergies he would buy an air purifier or even get his parents to take his cats for him.
If an inconsiderate person with a yappy dog wanted an emotional support animal letter I would not write her one. I would tell her her dog didn't qualify as an ESA and also that I thought she would bring lots of hassle down on herself if she took that dog to a place reluctant to have one.
"My problem is that I am being asked to place them in a special class of people who get more rights than other people, whereas in fact they're just reporting the normal experience of having a pet (that it makes them feel better)."
This is how I feel about religious freedom law. Like, I totally respect the person who thinks they have to do or not do XYZ because of their religion and their employer should accommodate that. But why should that person get more rights than the person who thinks they have to do or not do XYZ because of a personal non-religious belief? (And yes, I know in some circumstances people can argue that their non-religious beliefs should get accommodation similar to religious beliefs, but de facto it's gonna be a lot harder for the non-religious person.) The religious person gets more rights because it's Certified Religion, when in fact they just have beliefs and practices and scruples as we all do.
I don't think there's anything to feel bad about - it's inherent in the accommodation process that people with disabilities are going to get accommodations that other people don't.
So if I don't feel like walking up a flight of stairs, I can't get a ramp or an elevator. But for someone in a wheelchair, they can demand (and get) an accommodation. That's an unavoidable consequence of giving any accommodations to anyone with a disability.
The alternatives (no accommodations, or everyone can request an accommodation, even without a disability) aren't particularly tempting. There's an element of unfairness in giving only disabled people accommodations, but there's a pretty big amount of unfairness in anyone having a disability in the first place.
I think the situation is much worse than you describe, because what about people (like my daughter) who are terrified of dogs and only feel emotionally safe when dogs are *not* present? In the past, such people could feel safe in dog-free apartment buildings and airports and so on, where the only dogs were highly-trained Seeing Eye dogs and the like. But today the emotional support animal racket that you describe has made a mockery of no-dog policies and left almost no guaranteed-to-be-dog-free spaces anywhere, other than one’s own home. In the future, will people like my daughter be able to get their own psychiatrist letters that counteract or neutralize the emotional support animal letters?
But animal phobias are very treatable. The people I've written emotional support animal letters for (I'm a psychologist) have mostly been isolated people with chronic, painful mental illness that can be sort of ameliorated but not cured. Unless your daughter has other problems besides a dog phobia, the weight of misery these people are walking around with far exceeds what your daughter suffers even on days when she encounters dogs.
But the two preferences don't have to trade off against each other. We could have both buildings that allow dogs, and ones that don't, if enough people have strong enough preferences for each to offset the friction costs. Then someone who really benefits from a dog could go live in a place that allows them, and someone who doesn't want to be around dogs could go live in a place that bans them. Except that can't work if the law says that *all* places must allow ESAs.
The moral system implied here horrifies me. Even granting that the people who want ESAs get more benefit from them than they cause harm to others, that's obviously not enough reason to force landlords to allow them.
For one thing, pace experts such as yourself, there's no real way to quantify the amount of benefit someone gets from having a pet, nor the cost it imposes on others. If your pet ameliorates your incurable illness by 10%, but necessitates that I go through the trouble of curing my dog phobia, who is to say that this is a net benefit? Apples to oranges.
Second, and more importantly, the existence of a net benefit from ESAs doesn't prove it's a good policy. It's possible that there are alternative ways for you to ameliorate your suffering, besides an ESA, which don't impose costs on others (therapy, hobbies, human connexion, etc.). People need to partially internalize the costs their actions impose on others so that they are motivated to choose the socially optimal coping tool. Making it inconvenient or more expensive to have an ESA is certainly a way of doing that.
How's this for a moral system: People with dog phobias should get treatment for them, the same way we'd expect someone with nearsightedness to buy glasses?
But there are perfectly rational reasons for kids to fear swings and slides and bicycles too. It is possible on each of them to get quite a bad injury, and small painful injuries are virtually guaranteed. We are wired to sense the danger of height and rapid motion. I think we're probably also wired to fear large animals. And in fact virtually all phobias are of things with a real element of danger to them. I have treated people whose lives were severely restricted by phobias or OCD's where the feared thing was germs, chemicals, doing something that would make peers despise you, being killed in a plane crash, running over pedestrians, poisoning your wife with household chemicals, setting the house on fire. None of these fears are utterly irrational. The irrational part is that the person is seized by a conviction that these things are going to happen, whereas all are in fact unlikely, especially if you exercise reasonable caution.
Absolutely! Things like cars, steep staircases, food that's been out of the fridge too long, slippery surfaces...
Or, less sarcastically, dogs have a well-documented history of reasons to fear them, yes, but dogs also have a well-documented history of reasons to be perfectly fine with them. Probably >99.9% of all dog-human interaction hours are pleasant.
The difference is that people who want to indulge in uncorrected nearsightedness have no trouble doing so in their own private spaces, whereas the legal situation discussed here seems to prevent people from creating certain kinds of private dog-free spaces.
Aside from the psychiatric endorsement of their feelings (which Scott makes clear is pretty perfunctory), the situation here can be summed up as, "I like having X, therefore my landlord must not be allowed to prevent me from having X on his property." Doesn't this prove way too much? Should listening to death metal at 100 dB in the middle of the night be legally protected if I can prove it makes my depression better? Bear in mind that the only conceivable standard of proof for this is "I consistently say and behave as if it does."
Actually, I recall at least one of the 3 I have written letters for fretting out loud to me about whether it was legit to ask for. *They* raised the exact point Scott did : after all, everybody is fond of their pets. Did they have more right than others to having one? Real people who are members of groups you think are ripping you off do not necessarily behave the way they do in your fevered, angry imaginings.
I'm not speaking up in favor of forcing landlords to allow them. I'm explaining why it's not nonsense to take seriously the importance of pets to isolated, suffering people. I thought Scott Aaronson's example of a reason to object to having dogs in the building was a weak argument: animal phobias are very treatable, and anyhow dogs are everywhere -- in the park, getting walked down the sidewalk, tied to signposts outside Starbucks, sticking their heads out of passing cars, in some stores. I doubt that having a dog living in her building would add much to the tally of dog encounters Aaronson's daughter has. On the other hand, a dog that barks a lot is a pretty unpleasant stressor for everybody living near the apartment it's in, and that's not a weak argu,emnt. And a lot of people are allergic to cats. (I don't know whether having a cat in the apt next door dooms the allergic person to breathing enough cat dander to react. If it does, I also think that's a situation where an animal seriously affects their welfare.0
I suppose I don't think landlords should be forced to accept pets. Or, if they're forced, what if they were allowed to put a clause in the lease that gives them the right to demand that the tenant leave or give up their pet if it makes a nuisance of itself in any of various specified ways. And/or landlords could have the right to demand an extra bit of security deposit in case the animal damages the apartment, which some do. (I have gotten several no-pets landlords to accept me with cats by offering to give then an extra "pet security" deposit.) My own experience living in rentals is that pets would have been the least of the problems I had with the place even if I hated the sight and sound of pets. The biggest problems were generally other people: noisy tenants and landlords who did nothing about plumbing problems, impossible-to-open windows, etc. unless you used a crowbar to get them off their couch.
Like most other people in this rather ugly, polarized discussion you have lost track of the fact that I am not speaking in favor of making you, the landlords and everyone else bow down and let people with an ESA do whatever they please to you -- scare you with their pit bill, make your allergies worse, keep you up all night by leaving their dog alone and barking while they're out drinking or whatever. I have said multiple times that I understand there are competing interests here, and that being kept awake by a barking dog or having an asthma attack is a serious problem. I don't think it's right to just impose harms like that on other people. Seems approximately as bad as depriving an impaired, sick person of the comfort of a pet. I don't know what's a good solution. Best I can think of is permitting landlords to oust people's pets if they are a significant nuisance to people in the building, and/or requiring people who bring pets to pay an extra deposit, a pet deposit, which they will lose if their pet is a problem.
So the point I have been arguing is just that pets really do make a difference to chronically ill, isolated people in a way they do not for ordinary pet owners. And I did think Aaronson's objection was weak, so I pointed that out. All arrangements for people with
with a special needs have some people who do not have the need taking advantage of them. If you can find a way to cut down on that, fine. If you can't, and want to outlaw any sort of compromise arrangement that allows some people to have pets, OK then, but do it knowing that you really are taking away comfort from people who are in bad shape. No, stuffed animals and video games are not an adequate substitute.
I feel quite irritated at you and everyone else who is discharging their righteous indignation at me ("I am horrified by this moral arrangement") as though I am in favor of everything they are against: Stoopit woke policies, pointless systems for authorizing something that accomplish nothing, forcing people who are considerate and hard working to suffer indignities and discomforts for the sake of people who are not. I am fighting hard not to just write you off as a meanspirited asshole. That's not because of your beliefs, it's because you didn't pay attention to what I was saying, but reacted to a caricatured version that you built. This is how discussions fail.
Fair enough. My expression of "horror" was inflammatory and unnecessary. I'm sorry I irritated you!
I was responding to the particular comment you made in response to Scott Aaronson, which did not contain the qualifiers you've made here. I'll grant your position is more nuanced than was apparent just from that comment.
But I do think there is a real disagreement here, not just a misunderstanding. The issue is not whether people should be allowed to have pets. No matter what the law says about ESAs, many landlords will permit them, because renters with animals are a large group of potential customers. A quick internet search and review of a variety of sources suggests that at least half of all landlords permit pets in some fashion. I don't think there are major obstacles to renting and having some common kinds of pets (e.g. small dogs and cats). Some pets might be excluded much more often (e.g. loud or large dogs), but if the point of having the ESA is therapy, you should probably choose one that doesn't happen to have other undesirable characteristics.
Rather, the question is whether certain people derive a special and larger kind of benefit from their pets that overrides the right of an owner of a building (or airplane, or anything else) to exclude their pets.
I agree with you that dog phobia is not itself an important consideration. It's just a special, medicalized case of the general fact that my keeping a dog in an apartment building might bother my neighbors, possibly quite a lot. If you grant that my special need for a dog overrides my landlord's rights to exclude, I don't see how you can avoid opening the door to all manner of "needs" that renters might have, including the "need" to not be around a dog. There just isn't any good test to distinguish one person's "real" emotional needs related to a mental disorder from another person's mere preferences, or to rank them in order of importance. I don't think relative curability is a good test.
I totally agree that ESAs are very important to some people. I just don't see how that's categorically different from any number of human preferences which we could consider requiring landlords to accomodate.
I think the solution most consistent with a free society is to let people manage their own lives and property, with the result usually being about the best balancing of everybody's conflicting desires we can reasonably hope for. It is not the case that all needs require legal protection. Most needs are naturally met by voluntary arrangements in a free society.
I feel like the bigger issue is that “phobias are treatable” is too convenient: it erases the need to consider the perspective of a large class of people. Similar to saying: “everyone who is uncomfortable around any animal for any reason: get over it.” This sort of argument becomes common when people want to treat an issue as simple, and they are made uncomfortable by evidence that the path forward is morally ambiguous.
Yeah but that ain't what I said. I said *animal* phobias are *easily* treatable, and that in most cases professional help was not required. I added that parents can usually do it on their own with a little guidance from sources online. All phobias are treatable, in theory, but some are not a bit easy to treat. And in fact pretty much all illnesses are *treatable* in that there exist things that at least make the illness better for at least some people with it. It would be dumb and unfair to claim, for all illnesses set off by animals (for ex. asthma, which can kill the person who has it, or sleep deprivation because the animal barks all night) that they are treatable, therefore the person who has the illness should get treatment for it rather than objecting to having animals in their building. But that's not what I said. My point was that a child's animal phobia was not a strong reason for demanding that the child not have to live in a building with animals. But I also said elsewhere that other, worse, problems living with animals, such as asthma or being kept awake half the night by barking, were a strong reason for sparing someone the problem of living with an animal. I have no problem seeing the moral ambiguity here. What has happened is not that I simplified the situation to get rid of ambiguity, but that you simplified what I said so you could comfortable decide I'm wrong.
A lot of us have already decided that landlords are bad actors on society. So in our view it's no more immoral to closely regulate landlords than to regulate bookies, pimps or drug dealers.
Fair enough. But I think part of the case here is that not just landlords are adversely impacted by mandatory allowance of animals, but also other tenants.
Separately, the view that landlords are bad as a class doesn't quite seem analogous to the examples you gave. I think the mainstream view is that gambling, prostitution, and drug use are vices that the world would be better off without. Do you think that renting living space is a vice that the world would be better off without? That strikes me as a very odd view. There are times in most of our lives where renting is clearly preferable to owning, for many different reasons. It doesn't seem inherently vicious.
Private, for-profit landlords? Absolutely I want to see them gone. We don't need them. They are leeches. But actually no, in 2024 you can't take it as a given that most people want to eliminate gambling and prostitution. At last count, online sports betting was legal in 38 states.
My point isn't about private landlords vs. public, only that renting itself isn't a vice, whereas the other examples you gave are considered inherently vicious by many people, which is why they have historically been illegal.
I agree legalized gambling, prostitution, and drugs are increasingly popular, but that seems to prove my point, not yours. I favor all these things being deregulated. You seemed to be saying it was reasonable to regulate housing rental like we regulate those other things, but if we're moving as a society toward deregulating them, why would we be moving in the opposite direction on renting if you think it's a similar activity?
The weight of misery of living in a low-trust, dog-eat-dog society where everyone is forced to damage their souls (as Scott so eloquently says) far exceeds the benefits of ESA.
If having to write ESA letters & similar is the worst thing that happens to Scott, he's a lucky man, and I think he'd probably agree with that statement. What most mental health professionals fear most is having a patient commit suicide under circumstances that make them think they should have seen it coming. Next is patients going off the rails in some other godawful way that they feel they should have foreseen. Next is the professional discovering that he or she is incompetent. And then there's non-medical-professional life, where one's soul is damaged by being doxxed, by being publicly misperceived and attacked, by ending up in a situation where you have to choose between 2 things you think are both morally wrong, etc etc. Then there's the inevitable misery of the loss of parents and friends, and of course the dread of having one's children die.
And if the worst thing you have to do, Vitor, is something on the order of making a decision inside the framework of a stupid bureaucratic rule that forces you to choose between 2 lousy alternatives, you too are a lucky man. If that's enough to damage your soul you're a goner anyhow.
When you say they're very treatable, you assume that the person has money, time, and insurance to see a psychologist. How about instead we don't force them to live with a biting predator in the same building? I would also hardly call "I don't want to live in a building where I might encounter biting predators in the hallway" a mental quirk that needs to be treated.
Parents can usually treat pet phobias themselves. There are lots of online resources explaining a simple approach to doing it. As for calling a dog a biting predator -- come on! I absolutely agree that people who have dogs that bite or even just lunge forward snarling should not be allowed to bring the things into any setting where they might hurt other people: not apartment buildings, not stores, not parks, etc. But calling a dog a biting predator is like calling a car a child-crushing machine, a bike or a slide or a swing an armbreaker, a peanut or a bee a breath-stopper, a flight of stairs a coma-slope.
I'd say that 10% is about what I observe. So if I pass by 100 dogs this month, 10 will be trying to make some kind of contact with me. Zero will succeed if they are on a leash and I pay attention to how long their leash is and steer clear of them ( dogs have to be leashed outside where I live except specified dog parks). Based on my experience in places where dogs are not leashed, I'd say 7 of the lungers have clearly friendly intent, as evidenced by dog smiles, wagging tails and friendly licking once they have their front paws planted on me. (I don't much like dog's doing that, though. They get mud on me, and I feel sort of hassled and coerced.) The other 3 lungers were unfriendly but trying to scare me off with loud woofs and a lunge, not to bite. I have never been bitten by a dog, and grew up owning a dog and playing with all the neighborhood dogs, who roamed around unleashed all day. I'm fond of dogs and these days sometimes hang out in a dog park where they are off leash, and often pet strangers' dogs if the stranger's OK with it. But I'm decently able to read dogs, and also ask their owner if the dog's OK withbeing petting.. I can't even think of a time when I've seen someone bitten by a dog. But yes, of course it does happen.
On the other hand, in the 3 or so years when my daughter loved going to playgrounds, I saw at least a dozen incidents where a fall of some kind drew blood, and thousands of incidents where kids were distressed enough by something or other to cry. Also saw an adolescent fall off a swing and dislocate his shoulder.
As for the other dangers: Teen son of a friend of mine was hit by a car when he was on his bike. Flew quite a ways through the air but landed well and had no serious injury. Another friend has a son with a peanut allergy, and he once ended up in the ER because a baby sitter gave him something they did not realize was a risk. An adult friend went into anaphylactic shock after she was stung by a bee. She had not known she was allergic to them. A young adult I know just broke her tailbone by falling on the stairs. Oh yeah, let me add my own bike experience: I get around mostly by bike, biking to work and to the grocery store. Last year I had 2 falls: Once when I was riding in slush, which was not a bit slippery -- then I hit a frozen patch. The other time someone putting their trash out on the street did not see me and pushed his can right into my path. I slammed on the brakes so hard I lost my balance and fell over. Got off with just a couple scrapes each time.
So it seems to me that you have some selective attention going on..
Indeed, when I was very small, my parents visited a house with a very large, very friendly dog. It must have been taller than I was, and I was terrified of its attempts to be friendly - and this turned into a fear of all dogs. My mum recognised this was going to be a problem, made some enquiries, and found a nice blind man with a very well trained guide dog who I could make friends with at my own pace (she was a huge Alsation named Dorrit - one of my earliest memories). I haven't been afraid of dogs since then, and I am very grateful to my mum for taking that experience seriously and doing something about it.
There is no such thing as an irrational fear of something with a long, well-documented history of perfectly rational reasons to fear them. Such as just-barely domesticated wolves that kill tens of thousands of people per year.
30 to 50 dog bite deaths in the United States annually, with similar numbers in the developed world. Bob is showing how you can use true statistics to mislead and obfuscate.
Yes, I would be afraid if I knew that someone had a barely-domesticated wolf or cougar or such. However, I have never seen someone out in public with an animal like that. And it seems like there are simple ways to make sure a semi-domesticated wolf does not make it into an apartment complex. The landlords can and in fact should be asking for proof that the animal has a rabies injection. In my state "wolfdogs" are illegal -- I just looked it up. Presumably vets, who would be giving the rabies shots, have to report them, and they would be taken from their owners. Or landlords could require a letter from a vet stating that they have examined the animal and it is a normal, domesticated pet and gave no signs of aggressiveness.
Your scary stats do not apply to the US. Just looked up how many die from dog attacks here, and it's 30-50. I don't know whether any of those involve "wolf dogs." 35,000 per year die in auto accidents. Your risks from driving are 1000 times as great as your risk from dogs. Get outta that CAR, man! It's rational to avoid them, and also pedestrians have a right not to live in fear. Let's take the cars off the road.
I don't much like dogs. I have a dog (inherited) that I very much dislike for several reasons. I agree the pit bulls are dangerous and should be phased out asap. And I am one of the people who dislike the widespread overuse of the emotional support animal system.
But your statement is *extreme* hyperbole. My apologies if you are genuinely dog phobic, but it's offensively out of line with reality.
The dog has been domesticated for many tens of thousands of years. The dog is genetically distinct from the wolf, and its characteristics are basically those of a neotenous wolf. The vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of human-dog interaction is safe. 30 to 50 people a year die in the United States from dog attacks, it's mostly one or two breeds, and anyway that's about the same as the number of *lightning strike deaths*. We are talking "struck by lightning" levels of danger.
I don't *care* if it's tens of thousands of dog-related deaths world wide. Those are other, wilder dogs, not the dogs you are encountering in the first world, and it's statistical malfeasance against yourself or others if you insist on the global statistic instead of the one that actually applies to you.
Then why are they still able to interbreed to this day?
> 30 to 50 people a year die in the United States from dog attacks, it's mostly one or two breeds, and anyway that's about the same as the number of *lightning strike deaths*. We are talking "struck by lightning" levels of danger.
This is largely due to our advanced medical infrastructure being pretty good at treating victims of dog attacks. In other parts of the world, it's not such a rosy picture, and dogs kill around 25,000 people per year.
> it's statistical malfeasance against yourself or others if you insist on the global statistic instead of the one that actually applies to you.
Why shouldn't it apply to me? I haven't spent my entire life in the USA. I've traveled, and even spent significant amounts of time living in places where breeds of dogs that are illegal here are relatively common. And so have plenty of other Americans.
>Then why are they still able to interbreed to this day?
They're not. A select subgroup of dogs at the far wolfish edge of dogdom is able to interbreed with wolves. Think of dogs and wolves as a pair of genetic bell curves, far apart and getting further, where a few percent of dogs overlap wolves well enough to interbreed successfully.
>This is largely due to our advanced medical infrastructure being pretty good at treating victims of dog attacks. In other parts of the world, it's not such a rosy picture, and dogs kill around 25,000 people per year.
That's pure speculation. What if I said it was because other places have substantial populations of wild dogs, as well as wilder breeds, as well as cultures of letting domesticated dogs roam free, whereas we have leashes and other behavior controls?
>Why shouldn't it apply to me? I haven't spent my entire life in the USA
Neither have I, but I take care to adjust my fears to fit the circumstances. I would not pet a random dog in Nicaragua. I would pet a random dog in the US, UK, Canada or Germany and fully expect it to be a good encounter, and the statistics are very clear that I would be in the right.
You're basically saying "I lived in South Africa for three months, there's so much murder there, I have every right to an intense fear of murder while I'm living in Austin, and I *will* continue to speak of the global murder rate rather than the local".
This do not match all I have seen regarding canis lupus subspecies.
AFAIK (not a professional, but zoology and population genetics are among my interests so I have more than casual knowledge on this), you can not distinguish dogs from wolves, apart from dogs being pets.
Defining subspecies is tricky (species are tricky already, but you have a somewhat clear cut interbreeding test), they are largely a matter of convenience anyway and it's legally and culturally interesting to sort domestic wolves from wild wolves.
There are a few wolf subspecies, a lot more dogs subspecies (because we care more about fine subdivisions in our pets than wild populations, and because human selection created more phenotypical variation), but I do not see how you can split wolves subspecies from dogs subspecies using only biological data in a coherent way (1 cluster including wolves only, another dogs only).
And, appart from size issue and behavioral issue, dogs and wolves will interbreed, it's the rule rather than the exception. Not always in the wild, there would be a need for human intervention, but that's also the case between dog subspecies (a chihuahua will not interbreed with a great dane) or wolves (because they are to far in term of geography and venturing in a new pack will not necessarily work anyway. So no, dogs and wolves are a single species, with multiple subspecies, even if it's not politically correct to say so... Like humans, even if it's not politically correct to say so exactly for the opposite reason.
Sorry, but I simply _don't believe you_. There is absolutely no incentive for your patient to say "yeah, I'd probably be ok without this animal going with me everywhere." There is every incentive for them to act like a utility monster, pretending that their suffering without their pet is unimaginable, so they can shift their costs onto random strangers that they don't care about.
And, anecdotally, every example I've seen in real life of an ESA has been somebody obviously abusing a system (that has no safeguards against abuse) to bring favored pets into an area that they're not supposed to go. In contrast, I know multiple people with crippling animal phobias, who would - quite literally - choose DEATH over close contact with them. The fact that you claim that the former are the ones with "serious mental illness" and the latter are whiners who just need a bit of therapy ... that does not at all describe the world that I live in.
* I said a bunch of things. Which are the ones you don't believe me about?
*I did not say or imply that people with animal phobias have serious mental illness. In fact a said that animal phobias are easily cured, usually without the help of a professional.
*You are right that there is no incentive for my patient to say "yeah, I'd be OK without this animal going everywhere with me." And I did not say or imply there was an incentive for people to be honest. or that all people getting the ESA's really need them. But (a) people with painful mental illnesses are no likelier than other people to be lying selfish pieces of shit and (b) in any case my letter would not enable them to take their animal anywhere except into their home -- not into stores, restaurants, etc.
*I dunno how many examples of mentally ill people with ESAs you have seen. I have observed and had substantial talks with perhaps 1000 people with serious mental illness, maybe 200 of whom have been patients I have spent many hours with. I'm pretty sure my N's a lot bigger than yours.
Except for the above inaccuracies you make some great points
Well, that's the point, as far as I can tell I've seen zero examples of actual "mentally ill" people with ESAs. All the ones I've encountered in real life have been, pretty clearly, abusers of the system. (Of course, I'm not a psychologist, I can't diagnose them or their complex internal life, maybe they're truly suffering greatly and only present as selfish manipulators, etc. etc.) I did say it was anecdotal! But, for now, I'm going to trust my lying eyes that the people you describe, the truly mentally ill for whom there is no possible solution except to abrogate the right-to-exist-in-an-animal-free-space of everyone else, don't exist in large numbers.
Go for it, SnapDragon! There are many benefits to staying ignorant of the facts about people with. mental illness. If you think they can't go more than 30 mins without doing something bizarre like talking to the salt shaker or masturbating in public then you can feel confident that anyone who has an ESA and isn't jerking off in Starbux or screaming about Martians is a lying piece of shit, and the whole situation will suit you by being simple. And if you think they are all lying pieces of shit who will say anything to get what they want then you are very well protected from painful thoughts about what life's like for them. If you think none of them get much-needed comfort from animal companionship you needn't feel bad about your eat-shit-and-die reaction to ESA's.
The natural next step is for psychiatrist letters to come with ratings indicating how much the person is benefited or harmed by the presence of certain animals so that whoever's psychiatrist letter has the highest rating in a given situation overrules everyone else.
Then there will be a mad rush of people competing with each other to persuade or bribe their psychiatrists into giving them the highest rated letters possible, and whoever does hold the highest rated letter among all will become the king (or queen) of pets, able to legally summon or banish any animal to or from their sensory sphere at any time. It will be wondrous and absurd.
...Or we could just have a healthy number of housing and other options with consistently applied rules allowing or disallowing certain pets, so that these conflicts of interest don't happen so easily. So many problems could be solved if there were just more places for different people with different needs. I personally would join your daughter in no-dogs-allowed-anywhere village while all the dog people could live in dogs-allowed-everywhere village.
> So many problems could be solved if there were just more places for different people with different needs. I personally would join your daughter in no-dogs-allowed-anywhere village while all the dog people could live in dogs-allowed-everywhere village.
Unfortunately, that wouldn’t solve the problem of people who get much-needed comfort only from bringing dogs to no-dogs-allowed-anywhere village.
They say freedom of speech is the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear. It can be easily extrapolated to conclude pet freedom is the freedom to carry pets where they are not wanted. The more you can tyrannize others, the freer you are.
The distant future techno-utopian solution is to kidnap those people and put them into a simulation without their knowledge where they can do that without bothering any real people. Your last paragraph is why I think maybe there should be separate words for freedom-to and freedom-from.
> In the past, such people could feel safe in dog-free apartment buildings and airports and so on, where the only dogs were highly-trained Seeing Eye dogs and the like.
Didn’t we all use to get told that we totally must not fear that dog bigger than us, who can casually bite our head off for a snack any time it feels like it, and that if that happens, it’ll be solely our fault, since dogs sense our fear and can’t help preying on those afraid of them?
At the end of the day, everyone has to learn that others will take every opportunity to shake off their responsibilities at their expense, and that every weakness is an exploit waiting to happen.
Yes, I am indeed telling you that it's solely your fault. Get help. It's your responsibility to learn to co-exist with animals and if you can't, well, I guess that's tragic in a cosmic sense but it's a Your Problem, not a My Problem.
What's this “any animal” BS? We're taking about dogs, man's best friend. That's the crux of the disagreement. Anyone trying to convince me dogs are semi-wild dangerous animals might as well be telling me the moon is green cheese. Its nonsense.
You did say "co-exist with animals" not "co-exist with dogs". Trying to pull a little motte-and-bailey here? Seems untenable.
Regardless, Caperu's experience is not unique. I personally escaped mauling once only by sprinting very fast; the dog later mauled another person. To the local authorities' credit, the dog was put down, but that won't un-maul that poor woman.
AI art is really good! I can't understand the people who hate it - I mean, I understand they're sad that artists are losing jobs, I just can't understand the people who call it "slop" or whatever.
As someone who dabbles in AI art generation as a hobby, most people use it to make garbage. Without significant filtering the majority of stuff I see when browsing new models is porn. Also I feel kind of degraded after spending an hour digging through a github page to figure out how a regional prompt extension works and all of the tutorial images are prepubescent anime girls.
To me, beauty is about looking at something and liking how it looks. I can look at a landscape and not think: "Ugh, I hate how no one put any effort into this." but "this is nice". I don't think I'm the weird one, but these days, who knows.
I think I didn't make my point clearly. It's not about the number of human work hours it has taken to make a picture. It's more about the fact that, if it's real art, every little choice in it reflects the sensibility of a real person, and therefore, if I like it, I know I'm liking a person.
Also, it wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that very soon we won't be able to tell it apart from real art, therefore in practice we'll have to assume that any picture we see is AI made, which kills art as connection between us and the artist.
In my experience the way to tell is to look at the parts of the picture least relevant to the main subject, see whether they've got some consistent underlying concept to them, or are more like a pattern-filling, slightly-out-of-focus cliche.
Hm. For me, it's one thing when the art is made by someone I know. And it's a somewhat different thing when the art evokes in me a particular memory, like when a friend and I were wandering around a city and found an artist selling their work and got some. Those mean something **to me**. And I suppose sometimes I look at a piece of art (or listen, or read, or whatever) and it "speaks to me" in some way.
But to me, the vast majority of art out there is simply either enjoyable or not, beautiful or not, tasteful or not. AI art often distinguishes itself by a complete lack of taste such that I find it hard to believe that any human could produce it (but as you say, that's probably a temporary state). Otherwise I don't see much of a difference.
But I haven't reconciled this with your point about the possibility of finding out that this entire comment section was AI generated. That would indeed put me off of it. :-)
"We just need two different words for natural beauty and artistic beauty."
I don't.
"It gives me the creeps, because it's fake."
I cannot even begin to understand the thought process behind considering this more fake than any other picture of something that didn't happen. Also, why it really matters that much.
"- a person drew it and poured into it their own experience of hugging a pet."
... but what if the artist never poured into it their own experience of hugging a pet? I can draw plenty of things I have never experienced myself.
"I cannot even begin to understand the thought process behind considering this more fake than any other picture of something that didn't happen."
You and I don't experience art in the same way clearly. Your brain and mine are wired differently. If you cannot even begin to understand, clearly there's no way I can explain it to you.
"I can draw plenty of things I have never experienced myself."
It's unlikely you can draw well something human without drawing on your experience one way or another.
Another person in this thread used the word "soulless" to describe this art. That's the problem. It's soulless. That this word even exists, and is widely used in relation to art, suggest that many people are like me, and want artists to pour their human emotional experience into their art.
I'll just chime in and say I'm with Caba here, AI art always feels fundamentally off to me, no matter how apparently skillful it is, and while it's got something to do with knowing that a human put effort into something rather than entering some prompts and pressing a button, I feel it ultimately does come down to 'wired different'. There are some AI artists I like, and they're the ones who put time into trying different prompts and negative prompts at different strengths, reviewing the output and selecting for the best, etc. I don't like music that relies to much on sampling or most fanfiction, I suspect for the same reason: it all just feels recycled and parasitic.
Doesn't matter though. People like me have clearly already lost.
It's strange to me that someone could make AI art beautiful to you simply by telling you it's human-made, or conversely make human art not beautiful to you just by telling you it's AI-made.
It seems like a bias that only causes you harm. Had you never heard of AI (and thought all images were made by humans) you'd experience so much more beauty.
I'm not Christian, so maybe the analogy is somewhat lost on me. I don't really have an experience of a fictional character giving you gifts being more beautiful than your loving parents doing the same. But a continued belief in Santa is going to hurt you. What happens when your own children don't get gifts from Santa and you can only conclude they must have been naughty?
I don't see any harm in being able to appreciate the beauty in things not created by humans.
None of that is really my point though. I'm not saying it's better to believe false things if it makes the world more beautiful. I'm saying it seems like your perception is biased... false or illusory in a sense, and also harms you. The equivalent analogy would be if someone believed Santa was a demon who sucked the soul out of beautiful things and made art lifeless and unenjoyable anywhere Christmas is celebrated. You could be enjoying a beautiful Monet and this person could be looking at the same painting and saying that it just looks dead ever since Santa came.
Imagine you discover I'm a robot. Everyone here is a robot. There are no humans on this website. It's all generated by chatbots.
Would it bother you? Would you continue interacting with me in the same way?
What would happen is that, all of a sudden, the meaning of every comment here would change.
You might continue to interact, but it would feel different.
Imagine if at that point someone told you: but Michael, the sequence of letters on the screen is exactly the same. If you can't enjoy people's comments in the same way you used to just because you've been told they're written by robots instead of humans then your perception is... false and illusory and biased!
That is absolutely one beautiful thing about some art. But it is not the only beautiful thing about any art. Mondrian and Pollock diverge from this in different ways, as do many of the classic Great Masters who actually left most of the painting to the assistants in their workshops.
I agree with you, though. The essence of art is intent. Unless you're trying to say something specifically by using AI as a medium (the AI itself certainly has no autonomous intent, just yet) you're only using it as a one-armed bandit for illustration.
I get the complaint when it comes to the same artstyle being repeated endlessly, because that is just boring. But AI art is not just one artstyle, it's all of them if you want. My only guess is that your viewpoint comes from a lack of exposure. Most Ai Art generators have soft guardrails inbuilt so people can create nice looking pictures quickly with little effort. They all have similar looks though. If you however spend a little bit of time with the AI you can create all kinds of amazing pictures. If I only saw AI through the lens of quickly made reddit memes and fanart I would probably think all AI Art was the same slop as well, but I was on the AI Art Discords from the beginnings, and have seem some amazing, stunning, varied artwork. (And made some myself.) I think the whole thing tells one more about what kind of pictures end up being popular on social media sites. If you would have never seen any "human made" art apart from that you would think all human made art was soulless as well.
> How is a tool that produces all possible artstyles
...It really can't right now though. Most of the things these mainstream models produce has this weird, plastic sheen to them. It's like it's prioritizing for surface-level "polish" at the expense of everything else.
Midjourney is much better looking (but much worse at following prompts and certainly not cheaper), but Dalle-3, which is used for GPT-4, can also just be used for free with Bing, so it is indeed the best free one.
I heartily dislike the AI art I'm able to detect, including the piece on this post, which I rolled my eyes at before clicking through. There's a kind of inept, plastic-y quality to the lines, lighting, and many of the visual details that I find both unsettling and extremely tacky.
It's the visual equivalent of a turkey sandwich from an office park cafe which exists only to serve lunch to workers who don't have enough time to go somewhere else and must settle for an indifferent assembly of the cheapest pre-sliced deli meat, bread, and produce available for every-other-week delivery from a restaurant supply.
Edit: Although there's a certain specific quality to the ineptitude of AI-produced art that I can't quite describe. I can often see where inept human-produced art went wrong, but with AI-produced art, the *entire* image has gone (sometimes only subtly) wrong.
The art on this piece is good - the woman has the correct number of fingers on each hand! - and it doesn't have that surface shininess. It looks real enough. But it's probably produced by very high-quality AI. Most of the AI I see is the glossy fake stuff.
But once the technology progresses to the point that all AI art you see is indistinguishable from real art (and therefore you'll have to assume all art you see is AI)... will you stop disliking AI art?
I'm curious, because of all the people who commented on this thread, so far I'm the only one who has expressed a dislike of AI art regardless of whether it's ugly or pretty (in fact I dislike it even more if it's pretty, because the rise of pretty AI art makes it ever harder to know if a person made it). I want to know if the other people who have said they don't like AI art agree with me on this or not.
No, like CGI special effects in movies / TV, my objection isn't to the use of the technology itself, but to the noticeable ineptitude in rendering the final image.
I only loathe *inept* art. Before all of the inept AI art, my loathing was directed at *inept* CGI, which is CGI that calls attention to itself due to its lack of believable detail within the established physical mechanics of the story's universe.
For example, human-produced CGI is often unable to believably depict gravity in a setting of normal earth gravity. Way, way too often, objects (especially CGI replacements of human actors) don't have enough weight or force moving through normal-gravity space. I notice that, it pulls me out of the story, and it pisses me off.
But I'm not distracted and angered by the CGI that fools me! That's great CGI! I had no idea that so much of Top Gun Maveric was actually CGI until I saw the "'No CGI' is Invisible CGI" series on YouTube! Good for the Maverick CGI team!
I'm sure a non-zero number of AI images have already totaly fooled me the way good, *invisible* GCI has totally fooled me.
If it's good enough to *totally* fool me, I'm fine with it.
A couple years ago, a blog post like this would either have a bit of stock photo that someone searched for, or maybe even a stolen and copyrighted image, or no image. I don’t exactly know what to compare this to, but it’s like how there’s now music in restaurants and shops, some of which is infinitely annoying and some of which is quite pleasant, especially when you stop into a shop whose manager shares your musical taste.
Some of it is really bad, and when you've seen a lot of it (e.g. as used on the covers of Kindle books in a cheap-o series I'm currently consuming as brain popcorn), it's off-putting. A combination of surface slick glossiness with distorted expressions and, when you've seen enough of them, only a limited set of faces and facial expressions.
It's fake plastic trees. You see a bunch of artificial flowers, and you go "Oh, those are really life-like!" But then you see bunches and bunches of them for sale in the shop and, all together, the fakeness stands out.
As not much of an art person, AI art all looks kinda samey, like the average of a billion actual pieces of art. Because that's what it is.
I'm aware that it can do some neat tricks like "making a face appear when you squint at a normal-seeming picture" that are much harder for humans to pull off, and I guess you could call that a "style" (though then I think you have to consider the magic eye images from the 90s an "art style" too). But if so it's not a super interesting style to me.
Of course if you look at the details AI art falls apart almost instantly. Your image, for example, has one completely black pupil, weirdly regular skin shape on the dragon, weirdly smooth skin, hair, and shirt fabric, where wrinkles have been attempted they don't make any sense, focus that's inconsistent, a billion other things that should make your brain go "uh...this isn't right." And the dragon has an extra claw.
To be fair, if a human created a piece like that you could chalk that up to artistic intent or choice. I kind of hate the "human art is better because it has SOUL" thing, because while occasionally artists are challenging the status quo or whatever, most human art is meant to just be kind of nice to look at. Effort doesn't guarantee success and lack of effort doesn't guarantee failure. If this is nice to look at who cares? But I can't imagine how this uncanny valley nightmare is nice to look at? So we're left with "why was it made to look creepy and unnaturally regular? What is the experience we're supposed to be getting here?" And the answer is "oh right these are just artifacts from the generation process, it doesn't mean anything."
So if it's not a good recreation of the subject matter, and its artistic choices don't mean anything, then... why?
Surprised by your taste! AI-generated images can have different styles and some look good, but the ones you use don't: they look plasticky and awkward. I'm not sure if this is a function of the generator (and GPT-4 can only produce this style), or simply the default style and could be changed by tweaking the prompt.
I don't particularly mind the images: I'm aware that people click on posts more if there's an image; I certainly don't begrudge you wanting those clicks; if the images were actually unpleasant I'd block them on my end. In this context, I don't care what the image (if any) is.
In a context where I'm actually expected to look at the picture (e.g. to appreciate it as art), my reaction is strongly negative, and I think similar to what Caba describes below. This is worse when the image looks good: it's a more successful con. I keep thinking of that bit from _Blindsight_:
"The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception become apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack."
My reaction is far less negative, or even positive, when the image is intended to probe the behaviour of the image generator itself, or is a stupid joke — I know not to look for depth that's not here.
I tend to dislike it because people misuse it by using a vague prompt and taking whatever is generated. It seems like filler that's meant to break up text or have any image rather than an actual illustration.
I don't think that the AI image in this Nate Silver article about ballooning fast food prices adds anything. A stock photo of an old fast food menu (or a limited menu from Dick's Drive In or In-N-Out would illustrate what he was actually talking about.
Stock photos would also be called "slop" if they were used as carelessly as AI.
It falls into uncanny valley status for me. If you look at it enough there are certain tells and it just feels weird compared to art drawn by actual people.
Hayao Miyazaki once said (IIRC) that you shouldn't try to make a film for everyone. Human experience and thought is so diverse that a film for everyone would be a film for no one. That's why Miyazaki makes films primarily for himself.
AI art feels like it constantly tries to make art that everyone would like, with only a short prompt as a constraint. It feels like a Shoggoth threw together various things that humans are statistically predicted to respond positively to. It tries to wirehead the aesthetic part of one's brain, but isn't advanced enough to do it competently. That's part of why it's hated so much - the worst art is kitsch that doesn't appeal to you.
Yeah I usually go to the posts via email too. I've started making a point of checking out the pictures now though ever since some discussion a few weeks ago in the comments of another post.
I think this is the second time someone has said there’s an image on a post and I haven’t been able to figure out how to see it! I think this might be something that is only for the app, just as comment thread collapsing is only for people not on the app.
"Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier."
The other side of this is potential landlords who decide never to rent at all because they know they cannot effectively ban pets. Same goes for all the well-meaning laws that make it somewhere between difficult and impossible to evict bad tenants.
A while back I rented an apartment that was a small duplex sectioned off from the landlord's main house, where for $500/month we fit two adults, a baby, and a cat for several years. He was generally nice about it and we got along, but I could easily imagine small allowances adding up to discourage him from renting it out at all, and being forced to pay much more to a larger entity.
What then would the landlord do? Sell it? If to another landlord, then the buck is passed, and if to an individual, they can have a pet or not as they see fit.
Or, in the case of something like apartments, would the building then be torn down or left vacant?
What options would the landlord have if they decide not to lease it out because of not being able to ban pets?
Right now, so far as I can see with the housing shortage in Ireland, a lot of landlords *are* choosing to outright sell properties rather than continue to rent them out.
For institutional investors, I believe there was some advice about letting the units sit idle if they are in Rent Pressure Zones, where rent can only be increased by 2% per year, until prices go up high enough. If you're a big concern, letting some block of flats empty for a year or two years isn't going to hurt badly enough to force you to rent them out at a 'low' price when you anticipate the market rate going up.
I think in a situation where there is pressure on housing, "no pets or no home, you choose" is in the landlord's favour.
Which then means the Rent Pressure Zones have fewer apartments available to actually be lived in, thus increasing the pressure further. Point of a Georgist LVT would be to turn that sort of deliberate under-utilization of land into a bad investment, so institutional investors would stop doing it, and the space could actually be used for something productive.
That sounds like it would not improve the situation at all. At least int he current regime, the apartments come back online eventually. In your scenario they're gone forever. Of course, the whole problem is created by the "Rent Pressure Zone" legislation.
Why would they be gone forever? Institutional investors wouldn't be burning down the physical buildings out of spite, just selling to someone who was more interested in actually owning and using apartments than in low-effort ROI.
If they're renting out part of their house, they will simply not do that, and that section of house will remain empty. I have plenty of extra house and an extra bathroom, but would certainly not rent it out to a stranger under the current state of anti-landlord regulations.
Mao and Pol Pot enacted some dramatically darker regulations against landlords so maybe landlords today should count their blessings and be grateful they have what they do.
Reduced demand for rental properties means lower prices which means less incentive for real estate developers to go through zoning and environmental review and all the other barriers to building new housing. Ordinary supply and demand stuff.
More directly, I'm a single guy living in a 3 bedroom house in a college town. I considered renting out one of my rooms to make some extra money but unless it's someone I knew really well there's just too much risk, so that room just sits empty.
Even if the apartment allows companion animals, I know..people👀.. who have used ESA as a way to get out of pet rent and pet fees. I think I remember it being a way to also curtail breed restictions (ej pit bulls or large dogs).
Exactly. I had a prospective tenant (presenting with no mental problems other than a healthy sense of entitlement) who showed me her internet ESA letter and told me that she could make me accept her dog and not charge her pet rent. This in an apartment with carpets that have been maintained free of pet dander because there are *humans* who have asthma and allergies.
I second the comment by Nebu Pookins about the damage that this schnookery does to blind people who really need their guide dogs.
How about requiring proof of insurance for all support animals? Guide dogs would be cheap, they have papers. Getting State Farm to cover your ESA pit bull with no training? Not so cheap
I think you could be sued for that. You could definitely be sued if your tenant found this comment and presented it in court as evidence that you were evicting them on purpose.
For the record, I suspect Melvin is a troll account, going by the number of deliberately provocative posts like this / generally being awful. They have expertly pushed my buttons before, but having seen the pattern I no longer react.
I'm certainly not a troll account in the sense of posting things that I don't actually believe. But I admit I gain more pleasure from posting my opinions that I know some people will strongly object to than my most unobjectionable of opinions. There's not much point in posting something unless someone is going to disagree.
You could be, but the risk is worth it. The reality is that connecting a landlord to their ACT account is pretty difficult.
I am an actual, real-life landlord, and yes, if I get an applicant who presents me an ESA letter, I find a reason to reject their application. If I have an existing tenant who presents me a letter, I decline to renew their lease or take the next opportunity to raise the rent to whatever rent I think they won’t tolerate. I do whatever is legal to remove them and I make it clear ahead of time (as much as I can) that this is exactly what I will do.
I don’t do this for spite. I like animals.
1) Allowing one ESA opens the floodgates. In my multi-unit properties, one tenant having a cat means in six months the property has a cat, two pits and a chihuahua.
2) It’s an open door to tenant conflict. Many tenants signed their leases believing that I barred pets. They are understandably frustrated and disappointed if they believed their home was a refuge from barking, dander, potential violence, etc. You cannot possibly pay me enough to stay awake nights fielding phone calls about barking, and the cops will only do so much, which is very little.
3) There is no deposit which can ameliorate the damages. Just the dog nails on the flooring and sills alone will eat an entire deposit. If the tenant does not trim their nails (and they never do) then the flooring must be replaced when the unit is turned over at a cost of 5-10k per unit depending on type. Urine and stains are equally unlikely to remove, wall scratches require new paint, etc. This is the most pressing issue for me as even if I pushed every rent to market (which I don’t) there is no way to afford the repairs.
4) I have learned that the sort of person who feels comfortable abusing this system also feels pretty comfortable abusing the lease and landlord. It’s hard to say who is an abuser because about 50% of tenants will accept a pet denial and the others will slowly reason their way to breaking the rules.
5) Ultimately just as the tenants have lots of ways to do an end run around my prohibition of pets, I have lots of ways to legally make it clear that I’m going to make their choices to break our agreement cost them as much as possible until they leave voluntarily. None of these are easily proved. I don’t need a reason to raise rent on one unit and not on the others. I don’t have to give a reason to fail to renew a tenancy if I don’t want to and I don’t have to keep any sort of legible record of my reasons for accepting and declining tenant applications (and in fact I do not!).
I’ve been living with the risks of lawsuit for decades and it seems a small price to pay for peace of mind. I am happy to defend these practices against reasoned argument; I thought somebody ought to represent the ownership side.
I appreciate this look into how the real world works. It seems like an eminently reasonable stance, enforcing rules you are perfectly justified in making, even against those who would flaunt them.
I am an occasional landlord, and I second everything written here.
Before I would demand a pet deposit, and it's usually something like 3x the normal deposit, and even then it's not usually enough. So I stopped allowing pets. If someone ESA'd me, their tenancy would become quite difficult quite quickly.
Completely gutting all carpets, furniture, walls, frames of a house and replacing them is expensive, and tenants never pay up. They always assume it's super-cheap to replace all this stuff. I've had tenants quote me what they assume it should be to fix their shit, and it's usually between 1/10th and 1/5th the actual cost.
Thanks for the honesty. This is why I'm not attached to liberal democracy and am open to using brute (legal) force to wrangle problematic groups like landlords. You just admitted you routinely violate the law, which I appreciate, and if landlords don't play my the rules, why should we? Better to act than be acted upon.
Ironically, you don't seem very mentally well yourself. Definitely something odd going on upstairs unless you are very young, like 15 years old or something.
Coincidentally, a blind person in Seattle posted today about their experience being kicked out of a restaurant because of the blind person's service/guide dog. It seems like maybe the staff equivocated the service dog with being an emotional support animal, and perhaps was cynical that the dog even met that low bar.
Presumably this is in response to the extremely low barrier to getting one's pet categorized as an ESA, and possibly a widespread practice of people not even meeting that barrier and simply claiming (lying) that the pet they wish to take with them into the restaurant is an ESA.
I find the thing where no landlord allows pet weird. As a landlord I've had people with dogs and cats, and they've never caused me a problem.
But also, have people tried to offer to pay a bit more in exchange for being allowed to have pets? I can imagine most tenants compare places in large part based on rent, so landlords want to advertise the lowest price they are willing to accept, for which they aren't willing to deal with pets; they set rent based on what other landlords charge for similar homes, who also don't allow pets. (Sort of like airlines making the base ticket fee low, with minimal service, because that's what people compare.) But if tenants offer enough to offset the costs or risks—which may not be all that much—it's in the landlords' interest too to allow the animals.
We sold a house with wooden floors which went for sale again a couple years later. We went to the open house out of curiosity. The floors weee absolutely destroyed with dog scratches everywhere.
Yeah, you’re talking (by square foot and location) tens of thousands in damages in just a year or two—costs which cannot be offset by any reasonable deposit or increase in rent.
I had a landlord initially refuse to rent a 3 bedroom house to me because my wife and ai had a cat.i pponted out that my middle aged, declared cat would do far less damage than children enwpuld do and we had no kids or plans for them. It is all a part of the negotiation (and being a great tenant who can get references)
This is pure nosiness on my part, but I did briefly work in social housing, so I'm curious: if it was just you and your wife, with no kids, why did you want a three bedroom house?
Was it just that this was the only one for rent in the place/at the price you wanted?
In America, where middle class people love big suburban houses, it would not be completely out of the ordinary for a childless couple to want a three-bedroom house: one to sleep in, one guest bedroom, one home office (for the husband or wife or both).
Also, in most areas two-bedroom houses are pretty rare and one-bedroom houses are damn-near nonexistent. A three-bedroom house would be the smallest house you can get, if you don't want an apartment.
Yeah, when I was on the housing market there were very few two or one-bedroom places (and those that I did see tended to be poorly maintained and have only one bathroom, which were dealbreakers for me).
Also reminds me of the situation with medical cannabis before recreational use was legalized in California. A friend of mine went to the weed doctor to get a prescription for CBD oil to help with some pain. She brought all kinds of documentation, medical records, etc. The doc was like "lol wut" and handed her a script for more weed than she could possible consume.
Yeah, this was my experience in Michigan too. That time I had enough dignity to not participate but all my patients would just go to some practice with a name like 420Doc or whatever and get their prescription after a 15 minute appointment.
What, are you telling me that some people were using the medical cannabis exception for naughty purposes and that the weed version of pill mills started up? I am shocked and appalled, I tell you, even more so because we were assured nothing like that would ever happen and the only people looking for medical cannabis were doing it purely for genuine medical reasons!
(Honestly, thirty seconds thought would have told anyone this would happen, but I suppose enough 'I am a responsible non-criminal enjoyer of weed, it should not be illegal' types were able to put pressure on to have laws changed. And of course, it made things worse for people genuinely seeking medical relief for medical problems).
Do you see a difference between people without ADHD wanting Adderall and people without glaucoma (or whatever other condition cannabis supposedly treats) wanting weed?
Depends on where you are. I can literally walk 10 minutes in either of 2 directions to 3 pot shops, fully legal by state and local law (although not by federal law). It's cash only, and they check IDs, but other than that it's a normal shop.
I mean the whole medical marijuana movement was obviously a wedge the whole time.
However as one of those "I'm a responsible non-criminal enjoyer of weed", it really, really should be legal and seems to be moving that way monotonically anyways. I've lived in a southern state with harsh drug laws most of my life and it's always been trivially easy to get and a significant fraction of the population consume it regularly. It's a joke to have it classified the way it was for so long, this is just policy catching up with reality.
> And of course, it made things worse for people genuinely seeking medical relief for medical problems
Can you expand on this claim? What's your theory of how it made things worse for people who need medical help? For example, did medical weed make it harder to get cancer treatment? I can't think of a way that it did, but maybe you had something more specific in mind that this general statement is pointing at.
On Pettable, if you select too many "right" answers, and say you're suicidal, they don't give you the letter and instead direct you to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Snakes are a fantastic and clean pet that have essentially no way to cause any property damage. They should be a landlord's best friend but aren't due to harmful stereotypes and moronic property insurance wording denying all tanks regardless of if they actually contain water
I'm maybe biased here because of a family story that my uncle's pet python escaped the day before he moved, he couldn't find it, and he decided to just move and leave it as a "surprise" for the next person to move into the apartment.
That happens but it was likely hiding very close to where he kept it, if he wasn't moving it would have eventually just turned up. Even if the new tenants found a new snakey friend ball pythons are docile, completely harmless, and cute - nothing bad would have happened. Compared to leaving a dog cat hamster bird etc. behind it's infinitely better for safety and avoiding property damage.
You can say that because you know about snakes and are used to them. A stranger who finds a "surprise" python in the new home is not going to be calmly wondering if it's 'cute and harmless'.
Suppose you came home to find a stranger in the place whom you did not know, did not expect to be there, and looks like he might be dangerous. Are you going to be "oh, a cute and harmless fun new friend!"and be totally chill with the idea of strangers just popping out of thin air in your home, or are you going to demand explanations about that, and that he gets the hell out?
I realize that. I love snakes. But your average person finding a snake in their home will be terrified for their life. Terrifying someone like that is vicious.
Sounds like more of a problem with your uncle than the snake. I'm a landlord who does not want pets in the apartment (luckily there's nothing like support animals in my country) but I would have zero problems with a snake. Probably the animal least likely to damage property out of all of them.
The only possible problem would be the risk of the snake escaping and then scaring a clueless neighbour. (and then the media reporting about it and drumming up panic over snakes as pets, which actually has happened multiple times in the recent years in my country and has led to nonsensical laws requiring people to undergo useless training before having reptiles as pets, despite the fact that most pet reptiles are as harmless as you can get when it comes to pets.)
"most pet reptiles are as harmless as you can get when it comes to pets".
"Most". I have no objection to snakes myself, but I don't think requiring training is useless. See that Florida case (what is it with Florida?) about the idiot owner of a python and what happened her two year old child (one story says the snake was the property of the mother, another says she and her boyfriend - not the child's father - were co-owners of the snake):
"Florida python owners Jaren Hare and her boyfriend Charles Darnell were each sentenced to 12 years in prison today because the snake escaped from its cage and strangled Hare's 2-year-old daughter.
Hare, 21, and Darnell, 34, were convicted last month of third degree murder, manslaughter and child neglect.
The little girl, Shaianna, was killed two years ago when the couple's pet Burmese python escaped from its enclosure and strangled the girl in her crib. The snake's tank was only equipped with a quilt for a lid.
A medical examiner testified during the trial that the albino snake named Gypsy was underweight and trying to eat the girl. The snake hadn't been fed for a month when the girl died and was severely underweight at only 13 pounds, the Orlando Sentinel reported. The snake should have weighed nearly 150 pounds, the Sentinel reported."
The story gets even nastier and more tragic when further details come out, but I think the main point here is that these people should not have been allowed keep any kind of pet, they clearly had no idea how to manage the snake and were neglectful and cruel to it, and a law about training before you can keep reptiles as pets sounds sensible and not idiotic from this angle.
Nine out of ten people who want to keep pet snakes probably are reliable owners. But there is always that tenth fool.
> See that Florida case (what is it with Florida?)
There's nothing *particularly* crazy about Florida; the reason we hear a lot about "Florida Man" stories is that the state has some of the strongest public records transparency laws in existence, so it's a lot easier to find out about their crazies than other states' crazies.
I have long known this was the case, but I wish it were otherwise; I enjoyed believing that one of the fifty states drove ordinary men to madness. It made the world a more interesting place.
To be fair, that type of behavior would be received with abject horror by many snake keepers, who put a lot of stock on responsible practices and are still recovering from the Holy Thursday massacre.
Context: Florida bans the keeping of some snake species. This ban is retroactive, existing keepers are given 90 days to get rid of their animals. Most reptile owners think this is ridiculous and attempt to fight the restriction to get an exception or extension for existing pets.
Meanwhile, snake breeder Bill McAdam receives a call by Florida Wildlife Control to inspect his facility, as an escaped (and now illegal) python was found nearby. McAdam complies, FWC officers instead show up with a bolt gun and shoot 35 of his snakes.
This by itself is not a suitable method for euthanization, the snakes are alive although fatally wounded and continue to move for ~20 minutes. Among the animals killed is a legal-to-keep boa constrictor, body cam footage suggests the officer realizes the animal is not a python and shoots it regardless. The escaped python is found to be an unrelated animal.
McAdam's employee records the process, and the entire reptile-keeping community is beside themselves for months (which is how I'd heard of it, I don't keep reptiles myself but they're adjacent to fishkeeping groups and news travel).
Not to belabor the point, but that story has nothing to do with snakes being a problem and everything to do with your uncle being a problem.
If the python was small enough that it could actually be unfindable in an apartment, it poses as much health and safety risk to the next tenant as a forgotten mouse trap.
The most likely outcome of that story is that the incoming tenants find it, freak out, kill it, and then have to clean up the mess.
The outright impossible outcome is that the snake causes any significant harm to the incoming tenants (not counting harm from them panicking). Pythons do not have venom, they aren't a disease vector, they can't carry fleas, and if they're small enough to be lost in an apartment, they aren't strong enough to hurt even a small child worse than a mousetrap would.
The usual material is glass (works well with under-tank heaters), which is rather difficult to put a hole in. I've used a repurposed fish tank with a custom lid that worked quite well.
There's also the matter of substrate, which would make a mess if it can spill out through the bottom.
Scott thinks this is about housing and mental health. Other people think this is about balancing individual rights, the public good, economics, and animal rights, etc.
I'm going to up the controversy yet AGAIN and say...
This is a problem about dogs.
Aquarium fish do not bark all night long for no reason. Cats do not physically bodyslam you to the ground because they're "excited to see you!" Hamsters do not regularly leave their cages and leave massive shits all over the neighborhood. People don't walk by off-leash domesticated iguanas on the street and think, "wow, that creature could literally overpower, kill, and maim me before anyone has a chance to stop it, guess I'll just have to trust the owner with my life, even though I know nothing about them other than the fact that they paid $50 to adopt an animal at some point and also don't feel the need to obey local laws, which is always a good signal of responsibility!"
When people have issues with pets, most of the time they have issues with dogs. Pets are great! However, all kinds of pets can be beneficial and dogs have the most downsides in dense, modern urban environments. In the past, people used to let all kinds of animals run loose in cities until we realized that it was gross and dangerous and so we found better ways to do things. Now, we have regulations against owning horses and pigs and roosters in densely populated city areas. Maybe it's time to consider the same about dogs. We have strict licensing requirements around a lot of things that can kill people--like cars, guns, explosives--so why do we assume any random person has the right to own a mini-wolf up until the point it actually maims someone, no matter how much fear and mayhem it causes?
A lot of apartment buildings have started allowing pets under 50 pounds and I'm all for this, because really it's the only protection I have against having people's dogs forced on me all the time, and also it's unfair for my clean, well-behaved indoor cats to be classified in the same category as giant pitbulls that could easily terrorize entire neighborhoods.
I think it's great if you want to have a dog, but move to the country with the other people who like large, high-maintenance mammals so you can give your dog a good life. Nobody should have the "right" to try to keep a husky in a one-bedroom apartment.
Not necessarily arguing against some of the anti-dog sentiment, but from a landlord's perspective, I heard a lot of concerns about cats ruining the furniture and walls. As someone who owned quite a few cats in the past - those are perfectly reasonable concerns.
I'd be happy to pay a security deposit and agree to an annual or quarterly landlord inspection for my cats. I think the problem with dogs is that there are so many things that could go wrong (noise, sanitation, wear and tear, danger) that landlords can't even draw up a contract for everything. With other types of animals, there are a few predictable things that could go wrong. For instance, if my cat claws up the apartment, it's pretty straightforward to assess the monetary damage when I move out and charge the deposit (or have me pay for the furniture up front so it's not the landlord's problem). And I think it's reasonable not to allow aquariums in particular units that are prone to water damage.
Dogs are also somewhat unique in that they are the only common urban pet that requires daily outdoor, meaning that they are automatically everyone's problem.
Yep, as a sometime cat owner, mine did the same thing. Carpets, too. Fortunately, the first time around, my landlord was reasonable, and just charged me for carpet replacement and general repair at the end of my tenancy. And the second time around I was my own landlord, but that didn't stop me from noticing the damage.
That greatly depends on the specifics, of course. Cabinets and closets, libraries, doors - plenty of furniture and furniture-like objects are not uncommonly owned by the landlord. All of the above is literally the case for the place we're renting right now.
Yes, you can offer to pay for the damage. But a landlord might just say they don't want the hassle and the arguments about the extent of the damage etc.
Another problem with dogs is that they are fucking large. I sat on an airplane next to a lady with a huge dog by her feet. It was incredibly awkward and uncomfortable.
Not exactly the issue that Scott was originally commenting on, but you're spot on. The only "pet" problem in cities are dogs. No other common pet is nearly as dangerous, makes so much noise , or fouls the street as much as dogs. I'd 100% vote to get dogs out of cities and apartments just like we don't keep pigs there. With the possible exception of small old-lady lapdogs, but whatever, they could get a lap cat or a lap rabbit. Pet rabbits are underrated anyway.
As others have commented here (and as a landlord) , I disagree. Cats are also a huge problem. We rent out our apartment with furniture, and I know enough cats and people with cats to know that most pieces of furniture do not survive their encounters with cats unscathed. (The smell can be a problem too depending on the owner, but that's of lesser concern.) Yes, you could let people pay for it via security deposits, but that's just a hassle. The same goes ofc for other pets prone to scratching, biting and pooping everywhere, so sadly most mammals and birds. Fish can be a problem due to water damage. Reptiles, insects, snails etc would be completely fine if people knew more about them and were not irrationally scared of a lot of them, that goes both for landlords who forbid them and neighbours who are petrified when they think of the harmless corn snake or tarantula escaping. So sadly, all pets have problems.
That's not so much a disagreement as a different point as far as I can tell. As a landlord you get discretion, your relationship with the tenant is a market transaction so it's ultimately a negotiation between your and their interests. There's nothing about the things you mentioned that cannot be compensated with money, and you're also perfectly allowed to say "no pets, no exceptions".
What Farkling* was talking about is that dogs are quite unique in the externalities they impose on the rest of us, with no recourse - neighbours putting up with the barking, the excrements on the street (even when the biggest part gets picked up) and the possible agggressivity of the animal.
Actually... Cats are very much capable of maiming and killing people. Cat bites are extremely prone to horrible infections that have led to amputations and even death in rare cases. (Serious cat bites are very deep and very hard to clean.) Of course it's much more rare than dogs killing people but still, very much possible.
House cats rarely/never bite unprovoked though; they don't spontaneously impose themselves on the welfare and comfort of others in the same way that dogs do.
Worst of the worst? Ok, I'll say it gently but it amounts to the same. I think that dogs, with the possible exception of tiny lapdog types, are a bad match for the dense, indoor environment of cities. They're great in the countryside, but my rule of thumb is at least you need a backyard.
You should get help for this extreme irrational fear of dogs, as it could actually *provoke* dominating behavior and/or aggression in some animals that would otherwise leave you alone.
Are you joking? I would reverse this-- every dog owner should get professional dog training so they can keep other people safe. If your dog is stronger than you, and can easily rip the leash out of your hand, you cannot legally own that dog. Why should the average person have to tolerate dogs?
I'm fine with the idea of people being required to have dog-handling skills, actually.
With dog-handling skills, there's no such thing as a dog being able to rip a leash out of your hands, much less "easily." I've walked many large, untrained dogs (although they didn't stay untrained for long, lol), and had a 100lb Rottweiler mix who lived to 14, and I've never been "pulled," much less actually dropped a leash.
As a first principle I put the well-being of dogs and owners over the well-being of the dog-phobic. Why? Well that question isn't valid because it's a first principle.
It is the owner's responsibility to control any tendency towards aggression in their dog, regardless of what a human does. Your comment is blaming the victim.
I agree with you that every owner should have control over their dog.
However, the objection to "blaming the victim" is, as almost always when that phrase is deployed, counterproductive to helping a person avoid being a victim when facing another person who fundamentally doesn't know or care they are victimizing a person.
"You should get help for this extreme irrational fear of dogs, as it could actually *provoke* dominating behavior and/or aggression in some animals that would otherwise leave you alone."
The second half of your sentence is a good refutation of the first.
On second glance, I'm interpreting her comment quite literally. No judgement, just "if you don't want to be attacked, you should try this non-intuitive step to reduce your risk".
I'm actually not afraid of dogs and the fact that you read into that is very telling. I think they're loud and smell bad and I don't like how they get special treatment in the public eye (what other privately owned animal gets its own fenced off section of a public park, paid for with public funds, in a city with limited green space?) Your comment is especially ignorant considering young children are a significant number of dog attack victims, precisely because they can't control their body language.
I'm also just a very small person and have spent my entire life--yes, as a child as well--being unintentionally injured by friendly dogs simply because of the laws of physics, while their owners stand by helpfully telling me to "be more assertive" as I'm being physically overpowered faster than I can react. It's actually surprising that I've been hurt by dogs more times than I can count and haven't developed a phobia.
As someone who was also a small child, was occasionally knocked down by a family member's not-well-trained English sheepdog and who is only 5'2" today...
...but who also learned to handle horses at 11 years old, stood down a neighbor's two escaped charging Rottweilers at 14 and scared them back into their yard while her friend panicked and ran, and who has never been fully jumped on, much less injured by a dog despite occasionally encountering and handling strangers' large, untrained dogs...
Other people's dogs are indeed something you can have some control over. Since you aren't phobic, per se, I recommend watching some Cesar Milan clips of his work with large, boisterous dogs, paying close attention to his instructions on body language and physical corrections when a dog intrudes on one's personal space.
I also didn't. I know dogs pretty well, and I thought he had that sucker under control, then BOOM.
Largely I'm with you though. I think this sort of thing is an outlier. And that dog probably would not be allowed around people in any uncontrolled environment, but sometimes dogs get territorial about something unpredictable for humans.
I should have specified "whole Cesar Milan episodes!"
Without even clicking on the link I knew which one it would be. That dog was the worst case he ever handled (he later conceded he wasn't the right fit for that particular dog and referred the owners to a different behaviorist trainer) and that was the worst bite he's ever received, which is why it's among the most-watched clips - it's an extreme exception to the norm!
Or put another way, in this one case, "dog bites man" is so noteworthy it racks up 35 million views.
I should have provided this link for a Cesar Milan overview, as the interviewer is scared of dogs and Cesar's explanations of his principles are very basic:
Cesar's primary commandment, "No touch, no talk, no eye contact" (upon meeting a dog, especially an excited one) is key. Ideally it would be adopted universally, because it is so damn effective!
He has another framing device, "dog, breed, name," to describe the hierarchy of forces shaping an individual dog's behavior. Despite what the "furbaby" type of people might think, all dogs are first DOGS, a different species with a profoundly different sensory experience from humans and profoundly different motivations.
Then, while all dogs share important core traits, a dog's breed further shapes their sensory experience, temperament, and behavior.
The "name," which is to say, a dog's individual experiences and relationships, are actually the *least* influential forces on his behavior. People who begin by understanding the dog as a dog and honoring the dog's need to be a dog *before* it is a companion to a human will have better relationships with dogs!
I can't believe how far I had to scroll down to see one sane person making this comment. Scott thinks "society is hostile to pets?" Where does he live? I see dogs in the grocery store, the CVS, off leash walking around the neighborhood, in coffee shops, restaurants. The employees are not allowed to intervene, for the most part. My neighbor has a doberman who is off leash multiple times a day with no electric collar. So far, so good? I guess he has good liability insurance? I used to have dogs, the last one died a few years ago. After she died I started realizing how irritating, expensive and gross most dogs are. I think you should need a $500/yr annual license to own a dog, be legally required to take training lessons if the dog weighs more than 50 pounds, and you should be fined thousands of dollars or face jail time if you breed dogs without a license. It's the hubris that annoys me more than anything else.. just this assumption that everyone else will tolerate your dog for no reason other than you think it's great or you were lonely during covid.
I’ve always had dogs, and own a gigantic purebred Rottweiler. But I also have a lot of property out in the country and he is never walked off property without a leash. In addition, we took him for extensive obedience training as a puppy. Dogs aren’t a problem. Irresponsible owners who don’t train their animals, assume everyone else will love them, and let them off leash in public areas are the problem.
Agreed. I don't see how society is hostile to dogs. Almost every day I go for a run (along residential streets, or walking paths, or in parks) I either see dog mess or unleashed dogs. I've seen people with their unleashed dogs in the park less than a quarter-mile from the dog park. People will bring their dogs to pick-up volleyball games, then act shocked when their dog starts barking at another dog there, or at a dog walking by. They'll bring their dogs out of their apartment buildings to poop and then not bother to leash the dogs or to pick up the poop. Now, the majority of dog owners will display good etiquette. But the 10% that don't ruin things for everyone, dog owner or not.
80 years ago, Americans outside of a handful big cities used to be able to virtually have All Dogs Everywhere At Any Time. Outside of courthouses, churches, a few posh restaurants, maybe the library. That's the normal baseline we expect as dog likers and I for one resent any deviation from that norm. I have never even owned a dog and I demand that level of toleration for dogs. Yesterday.
A lot of people don't realize that dogs are domesticated wolves — literally the same species of animal, and still able to interbreed with wild wolves — and a lot of them still have more wild wolf in them than dog-lovers would care to admit.
I agree with the last sentence, but want to push back on the rest.
It's all about the owner. A dog that is well-trained and cared for will not bark, bite, jump, chase, or do any of the things you mentioned. A good owner will not bring their large dog onto a crowded plane.
Dogs, unlike cats, do not carry behavior-altering parasites.
People get emotional about animals, and we end up with situations like we're seeing here: good owners resent being lumped in with bad ones, even if the bad ones create victims who are entirely justified in their dislike of pets (or specific pets).
We need to find a way to make pet owners be good owners. I don't know how to do that, but I think the solution will look less like banning all dogs and more like whatever we end up doing to get people to stop blasting TikTok on the bus without earbuds, or bringing screaming children on the plane.
Not all dogs are trainable. Not all dogs can be well cared for in an apartment setting. Unfortunately "it's the owner" is a phrase now most associated with pitbull apologism for good reason.
"And it’s harmless enough with Fido - he really is a good boy. But I’ve had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake." I would take the snake over a pitbull.
"Emotional support" animals demonstrate a decline of trust within society. I do not recall going through these nonsense growing up, where the only animals you would see in restaurants were dedicated seeing-eye dogs. Now it is rare that I don't see a dog in a supermarket. Going along with that is the massive increase in pitbulls. It is a dangerous breed that has no place in modern society, yet their owners really don't care when they kill other animals and even humans. Animal shelters are overrun with the breed (and often lie about what they are). I just don't trust many pet owners these days or have any respect for terms like ESA or "fur babies".
I agree I'd rather live in a building with an emotional support snake than an ESA dog. However, this isn't really a pitbull problem. The best data on this topic available at the moment suggests that:
1) Small dogs are actually the most likely to have biting issues.
2) Large dogs bite less but their bites are more damaging. The breed doesn't really matter.
3) The biggest predictor of dog bite incidents overall is irresponsible owner behavior/poor owner supervision.
All of this says to me that letting random people have dogs of any kind is just a bad idea. As long as irresponsible dog owners exist (and they do), the public will always face the possibility of dog attack incidents. Trying to argue over which breeds are safer is just a matter of trading bite frequency for potential bite severity, which is not satisfactory to me. I'd rather feel safe at home and in public without risking getting bitten at all!
Pitbulls maul, they don't bite. And that behavior is not just "irresponsible owners" (and they do have the worst owners), but is actually bred into the dog. The function they were bred for is in the name. The breed has no place in a modern society.
I don't have one, but I have heard pitbulls are excellent dogs for the family, just not for intruders and strangers. The "no place" comment isn't necessarily true.
My brother-in-law had a pit bull which was very patient with his children, letting them pull on his ears and face, punching him (lightly, as small children are only capable of doing), etc. He never displayed any aggression I saw, and I wasn't even close to the family.
Someone else I knew had a pit bull who often said how gentle the dog was.
Anecdotes are not evidence, of course. But I stand by the "no place" comment being untrue. After all, some have had an excellent place.
I don't think the issue is how many pit bulls kill people, but the fact that they easily CAN. After all, that's why people are not allowed to keep tigers or lions or chimpanzees as pets. Not because every wild animal will kill a human, but because they are capable of it and it's impossible to predict which ones will, under what circumstances.
The 3 pit bulls I've known have been incredibly sweet and gentle dogs, and I think it's about the owners. Perhaps bad owners who want aggressive, dangerous dogs tend to focus on a couple of breeds, meaning that those breeds are the most likely to be trained to be aggressive and dangerous.
Small dogs are definitely more aggressive, but I'll take that yapping furball that put my ankles in severe danger (I had to look *down* to see what was making such a ruckus) over a bigger, quieter dog that, if it snaps, will mutilate or even kill me.
Poor owner behaviour is certainly to blame most of the time, but you get idiot owners who love to post photos of the pitbull lying beside their six month old baby. And it's not all the underclass stupid violent young men who do that, it's 'respectable' middle class women. Then they're amazed when their cuddle bug eats the face off someone.
Honestly, I think the best rule for dealing with aggressive dogs derives from the Law of Moses. They didn't have rules for pet dogs — dogs were considered among the worst of "unclean" animals — but they did have rules for aggressive oxen. If an ox gored someone to death, the ox was to be killed. One strike and you're out. And if the ox's owner knew that he had an aggressive ox, and shielded it from responsibility, and then it killed a second person, that was regarded as murder and both the ox and the owner should be put to death.
This makes a decent framework for dealing with aggressive dogs. If a dog attacks and harms someone, except in self-defense, put the dog down. One strike and it's out. There's no place for such animals in civilized society. And if it can be shown that the owner was aware that they have an aggressive dog, and didn't let the dog be put down, and let it keep happening, then they're legally liable for any subsequent assault and maiming as if they had committed the act with their own hands.
I would say "self-defense or defense of something it's supposed to be defending." A dog biting a burglar or attacker isn't something I'd want a dog put down for.
Is it declining trust in society or is the logical result of the ADA?
Take the question of why there's so much bullying and trouble-causing in schools. You could see it as "cultural decline." You could also see it as the inevitable result when people who don't want to be somewhere are forced to share the same space. Kids are forced to attend school; while public schools face a lot of difficulty in expelling students.
Another example is rent control. When landlords are forced to rent at below-market rates, they're not going to be very nice to their tenants. Good luck getting them to fix anything.
The law can shape culture to agree, and an incentivization of bad actors and/or lack of enforcement against them can contribute to the decline in societal trust. Especially when people aren't allowed to enforce boundaries and are even forced together as you say.
Agree with poster below. This is NOT a “pit bull problem”. It’s a pit bull OWNER problem. Staffordshire terriers (and other similar looking breeds often called “pit bulls” by the general public) when raised like any other companion dog, make perfectly gentle family pets and good companions.
About biting. I’m from Texas, a progressive Democrat. Texans traditionally have pretty strong beliefs about how things should be done, and that one-strike rule is one of them. I love dogs (obvi). But the taboo against biting humans should be so strongly held in a dogs mind from puppyhood that absolutely nothing should be able to break it except when protecting its owner from a serious threat (and it shouldn’t be punished for doing that, either).
It is believed that if a dog spontaneously breaks that taboo without legit provocation it means the dog is de facto mentally ill, or is physically injured / ill in such a way that the mind is affected. (Barring the latter situation, IF a cure is expected to heal the dog’s body, then mind, eg the biting was a one time event and all may be forgiven. TL;DR: if you handle an injured animal don’t blame them if you get bitten).
Back to the case of biting = mental illness. In which case, “take em out back and shoot em”. One strike. This Is The (Texas) Way
There are too many healthy good dogs sitting in shelters that need forever homes, that do not bite people. Please adopt them instead of trying to rehabilitate a biter.
>a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.
Isn't that a social net-positive? Restricting this nonsense to the upper classes means that you're less likely to step onto a United flight with 25 pitbulls. This is essentially a polite-society privilege, and those *always* get ruined when the underclass is let in.
Not on topic, but if you've ever seen one of those billboards that says "Exactly WHY are ferrets illegal in California?" then I promise the affiliated website is more insane than you probably imagined.
WARNING for truly horrific violent and graphic content (never thought I would be saying this for a ferret website, but whatever): https://www.legalizeferrets.org/
It's quite ugly and runs badly on mobile (but so does substack), but I don't think that qualifies as truly horrific violent and graphic content. Seems normal to me as well.
The only horrific content is the site creator's utter stupidity. "Why are ferrets illegal in California?" My immediate guess was "not a native species?" and turns out I'm correct.
The only native USA ferret is the black-footed ferret, an endangered species as its main food source - prairie dogs - has been driven out of its habitats by encroaching human development of both ranches and cities. The domestic ferret is a European import and all it takes is a couple to escape from captivity before they wreak havoc in the wild. They are domesticated polecats, and "Ferrets are obligate carnivores, that is, they eat whole small prey, including the bones, organs, fur and feathers. They are efficient hunters of rodents, rabbits, small birds and snakes."
Does this idiot not know the history of imported species? The grey squirrel is not native to the British Isles, and its introduction from the USA in 1911 led to it competing with, and often out-competing, the native red squirrel:
"Grey Squirrels were introduced to Ireland from North America around 1911. The species quickly established itself and rapidly spread throughout the country. They cause significant damage to certain species of tree and pose a serious challenge to the continued existence of the native red squirrel.
Every year Grey Squirrels cause millions of euro in damage to trees on forestry, woodlands, country estates, stud farms and golf courses. They usually tend to attack beech, sycamore, elder and hazel trees between 10 and 40 years old, although this will vary depending on the species of tree. They attack trees by first stripping the bark from around the trunk and branches (commonly known as bark stripping), discarding it, and then feeding on the soft vascular tissues underneath. This will most likely result in serious discoloration or death of the tree. They are more likely to cause damage to trees during the time period during which the carbohydrates stored in the tree roots is flowing upwards to the branches and leaves between March and August.
The spread of the grey squirrel has been mirrored by a worrying retraction in the number of native red squirrels. Our native reds are simply out-competed by the larger and more robust greys who have a more varied diet and can eat acorns before they are ripe. Greys can also act as a carrier of the parapox virus, which has a deadly effect on native red squirrel populations."
This mush brain thinks that "After all, they’re called Domestic Ferrets!" is a compelling argument, or at the least a cute slogan. Ferrets are hunting animals, that's why they were domesticated, and just because Chuckles here thinks they're cute and furry so he/she/they should be allowed keep as many as they like isn't a good enough reason.
"But Officer, Killer my darling pitbull never harmed anyone before! Well, apart from that neighbour's dog, and my cousin's cat, and the kid riding by on the bike, and of course he was a rescue because his old owner went mysteriously missing, but I swear, he's a sweetheart!"
I once wanted legal Xanax and adderall, when I was young enough that I thought it would fix all my problems, and just looked for the most expensive cash only psychiatrist I could find. I figured that was the gatekeeping hurdle.
The other casualty (besides apartment carpets!) is increased skepticism and hostility toward real service animals. My teenage daughter is completely blind and has a well-trained guide dog. However, many places she goes people are so sick of having to deal with misbehaving emotional support pets, they lump her into the same category until conclusively proven otherwise.
It's trivial when there's an abundance of options. As it is, with a market greatly tilted towards the landlord, this translates into a significant hurdle for pet owners. I'm happy I don't have a pet just now, honestly.
Ive never had trouble finding apartments in nyc that allow dogs. Is the experience generally different elsewhere, such that this loophole is required to overcome market failure?
I've had some patients who report problems, although in some cases they're poor or dependent on government programs and it might be something like "none of the three low-income apartment complexes in my area)
Or maybe they say "can’t find any place that allows dogs" when they mean "would have to pay 10% more than for an otherwise-equivalent place that doesn’t allow them".
Or maybe "I went to an apartment building which allows dogs but decided I didn’t want to live there because of all the noisy-dog-owning neighbors. The new place is great, very quiet, no noisy animals other than mine!"
Makes sense. Market rate apts are expensive due to nimby but still function as a market at that higher price point. Low income housing is different entirely. Ive known a land lord who demanded bribes from his tenants. In an environment like that they wouldn't be likely to accept pets or anything else slightly undesirable.
I’m so sick of the classist meanness of landlords in general - and it’s all just an excuse to charge renters exorbitant extra amounts of money which will never be returned, no matter how perfect the condition of the property, *just because* 😡 😡 😡
And I'm sick of the classist meanness I encounter as a landlord. (luckily only online) I have always given the entire deposit back to the people renting my apartment and generally help them out a lot.
Often service animals are given privilege above humans. My wife is allergic to dogs and cats, and if she is sat in an airplane near a service animal, the staff doesn’t know what to do and most of the time they will tell her she can’t fly. They don’t want the risk of anaphylaxis during the flight, but they also don’t want ADA up their ass. I find that insane. I think humans should be given priority.
So do most people. The question is, which human to prioritize? The one with allergies, or the one with the disability that gives them a legitimate need to have a service animal?
If Andrew has a service dog he takes with him everywhere he goes, and Bill has a severe dog allergy, Bill may have a legal freedom to associate, but in reality he lacks the de facto freedom to associate with Andrew. But Andrew is under no such constraints. Should Andrew be allowed de facto veto power over Bill's actions in the name of "freedom"? Or, conversely, should Bill be allowed de facto veto power over Andrew's, in the name of protecting him from very real harm?
This is a dilemma with no easy, simple, "just do X" answer.
"But Andrew is under no such constraints. Should Andrew be allowed de facto veto power over Bill's actions in the name of "freedom"? Or, conversely, should Bill be allowed de facto veto power over Andrew's, in the name of protecting him from very real harm?
This is a dilemma with no easy, simple, "just do X" answer."
There's no easy answer, I'm saying get the government out of it. Let them make their cases to employers/landlords/whatever, with nobody being able to threaten a lawsuit.
> I'm saying get the government out of it. ... with nobody being able to threaten a lawsuit.
In a land famous for a legal climate where "anyone can sue anyone for any reason," that is a contradiction that is literally impossible to accomplish.
The best we can hope for — and I'd love to see it happen! — is the passage of safe harbor laws, that allow a person who is sued on spurious grounds to make an early-stage motion to preemptively dismiss the suit as baseless and hit the plaintiff with fees for wasting his time. (For example, look at anti-SLAPP laws.)
>“Should Andrew be allowed de facto veto power over Bill's actions in the name of "freedom"?”
If freedom of speech implies freedom to not speak, and freedom of religion implies freedom from religion, then Andrew should be free to not associate with Bill in the absence of the dog *and* Bill should be free to not associate with Andrew in the presence of the dog.
The dilemma is that both of them wanting to be on the same airplane at the same time was never a "freedom of association" question in the first place as they don't actually know each other, nor are they associating with one another per se; they're *being associated* transitively by way of their mutual association with the airline.
Both of them bought a ticket and have a right to a seat as legitimate, paying customers. Andrew needs the dog with him; Bill can't safely be around the dog. Both of them individually have a good reason to be on the plane, but the plane can't accommodate both of them. So what's the best policy here?
Hm, coulda sworn I'd read some Replicant Crisis stuff awhile back about how many ESA studies didn't hold up so well and the net effect was probably roughly nil...did this change in the last few years?
This was a frustrating issue at my workplace even before the recent general societal decline in rule-following writ large. We allow full-bore Service Animals, but not ESAs or anything else, by decree of the Health Department. There's very little appetite for enforcement though, precisely because Troublesome Animals are already an indication that dealing with the owner might be a huge headache too, and the escalation isn't usually worth it unless something's really egregious. (Basically, some other customer has to complain to us about it first, we won't make the first move.) So one just gets used to barking dogs while grocery shopping. But maybe you fail the LUK save and instead it's the off-leash mutt who likes sniffing and nibbling on bread loaves. Or the incontinent one who, uh, leaks a trail across the store. Or the oblivious owner who puts her dog right on the register, along with her groceries.* Or the poorly-trained dog who, uh, evacuates in the produce section. At least the owner brought a poop bag to scoop up the evidence...which she then disposed of in the demo food prep kitchen. And that's just the ones I remember. (It's also always, always, always dogs. Never had issues with cats! Or that one guy with the bird!)
*My next customer immediately afterwards was a devout orthodox Muslim who was deeply grateful for me doing a complete deep-clean sanitizing of the whole counter before he unloaded his cart. Grateful that guy didn't escalate to a manager, that would have been A Whole Scene. And I wouldn't even blame him, it's ridiculous that our hands are tied even with something that outrageous. Competing access needs are a difficult problem, but not this difficult, I think...
That's an Interesting typo. You probably mean "Replication Crisis"? "Replicant Crisis" sounds like something from "Blade Runner", which was based on the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which featured a world in which many animal species had gone extinct or endangered, and humans take care of artificial animals to show how good and empathetic and socially-well-adjusted they are...
(Sorry if this comes off too punchy, I'm a bit on edge, but I thought it was a cool connection, given the post.)
I feel like there should be a distinctions between service animals who do something concrete (guiding dog, seizure dog, etc.) and those that don't ("I get calmer when I pet him"). The latter is true for anyone! Why is there even a need for a certification? Either allow these pets or don't.
...There is a distinction. "Service animal" refers to only the former category, not the latter. ESAs do not fall under the legal category of "service animal", and are governed by different laws.
The optimal amount of fraud is not zero. The optimal amount of fake support animals is not zero. If seems to me that this could be rationalised as follows:
- psychiatrists (and other medical professionals) are only required to attest that the person has the problem in question -eliminating things they can't reasonably evaluate.
- ESA certificates can only be obtained from a professional who is actually treating you for that problem. .
- the safety and good behaviour of the animal must be evaluated by a licensed expert in the animal in question. Alternatively, this could be required only if someone raises the issue of whether the animal is will behaved and safe
This would reduce the problem of fake support animals, to those who are just pets of people who do have a real problem and just want to keep their pet, and those who are prepared to spend the effort to con a psychiatrist that they have a real problem. And for the former I have a lot of sympathy anyway, as even if the animal is not helping that much, being required to give up your pet is likely going to make your depression worse.
Fun fact: in my country, it is illegal for landlord to ban tenants from owning animals, "provided that doing so does not cause the landlord or other residents in the building inconvenience disproportionate to the conditions in the building. If keeping the pet results in increased costs for the maintenance of common areas in the building, the tenant shall reimburse these costs to the landlord." (literal translation of our Civil Code)
There is a so called "night calm period" from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., enforced by police fines. Admittedly, at least in the capital city, enforcement is somewhat light touch, though definitely existing; all public musical performances have to end by 10 p.m., and outdoor pub seatings are closed by that hour. But, like, don't move to Prague if you want quiet nights, even though people are bigger problem than dogs.
Calling police on barking dogs is, I think, somewhat contrary to Czech social norms, but if you call them, they will show up and have a word (maybe even fine) with the owner. It is a thing that sometimes happens; I just googled that there is at least one case where dog owner tried to get their fine thrown out in court, but failed.
Love. love. love. this. Could be the perfect opportunity to officially launch my business which is called Tree of Life Mental Health Services with its BOLD mission statement which is as follows: OUTCOMPETE AND CUT OUT ALL PSYCHIATRISTS FROM THEIR ASORTED RACKETS AND START MAKING SOME SERIOUS FUCKING COIN
"But do you really want your patient to lose their beloved Nagini just because you refused to write a letter that has no legal requirements and no downsides?"
There are downsides - just to OTHER people, not to the patient. I'm for example deathly afraid of snakes. So if someone with an ADHD approved snake sat next to me on an airplaine, I'd have to find a seat far away from that person or leave the flight. And that would cause a lot of anxiety.
If an emotional support cat gets seated on a flight next to someone that has a cat hair allergy, who has to leave the flight?
"So if someone with an ADHD approved snake sat next to me on an airplaine, I'd have to find a seat far away from that person or leave the flight. And that would cause a lot of anxiety."
This is why you need to get your Emotional Support Anxiety mongoose approved, so if the ADHD snake is seated beside you, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi can take it out!
You can join forces with the Californian ferret lady and she can update her billboards/website to "And also mongooses should be legal!" 😁
You have a genuine medical condition which only this specific animal can help with, the Disabilities Act should have your back. Emotional Support Mongooses for all!
Well you are going the easy route and not the responsible one. But this issue has reached insane levels and there really no way to single handedly fight it.
I really don't get it tbh. If anything I would get a little thrill from in expectation helping someone plus also screwing over the suits and landlords. I would take joy in writing the most dramatic letters ("In accordance with decades of best practice in emotional support animals, bo reasonable psychiatrist could refuse Walden his crucial support hamster. Depriving him of the support offered by this hamster would set his treatment back a decade and would be in contradiction with the vast bulk of the available scientific literature"). Okay, maybe not that over the top, it's got to be believable but you get the idea.
Am I just a psychopath with regards to the local issue of not respecting rules that I think are harmful or are you especially conscientious?
There is a difference between "this is an elderly/isolated/genuine problem person who needs the companionship and support of their pet" and "this is someone trying to get around the rules on 'no pets' by faking a disability".
I'm generally on the side of tenants versus landlords, but there are reasonable concerns for people renting out their property, and if they've had bad experiences with people keeping pets before (e.g. cats clawing furniture and stairs) then they're entitled to say "no pets here".
So a hamster? Probably not that big of a risk, especially if Walden really is reliant on Hammy for comfort. But if Walden is breeding and selling hamsters? Not so much. And if it's not a hamster but reptiles or spiders? Yeah, I'm sure you're very careful they never get out, Walden, but that's not something I want to risk my professional reputation on.
Okay, it's Florida, but I sympathise with landlords requiring "no king cobras in/on the property, please!"
Since 2006, FWC has investigated at least 45 snake escapes.
Of those, 19 involved Burmese pythons, the single-most reported escaped species over the past decade.
• In June 2015, workers discovered a nearly 9-foot Burmese python slithering around their construction site on US 192 in Kissimmee. No owner was identified.
• An 11-foot Burmese python with no identifiable owner was captured at an apartment complex on Walden Circle in Orlando in 2009.
• A 14-foot albino Burmese python became the largest snake to escape over the past decade when it got out of its cage on Summerland Key in 2007. The python was later found in a nearby bank parking lot.
The most horrific escape of a Burmese python occurred in July 2009, when 2-year-old Shaiunna Hare was strangled to death in her Sumter County home by a 9-foot snake belonging to her mother’s boyfriend. According to investigators, the malnourished python that asphyxiated and bit the sleeping child had escaped from a terrarium covered with only a quilt. Jason Darnell and the child’s mother, Jaren Hare, are now serving 12 years in state prison for aggravated manslaughter.
Besides the danger to small children and pets, FWC officials are also concerned about the impact Burmese pythons will have on Florida’s environment. The agency believes escaped or intentionally released pythons have contributed to the invasive snake’s explosive population in South Florida which could decimate native animal species there.
...Although most escaped snakes reported to FWC have been non-venomous, four cobras have gotten loose, including the one that slipped away from Michael Kennedy’s Orlando home in September 2015.
According to FWC’s escape report, a large tree limb that broke off during a storm damaged the roof of Kennedy’s garage, causing rain water to leak inside. The dripping water weakened the manufactured wood on the cobra’s cage, allowing it to push open a screen and slither out.
The king cobra was captured more than a month later when a neighbor heard a hissing sound in her garage coming from behind her clothes dryer.
FWC issued Kennedy a $366 fine for failing to report the cobra’s escape until the day after he discovered the 8-foot snake was missing. The agency is also seeking to revoke Kennedy’s permit to possess venomous reptiles, a move Kennedy is challenging.
Meanwhile, the state attorney has charged Kennedy with maintaining the cobra “in a manner and condition which resulted in escape from its enclosure, constituting a threat to public safety." Kennedy’s attorney is asking a judge to dismiss the misdemeanor charges, claiming the law is vague.
In 2001, FWC cited Kennedy after different cobra escaped from his previous home in Orlando’s College Park. A neighbor who found the snake in his garage shot and killed it."
I mean, would *you* write a letter of support for Mike and his cobras, because you want to screw over the suits and landlords and neighbours who object to hissing sounds from behind their dryers? I would not like to be the German apartment resident who encountered a venomous snake in the stairwell!
"The last incident with a dangerous wild animal occurred in Herne (NRW) on August 25, 2019: There, an escaping highly toxic monocle cobra kept the police and fire brigade's forces on the job for days. A resident had discovered the venomous snake in the stairwell of the apartment building. All 30 residents then had to leave their homes. Four houses had to be evacuated. Fortunately, the snake was caught in a garden by a reptile specialist after a few days. The city of Herne seized a total of 22 snakes in a young man's apartment. It is unclear who will bear the costs for the large-scale operation. Animal welfare and animal rights associations have been calling for the introduction of a dangerous animals law in NRW for years. It is not just about protecting people, because the private keeping of wild animals and exotic species is also a major problem for animals, the environment and species."
The last part is just not true, the vast majority of exotics pets has no potential to harm anyone and especially, in germany, no potential to harm the environment. Most reptiles, including most snakes, are completely harmless, nearly all of those that are not are illegal anyway , and they can't harm the ecosystem if they can't even survive a single winter outside. The proposed law in NRW is pure populism. The venomous snake was already illegal. Making other, harmless snakes illegal doesn't do anything. On top of that is ofc the fact that dogs kill so many more people pretty much everywhere and no one demands to ban all dogs or mammals. (not even all potentially deadly dogs, which is a lot of them. At best a couple of the most dangerous breeds are banned, if at all.)
It's not really a binary classification. There's a continuum of higher and lower trust societies. The US has degraded, but there's still plenty of room to fall -- there are _much_ worse places out there. There's also plenty of room to improve.
Each decision made by each person moves the society some tiny distance up or down the scale.
"I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on."
Oh, I see, you are just using high trust society as a proxy for wealthy, developed society.. And in doing so you are blithely skipping over correlation vs. causation questions and implicitly pushing your biased version of history.
You're assuming that low trust societies become that way because of the cumulative individual choices of ordinary citizens, and vice versa when it comes to HT society. And I'm saying that's BS (classically) liberal historiography. In a modern Westphalian state, the individual does not matter. Only a relative handful of elites make the choices that define the nature of society. The classical liberal story where every individual matters is a fairy story to keep the little people victim-blaming themselves for society's ills instead of blaming those in power.
...why bother with the psychiatrist or the certification mill? Just go to Amazon, buy a dog vest that reads "Service Animal" for $5, and pitch a fit if anyone asks you questions. ESA isn't just a racket, it's a racket within a scam - they don't get any special legal protections at all.
The website of one of the services Scott linked, which I am grudgingly going to admit is probably one of the less shady services out there, does caution the applicants:
"Are ESAs allowed in all public places?
ESAs are not entitled to the same public access rights as a service dog and are therefore not always allowed in all public places. A legitimate ESA letter entitles ESA owners to reasonable accommodation when it comes to housing and can also allow the individual to travel with their animal on ESA-friendly airlines. However, ESAs may not be allowed in certain establishments such as restaurants or hotels unless such businesses are already pet-friendly. "
But I agree that the kind of person who wants to have their pet classified as an Emotional Support Animal in order to get special treatment is more likely to ignore that a (legitimate) ESA is not the same as a Service Animal, and to demand that the restaurant/etc. let them in, and to dress them up in the vests and what-not to make it more convincing that this is a "real" "legal" service animal.
It seems that there is a distinction between service animals and emotional support animals, but I'm with Darkside007 that the people trying to/willing to game the system (maybe they've self-diagnosed that they have a Condition and so that means their pet is really a genuine service/support animal) won't care about the distinction and will try to force their way and threaten to take a court case:
"The Air Carrier Access Act went into effect in 1986 and prohibits discrimination in air travel on the basis of a person’s disability. This law requires air carriers to accommodate the needs of passengers with disabilities, including the accommodation of service animals. Because of the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA), service animals are permitted to ride in the airline cabin with their handler (provided the animal is not too large or too heavy) and a person with disabilities cannot be charged a pet fee when traveling with their service animal. This law applies to all flights of U.S. airlines as well as flights to or from the United States by foreign airlines.
Airlines may, however, request specific documentation and/or 48-hour advanced notice if a service dog is boarding a flight, such as an official document from a licensed mental health professional confirming an individual's mental or emotional disability and their need for their assistance animal.
For a psychiatric service dog, this document will take the form of a Psychiatric Service Dog Letter, also called a Psychiatric Service Dog Travel Letter. For emotional support animals, this document is commonly referred to as an ESA Letter, or more specifically, an ESA Travel Letter. The allowance of emotional support animals onboard flights varies from airline to airline, however, so travelers should always contact an airline in advance to confirm any policies or restrictions when it comes to emotional support dogs and other types of assistance animals. Travelers may also opt to book their flight with an ESA-friendly airline to better suit their travel needs.
If at any time, an airline staff member is violating a disabled person's rights under the ACAA, that individual has the right to speak with a Complaints Resolution Official (CRO). The U.S. Department of Transportation advises that "A CRO is the airline’s expert on disability accommodation issues. Airlines are required to make one available...at no cost, in person at the airport or by telephone during the times they are operating.
As of January 11, 2021, the U.S. Department of Transportation allows each individual airline to determine its own policies and regulations when it comes to emotional support animals.
While airlines such as Delta, United, and Air Canada no longer recognize emotional support animals as a type of assistance animal, these air carriers may still permit individuals to travel with their comfort animal as long as the individual pays a pet fee, the way pet owners typically do when traveling with a companion animal.
There may, however, be restrictions in place in terms of an animal’s weight, size, or breed, so ESA owners should always contact their airline of choice ahead of time for more information about the air carrier’s policies. Those with concerns can also opt to travel with one of several ESA-friendly airlines that still permit emotional support animals onboard flights. These airlines will require proper documentation (in the form of an ESA letter) in order to confirm that the animal’s presence is required to help with emotional conditions or a mental disability."
I see what you mean about the form, though; you can just write yourself in as the trainer of your "service" animal:
"The Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) of 1986 prohibits discrimination towards individuals based on their disability and their need for a service animal.
Because Psychiatric Service Dogs are considered service animals, this Act, which was passed by the U.S. Congress, also applies to them.
Thanks to the ACAA, your PSD is able to ride in the cabin with you whenever you need to travel via airplane. As a result, you don’t have to worry about your animal facing any dangers related to traveling via airline cargo.
When booking travel in advance (typically 48 hours or more), you’ll need to submit a U.S. Department of Transportation Service Animal Air Transportation Form.
The form asks for basic information such as your name, your assistance animal’s name, and a description of the animal. The form also asks you to attest to the animal’s health as well as their training and behavior.
The ADA allows owners to self-train their PSDs, so if this describes your situation, you can simply enter your own name into the Trainer section.
Once you sign and date this document, you’ll then need to submit it to the airline for validation. Usually, the airline will have a special portal on their website dedicated for this purpose. If you have any trouble locating the portal, be sure to contact the airline’s customer service team for assistance or for more information on ways to submit your document.
If you’re boarding a flight that’s 8 hours or more in duration, you’ll also need to complete and submit a U.S. Department of Transportation Relief Attestation Form.
This form asks for information about your flight (estimated duration, departure airport, arrival airport) and additionally asks for information on how your animal will relieve itself (either the service dog won’t have to relieve itself during the flight, or the animal has been trained to relieve itself in a sanitary manner, e.g. through the use of a dog diaper).
If you’re booking your travel less than 48 hours before departure, you can present both of the above forms at your airline’s check-in counter."
That information is inaccurate/outdated. DOT adopted new rules 5 years ago that absolved air carriers from having to transport support animals. However all that is required to bring an animal on board without the pet fee (and without it having to stay in the carrier) is to declare it a service animal. You self-certify, no medical provider letter is necessary.
This actually does work because people who were bringing Noah's Ark onto the plane tend not to also be people good at doing advance paperwork.
What's more annoying to me is when people get those fake "service dog" vests for air travel. Fake ESAs are bad enough but ultimately mostly just an inconvenience to everyone around them; while OTOH it actually does genuine harm to people with service dogs by faking one.
Because REAL service dogs are specially trained, and when they're in public, they're *working*. If normies start getting the idea that every service dog is just like a dog in the park, and they can go up and distract it and pet it and what not, that could lead to catastrophic results for the people who depend on them.
I was at a burger joint and there was a boxer so marked. My experience of boxers inclines me to think they are too stupid and primitive (I’m not happy unless your hand is in my mouth so I can taste it forever! I hate the left rear wheel of the lawnmower and will pursue it around the yard barking at it! I hate your cat and when she taunts me I will jump through the window screen to get at her! But I love you and when you pull up in your car I will jump up and rake my claws across the finish! I know where another couple boxers live and I will make my way into their house and jump in bed with their owners, whom I do not know - yet!) to be service dogs. But in any case, this particular boxer was clearly chomping at the bit to be off after the hundred things taking his fancy. It was kind of funny because your typical service dogs (well, in the past) tended to have a dignified, even chilly demeanor that did not encourage petting. Sometimes they even displayed a “no petting” sign.
But even the friendly ones, were pretty locked onto their owner when at rest.
As dogs often are, say on a restaurant patio. They often look steadfastly away from you, as if unwilling to risk their bond with the dude next to them that has the French fries. Sometimes they seem dismayed that their owner has not rewarded them with a look in five minutes - but that doesn’t mean they’re going to exchange pleasantries with you.
My favorite dogs are those that love humanity. These are usually country dogs, ranch dogs.
But re the service support boxer, we were joking that he’d be off like a shot, saying, “Uh, hope you feel better!”
Huh. You know how sometimes the best way to learn is to teach? And how helping other people with their problems can help you deal with your own? I wonder if dealing with a dog like this can help with low executive function, or something like that.
I don't know if it's new parenthood and the stresses that come with it, but I'm finding Scott's recent articles resonating more and more with me on the spiritual level of Grumpy 😀
I've long considered the "emotional support animal" thing a racket. Part of this is my natural tendency to go "what the heck is this new therapy-speak fad?" about "we used to call those 'pets', why do you need a fancy new name?", but part is also down to reading the people online boasting about how this One Weird Trick meant they were able to get their dog/hippo/crocodile onto the plane, or into the restaurant, or wherever by claiming it was an emotional support animal. There have been other posts on social media from people asking not to do this, as you can dress up your dog in a vest you can buy online with "emotional support animal" or the like on it, and the restaurant manager or airline rep has no idea if this is legit or not, and so they're afraid they might be sued and they let you bring the animal along.
And it's not trained, because it's a pet not a therapy animal, and it causes trouble. And this then poisons the well for people who genuinely *do* have therapy or support animals that have been properly trained, because now the restaurant or airline is sceptical and suspicious. "Yeah, you have a vest and a letter, but so did the last person, now take a hike".
It's a pity that it *has* to be a racket for legitimate doctors, where people do depend on pets for companionship but they're not technically "emotional support animals" or therapy/service animals, so you have the choice of "write a letter that I know is inaccurate" or turn the person down. The "pay us and we'll certify your emotional support rhino" sorts get a lot less sympathy and much more short shrift from me, and their clients with "I wanted to bring my sweet little pitbull Killer into the daycare centre but the meanies there were afraid for the kids - you nip at *one* toddler! - and so I need this letter".
For the genuine cases, I think it's better to err on the side of sympathy and write the letter, but also to tell the "this is my emotional support python" types to take a hike. EDIT: They can pay if they want the privilege, and I think it's a bit rich of one of the "pay us $200 and we'll write your letter" sites to be sniffy about "scam sites":
"Is a Registry Site or Emotional Support Animal Vest Required?
An individual does not need to register with any ‘national databases’ or ‘registry sites’ to prove their animal is an ESA. While many fraudulent sites claim that an ESA will need a registration number to validate its status, this isn’t in any way the case and is simply the rhetoric of typical ESA scams. All that’s required to confirm that an animal is an ESA is a legitimate ESA letter signed by a professional licensed in mental health.
However, many ESA owners still choose to outfit their animal in special vests or harnesses that clearly distinguish the animal from an ordinary pet. An ESA ID card is also a common item these individuals make it a point to have on hand. These items help communicate that a comfort animal is ‘on duty’ and therefore shouldn’t be disturbed. These items also help communicate to personnel such as a landlord or an airline staff member that the animal provides needed assistance that supports certain disabilities."
An anecdote from my time in social housing! My boss' boss used to be a social worker, and she regaled me with the tale from years back when she was working in Dublin. One client of hers was an elderly man living alone and he had been admitted to hospital for an emergency. When she went to see him, he was concerned about Flashdance. She eventually got it sorted out that Flashdance was his budgie, left alone in the home with nobody to look after it and since he'd been admitted to hospital so suddenly he hadn't been able to arrange care for it. So she went out to the guy's home, managed to talk some local police into helping her get in and retrieve the budgie, and pet and owner were eventually re-united. But ever after that, every time a police car passed her, someone would lean out the window and go "How's Flashdance?"
Oh boy, that website is a gold mine, and it's probably not even one of the scammier ones!
"Emotional support dogs are the most common type of comfort animal. This is because emotional support dogs tend to be easy to train and because dogs in general are typically allowed in a greater variety of places such as dog-friendly public parks and other dog-friendly locations. However, cats and rabbits can also be ESAs, as can miniature horses.
Exotic animals such as sugar gliders, snakes, and certain types of amphibians, birds, and insects can also be designated as an ESA. However, an exotic animal may not be entitled to the same reasonable accommodation as domestic animals. For instance, airlines that allow ESAs typically only permit dogs or cats onboard, as some animals (especially untrained ones) can pose a risk to public health. For these reasons, mental health professionals will typically recommend that an individual select a domestic animal as their ESA."
Ah, yes: the emotional support Shetland Pony. How unreasonable of the airlines not to permit those to travel along with their owners! Though having scoffed at it, seemingly miniature horses are indeed used as guide/companion animals. I still think it's slightly creepy to have deliberately bred such small animals, but there you go:
A big benefit of having a seeing eye miniature horse as opposed to seeing a dog is that horses live about two times longer, so you get a better ROI on all the training and investment in the animal.
There are also some people who use service animals to help them walk, and miniature horses are sturdier than dogs.
Of all the animals in the world, I feel like it's the only one who truly understands me. BRB, filling out an ESA form so that I can bring the Manul to the office where it will eat all the ESA bunnies and such.
I knew someone whose freshman roommate, assigned by the college, brought a dog to live with her in the dorm. In fact, it was so much still a puppy it was not fully house broken - thus it seemed unlikely it had had any special training in the support way - which was connected to a particular newly-defined ailment which I’ve forgotten, but which was felt to be dubious - not “senses a stroke” or something.
People love dogs, so even though this acquaintance was not thrilled about sharing a dorm room with a dog, and its messes, I am sure plenty of others would have been perfectly happy with it, or nearly so.
Still, it suggests an abandonment of common sense for the administrators to feel that a dorm was a good place for a dog, there being no yard to leave it in, and the job of taking it out multiple times a day seemingly incompatible with being a college student - if in fact college in this case involved more than living in a dorm with your dog.
How much would be solved by requiring a similar level of training for ESAs as service dogs. That is proven obedient and well behaved dogs are allowed almost anywhere but poorly behaved dogs are restricted
Thanks for the nice summary from the psychiatrist's perspective. But I don't think you do justice to the "racket" implications. I've had no personal exposure to emotional support animals either being allowed or disallowed, but there were some stories about emotional support emus, ostriches, turkeys, snakes, and alligators causing significant disruption (not to mention sanitation issues) on airlines. These stories seemed to me to be cases of people deliberately gaming the system - either because they were rich and wanted to show it, or because they wanted to pull a prank without concern for the effects on others.
Again, no personal experience, but I understand that airlines are now much less accommodating, which I think is a good thing.
Even a hundred years ago, many if not most people spent a LOT of time in contact with domesticated animals, because horses were big in transportation and there were a LOT more farmers. I tend to assume that things like the nine poodles I saw a guy walking on a leash the other day are in large part a replacement for tens of thousands of years of human evolution (genetic and cultural) spent hanging out with non-human animals.
I just sent this piece to my wife, who works in psychiatric epidemiology research (speaking of rackets, research funding is definitely one where taxpayers are concerned). It seems like it would be right in that field's wheelhouse.
The doctor letters are indeed a racket. I have a friend who daughters thought they'd like extra time writing the SAT etc. They had some doctor write a letter saying they have a disorder related to menstruation needing extra time on all tests.
Sociopaths, milking the system for some advantage. Not just the kids but the parents too. This is the type of upbringing that I think leads to creating an Elizabeth Holmes.
I hope they pay some price for it but maybe they never will. They'll get into politics or the like, get far, and run everyone else's lives too.
> Sociopaths, milking the system for some advantage.
The real problem is when enough of them get away with it that it no longer becomes so much of "you get an advantage if you do this" but rather "you need to do this or you're under a disadvantage compared to all the dishonest people who have normalized this form of cheating." ( https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-chump-effect )
My mother and sister got their yorkie emotional support certified after a referral from a friend so that they could travel with him and basically take him everywhere (supermarkets, restaurants, you name it, the dog was there). Neither of the has even been to a psychiatrist in their lives. The only one who needed any emotional support was the dog, who had extreme separation anxiety, was a general pain in the ass, and would piss everywhere.
Honestly, aren't all pets ESA's, otherwise why have one? I'm sure there people out there who love the smell of cat pee or knit sweaters from their huskie's shedded winter coat but most of us (grand, unsupported generalization) have pets because we get some sort of positive emotional feedback. Otherwise, they're farm animals.
I'm in favor of thwarting ESA requests whenever possible, not for the public's sake, but for the "patient*, to prevent them from burdening themselves with an obligation they can't afford.
The times I've had low-income acquaintances or coworkers worry about how their pet is going to fit into a current crisis are countless. "My job is making us to back to the office and I can't afford a doggy day care for my high-energy purebred!" "My cat ate part of an Ikea plastic plant and the vet wants $5,600 to remove the intestinal obstruction!" "My boyfriend kicked me out, I need to rent a room somewhere because I can't afford my own place and oh by the way I have two cats..." "I want to go on vacation to see my parents, but pet-setting is so expensive..."
These are all incredibly preventable issues: Don't own a pet if you don't have the disposable cash to support it *and* all the impacts owning it will have on your lifestyle.
So good of you to take these decisions out their poor, stressed hands and do the cost-benefit analyses for them. It's so frustrating when one's low-income acquaintances can't solve these simple problems for themselves, I'm sure they'll be very grateful for the help. You did do a cost-benefit analysis? No? Well, no matter. Once people know that you're in the business of preventing others from owning pets if you decide it doesn't fit the budget you haven't seen I'm sure they'll volunteer all the relevant information going forward. I doubt anyone would ever fail to mention the benefits they derive from their pets should they ever succumb to the desire to complain about unexpected expenses in front of you.
And yet pissing people off is not evidence justly welding power. My complaint is that assuming responsibility for someone else's decisions on the basis of very limited and biased information is actually pretty irresponsible.
And if someone really believes that someone they know is making their lives worse by having pets, the responsible thing to do is to tell them and risk actually pissing them off and complicating that relationship, not to kvetch about the irresponsibility of poor people in a forum where you anticipate a good reception.
OP is in favor of preventing people from having ESA allowances (like living in an apartment building they can afford) because it would prevent some poor people from owning pets, which they believe is good. I'm arguing against OP's wild overconfidence about what's good for other people, and their willingness to bar people from making this choice for themselves, on the basis that they hear people complain when things are expensive.
That said, I think it's quite rare that anyone is actually forced to put up with an animal they otherwise wouldn't because someone else has an ESA letter. The airplane situation is legitimately bonkers, but how often are people differentially bothered by ESA animals in apartments? These days, most of the time you see a dog in a public place like a restaurant, it's because the restaurant or store or whatever simply permits them. ESAs generally don't get special admission to stores and such, that's only legally required for service animals. Some people are happy to take advantage of the general confusion and other people's conflict aversion and buy a vest for their untrained pet and bring them everywhere, and I think these norm defectors (who not coincidentally have often defected on other norms) should be punished (with loud booing) for ruining things for everyone. It seems like all the negative externalities of pet ownership and especially pets in public have been blamed on ESAs in this thread and I don't think actual ESA animals are causing much of their consternation.
"OP is in favor of preventing people from having ESA allowances (like living in an apartment building they can afford) because it would prevent some poor people from owning pets, which they believe is good. I'm arguing against OP's wild overconfidence about what's good for other people, and their willingness to bar people from making this choice for themselves"
It's not a choice for themselves, though, it's a choice for other people. I think if you're demanding a restriction on other people's liberty in order to allegedly benefit you, they have every right to question that benefit.
"That said, I think it's quite rare that anyone is actually forced to put up with an animal they otherwise wouldn't because someone else has an ESA letter."
So should we amend the ADA to exclude ESAs? There is a common rhetorical technique of saying "we need law X; law X doesn't really do anything so all criticisms can be dismissed."
Could you elaborate on how getting an emotional support animal makes choices for othe people and infringes on their liberty? Regardless your answer, do you think that getting an ESA is more restrictive of liberty than prohibiting someone from having an ESA if they are poor, or denying ESAs as a matter of policy just because it leads to fewer poor people having pets?
I'm confused about your second point as the ADA does not consider ESAs service dogs and ADA protections don't apply. ESA laws apply at the local and state level and mostly concern housing discrimination. I don't have a strong opinion about whether they should be made more or less strict as a class. What I do have a strong opinion about is that there should be penalties for impersonation (imdogination?) of service animals that are actually enforced.
I’m not totally sure they’re even asking for pets so much as the city animal shelters and rescue groups put out constant appeals - clear the shelters days and so forth - to an impressionable public tenderhearted about animals.
Similarly there is an “everybody do your part and take a dog home today” mentality mixed with a lot of judgment about how the people who’ve taken those dogs home, treat them - eg reporting when dogs are left in yards to bark, calling the police when an animal is in a car with the windows partway down on a warm day, picking fights with people who let their dogs run the green belt trail off leash (which is technically, letting their dogs have some fun).
Taking on an optional animal dependent that one *predictably* can't afford to properly care for is irresponsible and, ideally, should be as difficult as possible.
I like dogs so much that I don't have one, because I am single, don't have anyone else to help me routinely care for a dog when I work late and travel, and I don't have the (functionally) unlimited funds to spend on veterinary care should they need one and/or have pet-sitting or doggy daycare were my job situation to change.
And thank *FUCK* for that, because my condo was damaged by a sprinkler break caused by a regional catastrophe and my insurance company refuses to pay for me to live elsewhere because my bathroom is still usable even if the rest of the living space is not. And thus, for months, I've been living in the basement unit of very generous friends, who welcomed me but would not have welcomed my dog.
And I've breathed many sighs of relief that I don't have the dog I long for, because I'm a more responsible "too-poor-for-a-pet" person than my peers who give into the temptation to get a pet they can't afford.
As to your comment below, I have in fact urged "poor" people thinking about getting a pet not to do it, citing the ways it is likely to be severely complicate many of life's common challenges.
There's no point in saying that to people *after* they've gotten a pet.
> Taking on an optional animal dependent that one *predictably* can't afford to properly care for is irresponsible and, ideally, should be as difficult as possible
I agree that it is irresponsible to adopt a pet you can't afford. Our disagreement is about what kinds of actions are appropriate for others to take to try to prevent that outcome. Since you can't selectively make a process more difficult only for the people whose designation is the intended outcome of the process--you can't make it "as difficult as possible" only for people who shouldn't have pets to get pets if the point of the difficulty is to prevent those people but not others from having pets--what barriers to pet ownership do you propose as a matter of public policy, in the same spirit that led you to recommend Scott deny ESA requests as a matter of personal policy?
Sure! I'd be totally up for animal shelter having income-based requirements.
*Responsible* dog and cat breeders will verify a potential owner's financial stability, and some even require a home inspection prior to handing over a puppy or kitten. I'd be up for that as an industry standard or even regulation as well.
There would always be stray animals and scofflaws, of course, but I wouldn't let "perfect" be the enemy of "good" here, had I a magic wand.
I agree that a check of financial stability could be reasonable, but the devil is in the details. You described the money necessary to care for an animal responsibly as "functionally unlimited". Roughly how much money do you think a person needs to make/have access to to be a responsible pet owner? A higher bar means you can feel more confident that an individual pet will have a good outcome, but it also means fewer pets will be adopted and more will be euthanized.
Well, my phrasing about veterinary bills being "functionally unlimited" was a bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary on the sky-rocketing costs of American veterinary care now that so much of it has been rolled up by private equity firms.
I'm not a finance expert and don't want to be drawn into naming a specific number, but off the top of my head, probably whatever the updated number of that "people don't get any additional happiness from making additional money over $70,000" study would be.
In other words, enough money that routine financial stress isn't a thing (no month to month worry about paying routine bills), and common unexpected emergencies can be absorbed either by income or an emergency fund without great concern about the immediate or long-term future.
For example, my ex-boyfriend's two year old shelter rescue cat ate part of a lily in a bouquet of fresh flowers, severely poisoning himself. He was in the vet equivalent of an ICU for like two weeks, had follow up visits for testing and shots weekly for like three months, then the appointments moved to once a month, and then will need tests every six months for the rest of his life. His food had to be switched to an expensive formula for his permanently damaged kidneys (or maybe it was his liver?).
My ex is wealthy enough that none of the stress of this event was financial. He certainly would have preferred to not have to spend that kind of money on veterinary care, but he had ability to do so without negatively impacting his financial health.
That's about where someone should be in order to have a pet (or at least, one they are prepared to euthanize rather than take on crippling veterinary bills, but many/most people aren't emotionally capable of doing that).
I'm not at his financial level, which is why I don't have pets. Yes, a non-zero number of the pets-I-didn't-have were euthanized in the years I've made the sometimes tough choice not to have a pet, but that doesn't override my obligation to myself to not take on an obligation I can't easily afford.
The BIG STAKES game was the draft, (for) now, defunct. Donald Trump beat it with bone spurs. Many of the rest of us took the rifle, not willingly in most (my) case. Certain doctors benefitted richly. Their patients are among us today.
As a former landlord in Georgia, I can tell you ESAs only serve to skirt around pet charges and bans. We allowed pets for a charge. The ESA lets them have a pet with no charge. (You also can't refer to them as pets, because that is offensive or discriminatory or something.) We limit breeds and size, the ESAs allow pit bulls for everyone. The ESA gets the animal in the door, however, the tenant still has to abide by laws like leash laws and noise ordinances. However, I had no luck trying to evict a resident who refuses to abide by the rules with her ESA pit bull that scares all of the children in the community. Did I mention that if that pit bull bites someone else on property, I would be sued for not taking proper precaution to protect that other resident/guest? Yeah, that's why I am a FORMER landlord. You can't price that lawsuit into your monthly rent or pet charge.
“But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep”
This reminds of grade inflation and teaching: in theory we want rigorous teaching and honest evaluation of students. In practice, when I taught undergrads, all the incentives ran towards grade inflation: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/. I was a gatekeeper for grading but no one had any actual interest in whether the grades I or anyone else gave reflected much of anything.
Students not surprisingly prefer higher grades to lower ones.
> Colleges mostly know that the students will pay tuition (or rather, their parents and their loan originators will) if they are happy with the educational product, and professors know they are more likely to keep getting paid if they have fewer student complaints rather than more. Colleges have set up programs that are designed to graduate students with limited skills but real tuition money.
IMO this is the root of the problem. Colleges have a severely perverse incentive here, as they're entirely unaccountable for the results of failing to educate students. If they were on the hook for 50% of any student loan default, you'd see a lot of improvements in selectivity and educational quality being made out of sheer self-interest.
I was thinking that there was potentially some useful space between "bring in police to (simultaneously) thrill and harass campus protesters" (admittedly some half at least are probably not students) and give them the grades they actually earn by doing activism around the clock instead of whatever their schoolwork is.
True, they are probably not enrolled in very difficult courses - and their professors are probably only too ready to give them extra credit for protesting, as they once gave extra credit for *voting* (!) when I worked at a poll in the big university library and discovered the kids were happy to stand in line for 3 hours watching Netflix on their phones, to get this quick A.
So maybe it would make no difference, but I was thinking it was a sign of our affluence that we can basically pay for kids to attend college, and pay for them not to attend but rather to protest, and then give them grades they've not earned - because the system is set up not to fail anyone.
A thought about incentives: the university rankings should reward high fail rates rather than (or in addition to) high selectivity.
If Harvard had an 80% failure rate, but people were still lining up to get into Harvard, it should mean that a Harvard degree was very prestigious indeed.
This does have to be adjusted for the student body: a community college could easily get a failure rate that high. I think part of the problem with grade inflation at elite universities is that the students there are expecting to be graded as if the other students were completely representative of the rest of the country (which means they'd get an A, of course, just like they did everywhere else).
The only problem here appears to be cost and its consequent disparities. I'm very happy there are measures in place to restrict people's ability to impose on others with their beloved nuisances, and suspect removing these barriers would simply result in a new office pet daycare racket. In fact, I wouldn't mind making pet ownership and distribution more annoying to achieve universally. There's an awful excess of irresponsible and net-negative pet ownership out there.
> Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.
I can't help but wonder, is there any research on the opposite effect? A mentally healthy, emotionally stable person like myself, who also owns a cat, finding that it does somewhat *increase* anxiety because she just doesn't learn to get out of the way of people's feet when they're walking, to keep claws tightly sheathed at all times when being cuddled, to stay away from food being prepared, etc...
Pets contribute heavily to my (post-traumatic) anxiety because they are ANOTHER creature (in addition to humans, but at least in the developed world nowadays the humans dependent on you are not likely to die on you unless you're a doctor or adjacent) likely to die on my watch. Nothing makes you realise that you can't save anyone than sharing your life with a small, relatively or completely helpless being whose natural lifespan is a quarter of human's. I completely fail to understand how depressed/anxious people don't get affected by this.
Meh. That one doesn't bother me too much; that's just life. When I was in elementary school, we had a few outdoor cats that I loved very much. One day, one of them got hit by a car while I was at school. My parents never tried to cover up the truth. They didn't say that he'd been sent away to a farm upstate (that would have been tricky to pull off, as we were living on a farm at the time!) or any of the other pleasant lies you hear about in such situations; they told me he'd been hit by a car, and let me see the body. I had a good cry, and then I dug a hole and buried him, and eventually got over it.
The thing that bugs me is when the pets are too dumb for their own good. I strive to be someone who lives a good, moral life and does no harm. But both my wife and I have accidentally stepped on or kicked our cat multiple different times, because being human, we don't have 100% perfect awareness of our surroundings at all times, and the kitty just cannot seem to learn to STAY AWAY FROM THE FREAKING FEET! And I find that inability to learn irrationally irritating. I know she's going to die in a few short years, and I'm OK with that, but I don't want to be the cause of it, even accidentally!
That's very sane, and I used to be like that most of my life before my brain broke, but yes, the "you stupid cat, don't make ME be the cause of your demise" definitely loads on that ;)
My general point tho was that pets are not unequivocally emotionally beneficial for everyone, in various ways.
> and the kitty just cannot seem to learn to STAY AWAY FROM THE FREAKING FEET!
Huh, the cats I grew up with learned rapidly which set of maneuvers in "being underfoot" were safe and which weren't, but maybe that was from being around children? I don't think either of them was particularly smart...
In my experience many cats should by all rights have gotten stepped on, but the only way to teach them that is *by stepping on them*, and if you are obviously not taking care not to hurt the cat, then *you* are the bad guy, right? So they don't learn. Children are an exception because they might step on the cat but then *they* get a pass for being children; they aren't expected to know better either.
> Sorry, I refuse to believe a snake can help you with ADHD, unless it’s one of those talking snakes from Harry Potter and it whispers “Concccccentrate . . . conccccccentrate” in your ears every time you start slacking off.
I should point out that the Harry Potter mythology is very clear that all snakes do this, and what's different about Harry is that he can understand them.
I will stan for snakes as being great pets, BUT there is no "daily routine" needed. They only eat at most once a week, sometimes far less (they can and will happily go months without eating in the winter), and their enclosures need minimal upkeep. I guess they can very rarely escape, which can be a problem in a landlord-type situation, but other than that there's really no reason they should be banned as pets in apartments (except for the venomous ones, of course).
I feel like there are a fair amount of cases like this. I was recently diagnosed with TMJ (after months of ENTs saying I should put drops in my ears to fix my problem). I got a scan and am having an appliance made up that will correct my jaw problem, eventually. For the last 4 months I've had to wear an OTC mouthguard and take an opiate in order to be able to sleep. Otherwise the pain was too intense. The TMJ doctor said I should get Botox because it would provide immediate relief (2-3 days) and last for 3-5 months. This would include the 8 weeks it will take for me to get the appliance. Great! Except, insurance cannot cover Botox because if it did, everyone who wanted it for cosmetic reasons would get a TMJ diagnosis and have their insurance cover their Botox. So I have to pay $1K out of pocket in order to stop taking a narcotic to sleep at night. Because people want Botox (or pets with them all the time), the system deforms to either allow (pets) or not pay for something with actual medical value (Botox to treat TMJ) because doctors don't want to be hated and get paid for services.
People should wear motorcycle helmets. There's a law requiring it, same as seatbelts. But there are some diagnoses where it may be bad for you to wear a motorcycle helmet, like certain rare severe forms of dandruff.
Outlaw bikers don't like wearing helmets. And _weirdly_, so, so many of them turn out to have these rare severe forms of dandruff, at least according to their physicians.
Historically, refugees have oddly developed just the right psychiatric afflictions where they can't be deported, as well.
I assume medical marijuana prescriptions work(ed) the same in the U.S.?
Essentially, it's an insane idea to believe that physicians can be trusted with this. Even if some (or for teh really optimistic, most) might have integrity enough to cause annoyance and lose patients for no strong reason, you will automatically get the rubber-stampers that people will turn to for their piece of paper.
The simple solution is for the law to say, "if you're not capable of wearing a helmet due to weird medical conditions, then don't ride a motorcycle." I don't see this as being any less reasonable than the actual laws that say "if you're not capable of driving due to blindness, don't drive." Motorcycle operation is not an inalienable human right.
Oh yes, I’m in a state with medical marijuana… All you have to do is go to a doctor, pay a few hundred, and say you feel anxious or whatever. I don’t think you need any official psychiatric diagnosis. You can see signs advertising the service in the sides of roads sometimes.
Legally, it’s a racket. In order to benefit from these rules, you need for a psychiatrist to write you an “emotional support animal letter”, saying that your pet is actually an emotional support animal. In theory, the psychiatrist should evaluate you carefully, using their vast expertise to distinguish between an emotional support animal and a normal pet. In practice, nobody has a rubric for this evaluation that makes sense. I’m not saying there aren’t long, scholarly-sounding papers with twenty-seven authors from the psychiatry departments of top medical schools called things like A Rubric For The Emotional Support Animal Evaluation That Makes Sense. I’m saying that when you take out all the legalese, the executive summary is “think really hard about whether this animal really helps this person, then think really hard about whether it will cause trouble, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble, sign the letter”.
This applies to all sorts of human endeavors, not just emotional support animals, not just psychiatry, but all sorts of things.
To give an example, the courts have adopted a simple 13 factor balancing test for determining whether a mark described in a given trademark application is likely to be confused with an existing registered mark. Taking into account the number of registered marks and the volume of applications, as a practical matter, this test boils down to a judgment call on the part of the trademark examiner using a similar heuristic as the psychiatrist in your example.
I don't think I'll ever be able to read about pointless bureaucracy without thinking of sociopolitical collapse again (https://www.elidourado.com/p/collapse).
** I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever. **
This seems fairly easy. Choose one of the other options you listed. You then explain your position to the client. And (then maybe) hand them a list of places that will write the letter for $100. And say you will reimburse them $50 of the cost when they bring the letter to you office next time. The $50 is what you pay to save your soul.
Maybe a mandatory training course? Sure, runs into the problem of needing to have free time, but having a well trained service animal seems important and if Fido really is a good boy like you say, passing a course shouldn’t be hard. Although one of my friends has a pit bull who must be muzzled outdoors at all times even though he’s a sweetheart who would never hurt a human.
Scott, why not write the same article about testing accommodations?
If you're a student with anxiety or ADHD or another condition that affects your schoolwork, schools (and other testing providers like the people who run SAT, iirc) are required to accommodate your disability. In theory this could take many forms. (I once had a diabetic student whose accommodation allowed her to eat in the classroom if necessary.) In practice it almost always takes the form of extra time on tests.
The default is 1.5x time on tests, but I've heard anecdotal reports of accommodations going up to 3x time. (Berkeley is always an outlier...)
I heard from a friend who went to a fancy private school that everyone whose SAT score was too low was automatically sent to the school psychologist to be evaluated for disabilities. Meanwhile, I've done some informal polling and it seems that most people aren't even aware this option exists...
Ability and aptitude are the same thing. If you have a dis-ability it means you have a low aptitude. The idea that having a low aptitude should qualify you to get more time on your aptitude test because otherwise you might score low for aptitude is mind-blowing to me.
I disagree. Now, I do think that in a lot of cases, people are gaming the system, and this tends to benefit the wealthy and well-connected.
But some accommodations on standardized tests strike me as perfectly reasonable. I wouldn't object to a blind person getting a test in braille or some sort of auditory format. It should be fine for a kid with a broken wrist to have a scribe or typist on an AP exam.
I admit it gets murkier when you get into these extended time cases for people with ADHD or dyslexia or something like that. Let's say you have two kids taking the ACT. One has dyslexia, one doesn't. Under normal time conditions, they both get a 25. Give them both extended time, and the one without dyslexia doesn't benefit that much (maybe he goes up to a 27), since he has less trouble reading quickly. The one with dyslexia gets a 30, because the extra time is more beneficial. Wouldn't that suggest that the person with dyslexia has more "aptitude" than the person without it?
I found one study from College Board about extended time: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563027.pdf . It seems, unsurprisingly, that smarter kids (learning-disabled or not) benefit from extra time, but the not-so-smart kids don't (because even with extra time, they don't know how to figure out the answers). And it also seems that the high-ability learning-disabled students benefit more from 1.5x time than the high-ability non-learning-disabled students. So I do think there's a real benefit in the extra time for students with learning disabilities, beyond just the basic advantage of having more time.
Anecdotally, I've taught a few kids with dyslexia and it seems fair to me to adjust for that in either giving the standardized tests themselves, or in interpreting those results in the college admissions process.
I do think that there's a point where the extra time doesn't make sense due to the purposes of the test. For example, I strongly support extra time for dyslexic kids on reading standardized tests to complete middle school. However, it is pretty clear to me that the Putnam shouldn't have an extra time option. The SAT and GRE are in the middle, and I'm leaning towards no for the GRE.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who was a fellow math major in college, but who took really long with reading and with problem sets. He was evaluated for learning disabilities his senior year and was diagnosed with "slow processing speed," with corresponding extended time on the GRE. He earned a decent score (and much higher than he would've without extra time) and was admitted to one of the UCs for a math PhD. He quickly realized he was in over his head and that he was continuing to take much longer than classmates on problem sets, which was now becoming an untenable situation combined with TA and research obligations.
At a certain point, speed is part of aptitude and once you're getting to graduate admissions, that is useful information. I lean towards no extra time on the SAT either, especially with stories of how few people are actually told they don't need extra time when they get an expensive evaluation from a private psychologist.
I have some bias on this topic, because I have a fast processing speed and have never had issues with the time limit for exams, and like most people I like to think that things I am particularly good at are valuable things.
You mention blindness and broken wrists. I think that's a major red herring
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of students with accommodations have extra time on exams -- on a quick scan, it looks like about 80% of students. Only a very, very small fraction of students with accommodations have visible physical disabilities.
I think it's dangerous to take moral intuitions about wheelchair ramps and braille and apply them in this completely different situation.
I skimmed that College Board paper and it looks like a morass of bad statistics. They are trying to determine whether non-disabled students benenfit from extra time. This is the right question!
If extra time benefits all students, it seems to me very unfair to only give it to some students. If extra time benefits all students but some students (e.g. dyslexic students) more, it still strikes me as unfair. "Should tests be designed with more time built in" might be a good policy question in that case.
Your reading of the paper is that extra time does benefit non-disabled students (at least the "smart" ones). If this is true I very disagree with your conclusion on what's fair. You're just giving an advantage to some students but not others.
But... I think when you find papers showing things like "smarter kids benefit, but less-smart kids don't"... it's a sign of bad statistics. The authors here tested a huge number of hypotheses. The test was broken into four sections (two math and two verbal); they tested four testing conditions (1x time, 1.5x with sections, 1.5x without sections, 2x); they tested their hypothesis separately on many disagreegated subgroups. A part of the paper's conclusion tells us that:
-- high- and medium-aptitude students both disabled and nondisabled benefit from extra time, but
-- disabled low-aptitude students may be harmed by extra time
which sounds to me like precisely the sort of nonsense you get when you try to milk too little data for too much information.
Those conclusions don't strike me as nonsense at all. I've taught ACT/SAT prep to high schoolers and some weak students aren't going to benefit from extra time at all. They didn't do any better in a practice setup with no time pressure. If you have no idea what's going on with a particular problem, you aren't going to get the answer, except with a lucky guess. (But a better student could maybe use the extra time to backsolve from the answer choices, or eliminate at least some of the choices, etc.) I'm sure there are many people who know more about statistics than I do. I don't know all of the flaws the paper may have.
On the larger philosophical point, I don't think it's wrong to have the learning-disabled students benefit more from extra time. I think you get a better feel for a high school student's underlying "aptitude" if the time pressure is reduced somewhat, especially for someone with any sort of learning disability. Now, there may be some fields in which processing speed really is more important than depth of knowledge, but in many, many jobs that require a college degree I don't think that's the case.
A perfect standardized test would have infinitely many questions, but obviously that's not practical. So the test makers have to reduce the number of items. And I do think processing speed has its uses; ceteris paribus, someone who gets 10/10 in 10 minutes is probably smarter than someone who gets 10/10 in 15 minutes. So test makers also have to balance how much they want to use time pressure.
It is not true that airlines have to accept ESAs. They can do so, just like they can allow pets if they want to, but they are free to treat them no differently than pets (which is after all what they are) and charge you the permission.
This comment surprised me, but apparently this is a fairly recent change. Airlines (in the US) were required to accommodate ESAs starting around 1990 (when the implementing regulations for the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 were published). This lasted until 2021, when there was a rule change reverting this, apparently in response to pressure from the airlines and the public.
A similar dynamic turns up with transgender healthcare (in liberal coastal cities in the 2020s). From the '60s through to about the 2010s, the functions of gatekeeping trans healthcare were: avoid getting sued, prevent people from transitioning if they would later regret it, and prevent people from transitioning if they would creep people out with how they looked after transitioning. Another way to summarize that is "reducing risk to the provider, to the patient, and to the public."
Now, in liberal coastal American cities, I think providers have relinquished responsibility towards the public (they still ask if your spouse and family are supportive, but I don't know what they do if you say no); many providers have switched to an informed consent model regarding risks to the patient, obligating you to sit and listen while they explain what the treatment will do, then asking if you still want it, but forbidding treatment in rare cases; and risk to the provider is still a priority. Surgeries require a big stack of these form letters, which I figure is because plastic surgeons get sued more often than endocrinologists (but I do want to double-check that guess).
Emotional support animals seem to involve more potential harm to the public, like you mentioned, and Adderall seems to involve greater risk to the patient (you can get addicted, and the odds of heart trouble are greater).
If this works with animals, I don't see why it wouldn't work with objects, too. Like whose anxiety wouldn't be calmed by being able to carry a weapon all the time? Can I claim a TSA exemption at the airport for my emotional support katana? Should I start a website offering ESG (Emotional Support Glock) letters?
> Can I claim a TSA exemption at the airport for my emotional support katana? Should I start a website offering ESG (Emotional Support Glock) letters?
Please, yes! It's brilliant. Do this as performance art if nothing else.
I mean, inevitably somebody is going to push it to the point of "I, a definitionally mentally ill or unstable person, NEED to carry a BSL-4 level aerosolizing plague container with me at all times to assuage my crippling social anxiety and depression / post-modern anomie."
And this is exactly as it should be. Not enough bureaucracy is tested to the breaking point.
We lived in a ground floor apartment for 3 years. The building has long had a "no pets" policy. We've wanted a pet for some time but love our apartment (pet-free buildings are clean and relatively quiet, after all!) and considered this an acceptable tradeoff until we're ready to buy.
We recently moved up one floor, directly over our old unit. The new tenant below us moved in with a dog. We're on good terms with our landlord who also lives on site. We inquired about this and were told the dog was a "last minute surprise" and they had to allow it because it was a support animal.
While I have little reason to believe, other than spite, that this person is taking advantage of ESA rules, the ease of obtaining ESA certification has clearly resulted in a situation where it's impossible to distinguish between good honest pet-wanting people, and bad lying pet owners. Maybe more lax housing rules about common pets like cats and dogs would be a net positive for renters in a housing shortage - but given the increased burden that would place on landlords (litigating endless complaints and property damage issues) I suspect tenants and property managers will continue to play cat and mouse.
I initially wrote the below as a message on the discord, which is why it appears to be responding to someone.
[person wonders why Scott Alexander approves of bringing a hairdryer to work to cope with OCD, but dislikes the ESA racket].
I share Scott's approval of bringing the hairdryer, and his distaste for the ESA racket. While I cannot speak for him, I can provide my own reasoning, and perhaps that will provide some insight.
The distinction, in my view, is one of incentives and externalities.
Most people don't want to bring their hairdryers to work with them with no intention of using it, so if there was a rule that you could be allowed to bring your hairdryer to work, iff a doctor said you had a legitimate medical need to bring it, that wouldn't incentivize specious claims of medical need.
However, loads of people want to bring their pets to restaurants and on airplanes, and into apartments that are supposed to be petfree. Many of those would *love* to get out of the cost of pet rent (300/year on the low end) for the cost of a specious ESA certification (100 dollars on the higher end. Free if you find an indulgent psychiatrist and your health insurance doesn't charge a copay for the visit).
And the externalities of bringing your hairdryer with you everywhere you go are minimal to nonexistent. If a purse is no problem, an unplugged hairdryer is no problem.
The externalities of bringing (potentially a poorly trained, incontinent, or aggressive) dog are much more severe. Even if the dog is well-trained, fully housebroken, and completely docile and silent, some people have allergies so severe they can't be in a confined space with a dog for any length of time. If you have an ESA and an allergic person on the same flight, someone has to get bumped.
The externalities of service animals for the disabled were trivial when service animals were essentially only a thing for the blind, and they were so expensive to train that your chance of meeting one was almost nil.
The externalities of ESAs, when petowners can save upwards of 200 dollars a year by being dishonest, are much greater.
I have a fairly simple, easy to implement, low-cost fix for the ESA problem, which would (mostly) put an end to the perverse incentives that created it in the first place, without ruining the lives of people who actually need ESAs.
Insurance.
Require a 100k USD liability insurance package for each ESA or support animal, and require that anyone seeking accommodations present proof of that insurance before they can require accommodations.
The cost of that insurance for a fully-trained seeing eye dog would be a rounding error in the total cost of having one in the first place.
The cost of that insurance for a completely untrained pit bull that has already drawn blood from two people would be prohibitively expensive.
The cost for a well-behaved, moderately-trained chihuahua would be somewhere in the middle, and whether or not it is worth it to the owner would depend upon how much the owner actually needs it.
The insurance model would even allow people who believe they would benefit from an ESA to cut out the middleman of a doctor.
If I had a pet snake that helped my ADHD, no doctor need assess if I 'actually' 'have' 'ADHD', or if the snake actually helps. Some actuary at state farm, or progressive, or geico can look at the risks, say 'ball pythons are docile, clean, hypoallergenic, and couldn't seriously hurt even a child even in the worst case scenario', and write me a policy that would cost less than my adderall copays.
And if the snake truly helped, I'd pay the premiums with a smile.
And any airline, restaurant, landlord, hotelier, or school from whom I request accommodations doesn't have to worry about the law forcing them to give free, high-risk services to anyone with a pet who tells them the correct unverifiable lies. They can just ask to see your insurance card, and that's the end of it.
I think this neglects many downsides to pets and assumes that pet owners are more conscientious than is probably typical.
1. Many people neglect their pets, at least to the extent that they do not train them properly. Fido may seem good to you, but he spends the whole night barking keeping the neighbors up.
2. People are lazy and do not clean up after their pets. Depressed people may like having the cat around, but depressed people also find it difficult to have the energy to empty the litter box, so their apartment smells like cat pee. The sidewalk in front of my apartment building in a large city is constantly covered in dog poop, because even though 99% of people pick it up, the 1% who don't are still a lot of dogs.
3. Animal allergies are very common. Why should the airline prioritize someone's emotional support animal over a different persons dog allergy? At least the dog allergy is demonstrably true, whereas the benefit of the emotional support animal is, as you imply in this article, probably nonsense.
"Many people neglect their pets, at least to the extent that they do not train them properly. Fido may seem good to you, but he spends the whole night barking keeping the neighbors up."
Yes, this is a problem for local authorities. Going by memories of the situation over here, a dog warden can't legally enter a dwelling (which means house and garden) unless there's a court order and accompanied by a police officer.
So what happens is: neighbours ring up the council complaining about barking dogs, dogs wandering around, guy keeping lots of dogs.
Dog warden goes out to inspect but of course can't legally enter the house or back yard. So reduced to trying to see if he can spot loose dogs, or asking owner of property "do you have dogs?"
Owner can (and does) lie about "no", "only a couple", "oh those dogs? not my dogs, no idea who owns them".
Dog warden then has to leave, and in many cases it's impossible to prove that the sixteen dogs wandering around belong to this guy. So neighbours are pissed off at the council, but nothing we can do. If the guy *is* breeding and selling dogs, what he will do is move the most of them off the property for a while so if the warden comes back with legal warrant, there's only two dogs on the property and there we go, I told you so.
It's the same with restricted breeds. These change over the years and what was once regarded as an aggressive dog is now more regarded as a family pet, so people agitate for them to be taken off the lists. What tends to happen is:
(1) Big/exotic dog breed becomes trendy
(2) People get them, including the bad/irresponsible owners
(3) The dogs of the bad owners get into trouble, e.g neighbours are scared of them (because the idiot owners like the idea of being 'in charge' of a big, aggressive, animal and encourage the dog to bark and growl and snap at others)
(4) Eventually there's a case where one of the breed attacks another dog or child or person
(5) Calls for banning
(6) Breed is added to Restricted Breed list as one you can't own if you're in social housing
(7) After a couple of years, a new big/exotic dog breed becomes trendy
(8) Rinse and repeat
It happened with Alsatians, it happened with Dobermans, it happened with Rottweilers, it happened with Akitas, it's happening with Pitbulls and now the new trendy breed of American XL Bully.
And of course people owning the new trendy breed point out "but Alsatians are perfectly acceptable now, but they're still banned, even though they shouldn't be; same applies to my Bloodripper Wolfuskybantiff Cross!" You, the responsible owner, may indeed be able to control and take care of your dog which is well-controlled and not aggressive, but the unhappy fact remains that "Well do we really need these kinds of bans? Just let people be reasonable" forgets the unreasonable people, who *won't* be careful and who *do* go "Make me" so you have to draw up bye-laws and regulations and ban all instances of the breed.
The unreasonable include the types who insist their big dog is a total sweetie who wouldn't hurt a fly, right up to the moment the dog snaps and rips their face off.
I don't care how much you go on about the dog being loyal, cute and playful, if you're ranking them based on "psi bite force" I'm thinking they go right on that list. And you're gonna get your face ripped off, never mind all the puns in the world about "their pawrific jaws".
"they fit nicely with a human family who understands their need for play, work and consistent routines filled with affection."
Translation: they need lots of space, lots of exercise to tire them out and keep them occupied, you better stay on top of their behaviour every minute, and for God's sake keep the kids well away from them.
This would be less of an issue if clinicians were able to incorporate service animals into treatment plans in a way that led to the mitigation of symptoms rather than just their apparent amelioration. But clinicians are no longer trained to use basic behavioral principles. As a result, too few of them know how to use the reinforcing properties of the animal's relationship, much less the animal's (often superior) ability to discriminate treatment relevant stimuli, to influence the patient's behavior and actually improve their outcome. Instead, our profession is left in the position of uncertainly condoning pet-assisted avoidance repertoires, and society clearly sees this. Of course they're annoyed.
Getting a blowjob always wildly improves my mental health which is why I need to have an emotional support prostitute with me at all times in case of a mental health emergency.
I guess it is a general issue that when there's a behavior society has a general (and perhaps unprincipled) opposition to, but not quite strong enough to outright ban, we compromise by "soft banning" it with exceptions that "everyone" knows can be circumvented with a little effort and arm-twisting.
Except not "everyone" really know this -- people who are connected and have resources can get the required exceptions, others may not.
And this creates a kind of inequality.
One secondary effect for scrupulous people with resources is that they may be reluctant to claim exceptions they truly are entitled to. Am I receiving this accommodation because I deserve it, or because I'm privileged and skilled at navigating beauracracies? I, for, one, don't always feel great about benefitting from the latter.
I think that that ESAs are likely helpful, but certain breeds and species have vastly different distances from the Pareto frontier.
Not being an expert on animals, it seems like dogs are probably the most intelligent non-exotic pets. Followed by cats, then smaller mammals like rats, guinea pigs and the like. Intelligence seems helpful for forming bonds.
Mammals -- including humans -- are hard-wired for cuddling. It is in the very word pet. I have a hard time seeing non-mammals on the Pareto frontier of being a good ESA while also minimizing the costs imposed on the animal, the human and broader society. I don't suppose birds, reptiles, amphibians, or fish are equally cuddly.
The failure mode of ESAs seems people getting an exotic pet to signal what a uniquely special snowflake they are. This is not His Dark Materials, nor is an ESA some kind of soul animal. An emotional support alligator seems as absurd as an emotional support Kalashnikov.
That being said, I don't think what kind of quiet, non-dangerous animal you keep in your flat should be your landlords business.
Personally, I sometimes have nightmares about owning a pet and failing to provide adequately for them, so I will stick to potted plants.
Let me clarify. I am not saying that it is impossible for a human to become attached to an alligator. But I think that it is highly unlikely that such a human could not also have formed a bond to a more central example of a pet.
I am also sure that the origin stories of such bonds generally is not 'I was too depressed to go to the pet store, but I started feeding that stray animal and eventually adopted them, and this is how I ended up with my alligator'.
It is more likely that they went out of their way to get an exotic pet in the first place.
I am in favor of society trying its best to accommodate the needs of its people, but at some point this should be a two-way road. I am all for an employer not caring about what brand of car their employees drive to the parking lot, but that does not mean they have to accommodate an employee who made the impractical decision to drive an eight-wheeler to office.
And yet no one would argue that someone should have legal protection of their ES Kalashnikov. I would argue that should apply to most objects and creatures.
I have that dream too! In mine I'm responsible for some creature, but forget to take care of them and only realize after a grotesquely long time that I have forgotten to give them food or water. Find them all limp somewhere, and try desperately to revive them. Feel horrifically guilty. Is your anything like that?
"anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules"
This looks like a classic example of a transaction cost solving a knowledge problem. Say you're a landlord, and you notice that some people with pets leave terrible messes that cost a ton for you to clean up in time and money. Maybe the tenant gets a dozen cats and the cats go in the litter box until the box never gets emptied and...
So you try increasing the pet deposit, but it's not enough. You make new rules about which kinds of pets, and how large, and required vaccines, and annual flea treatments. But every time you add a new restriction, a tenant finds a new way to destroy a place with a pet. You set a maximum pet limit and they get ONE female cat that wanders the neighborhood and now they have a dozen cats tearing up the walls. Crafting Byzantine pet codes is not why you got into the landlord business. You'd like to just wash your hands of the whole thing.
Along comes a law that requires people to demonstrate a certain degree of conscientiousness before they're allowed to have a pet in your apartment. 'Normal' pets pass a normal threshold, but it's slightly harder to get a letter for a slightly weirder pet, etc. The law doesn't PROVE that the person with the letter is going to be responsible enough to clean up after their pet. All it proves is that they were willing to state that they love their pet and need it to help them be happy/normal. It is an opt-in system, though, which requires an affirmative act by the pet owner to say, "my pet makes me happy." Maybe there's enough of a correlation between "obtained a letter authorizing an ESA" and "won't leave droppings on the carpet when they leave" to weed out the irresponsible pet owners the landlord would like to exclude.
The system 'works out' for the landlord concerned about animal damage that will exceed the deposit, and it doesn't strictly bar a sufficiently-determined pet owner from getting an apartment with a pet.
I wish I could. I'm strongly considering trying out one of those transparent backpacks to carry a cat around in, I'd love to be able to get him outside more, even artificially.
I think this would probably be fine if we modify/replace it to a "well behaved pet" credential or something. Shift the emphasis to the pet rather than the owner, and remove the psychiatry. Standardize a checklist of things the landlords have legitimate interest in, like
"Is potty trained"
"Doesn't make loud sounds that disturb neighbors"
"Is safe to be around even when stressed"
"Doesn't destroy furniture"
etc
Then anyone can get their pet evaluated regardless of their own mental health, And you can regulate who is allowed to do these evaluations (who would be cheaper than psychiatrists). And then landlords can submit complaints when animals violate the credentials and you can track and punish credentialers who abuse the system.
> Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets
Society is hostile to pets? News to me. To my "not a big fan of pets" eyes it seems like society is obsessed with pets. Every cafe and restaurant is "dog friendly". Every park is full of yapping animals. Every street in the rough part of town is covered in shit. Every WhatsApp chat is full of kitten GIFs. And everybody is talking about their pets All The Time.
Maybe I'm proving your point a little (by being hostile to pets) but I really feel in the minority on this. I wouldn't even admit these opinions to my irl friends and acquaintances. I'd rather tell them I have unfashionable political opinions than admit I wish I lived in a world without cats and dogs.
I'm going to jump aboard the Grump Train by saying pets are replacing children. I was reading an obituary of a local man who died recently and he had twelve kids (six boys, six girls). Now we've got people going "three kids is a big family!" and even "have a child? are you crazy, no way I can afford that!" while putting up TikTok videos of them cooking in their kitchen while the six cats jump all over the counters.
I share this observation - and honestly can't blame them. As expensive as pets are, they don't remotely compare to a child.
My hot take is previously, having kids was obligatory, and also you were allowed to indoctrinate your children into loving and worshipping you. This is no longer considered acceptable parenting, so people who want to care for a being that will worship and love them are getting puppies instead of kids. This is a good thing!
Also, you can profit by filming a cat constantly and posting it to Instagram. While doing this with a child is technically profitable, it's also kind of frowned upon and in many circles, considered abusive.
This is one of Scott's funniest posts, and "gatekeeping cargo cult" is brilliant, perfectly encapsulating the problem with this whole charade. I just flatly decline to write ESA letters, explaining briefly why I believe they are indeed largely a racket. Haven't lost a patient for doing this yet...
Sorry to be a jerk, but just another example of how many resources are wasted on the LCDs so we can all say we’re “compassionate”. (Related, if EA people were actual utilitarians they’d far more frequently conclude things like “well, those people’s lives just aren’t worth saving.)
Empathy's not highly correlated with intelligence, so no reason to think they'd be dumb or poor. As for being a gangster -- that's just one of many roles in which somebody can steal. I don't see any reason it would attract low compassion people any more than do things like increasing your pharmaceutical company's earnings by pushing doctors to prescribe higher doses of opioids.
A lot of cafes in my part of the ultra-blue SF Bay Area (including several of my local Starbucks) seem to be fairly nonchalant about people who bring their pets in with them. And I haven't seen the clientele objecting. Of course, no one wants to get into it with someone playing the emotional support card. But I'm surprised that the pet allergy contingent hasn't been more vocal.
OTOH, our culture may be loosening up to pets in dining establishments. The first time I went to Paris thirty years ago, it shocked me that people were bringing their dogs into cafes and bakeries. But I asked my girlfriend at the time (who was Parisian) and she said it's pretty much up to the owner if they let pets in. Does anybody have any data for other countries in Europe?
The pet allergy contingent gets literally shouted down and/or when we speak up and people let their pets jump on us and slobber on us. I was actually gasping for breath and frantically looking for my medication while airline staff and passengers (including 2 dog owners told me to stop making such a fuss). I’ve had to tell my boss, my hairdresser, and my doctor that I can’t attend in person appointments because they bring their dog to their office and let it jump up on me. I have to premedicate with SO much medication before I leave my house to be able to be safe in the world anymore.
The morass of misinformation regarding animals in service is rampant, but the ADA.gov site clarifies myth from facts: Service animals are DOGS. period. They are "trained to perform a task directly related to a person’s disability," yet NOT "required to be certified or go through a professional training program" - ?! Yep. A friend with an actual service dog trained to sense her acute asthma onsets is very aggressive about her rights, that may surprise many: By LAW, her dog does NOT have to wear any identifying vest or ID, and you as a business owner or individual can ask only TWO questions: "Is the dog a service animal because of a disability?" and "What task has the dog been trained to perform?" You can NOT ask for any documentation for the service dog, the nature of the person's disability, or demonstration of the dog's task. To confuse further, airlines "may request DOT proof of service status," but when or where isn't clear. What IS clear though, is "Emotional Support Animals" do NOT fall under the special status of true Service Dogs, the most apparent being Seeing Eye dogs, which MUST be allowed to accompany the owner, even in most places where animals are not allowed. The abuse of the privilege by far too many, along with the ambiguous criteria for differentiating legitimate from false status (i.e. pets sliding through with fewer checks) has made the whole issue of companion animal privilege a real dilemma for public areas, and transportation. As a precaution, even service dogs MUST be current on rabies vaccination, without exemption, and traveling with proof of vaccines, along with a timely Veterinary Health Certificate, is standard for airline travel, independent of Service animal status.
The ESA scam is perhaps one of the most flagrant examples of the lengths people will go to to convenience themselves and fuck anyone else who doesn’t like it.
"Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse."
Probably, yes. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.
As usual, this entire question goes back to whether society should begin with maximum accommodation of diversity and then reel it in, reluctantly, as necessary; or whether it should begin with maximum adherence to a default and then dole out exceptions, reluctantly, as necessary.
It's not a question that can be answered case by case. If YIMBYism triumphs, and the cities of America and Europe achieve a housing surplus with desperate landlords competing for wolfdogs and vipers, it'll just turn up somewhere else.
One alternative to flawed, infuriating, self-ashamed, rubber-stamp gatekeeping is the free market. In other words, the jungle. I wonder how well the class of people who currently struggle with gaming the ESA system would fare if their landlords and other leverage-wielding sorts in their lives had the final say, without even a chance for the corrupt recourse.
Another alternative is a lot of meaningfully, unselfconsciously enforced positive legal rights, including to stuff like pets, with all the high costs that would impose. But that gets us to socialist humanism pretty quickly.
"Another alternative is a lot of meaningfully, unselfconsciously enforced positive legal rights, including to stuff like pets, with all the high costs that would impose."
You insist on your legal right to a komodo dragon as pet. I insist on my legal right not to live beside a komodo dragon because this is not the Galapagos, it's the middle of Dublin/London/New York. Who gets to win? To the courts! Of public opinion, often, because Jack will cry online about the mean ableist Karens depriving him of the only pleasure and companionship in his life demanding he get rid of Binky ('would they just turn their own child over to unknown caretakers?") and Jill complains online about arrogant idiots who don't care if their killer monster rips your beloved pet Chichi to pieces ('my darling Brahma rooster who wakes me up at six every morning with his sweet serenade').
ESA letters are a fudge, but they are an attempt to steer between Scylla and Charybdis of depriving genuine sufferers by banning all animals and wrecking the lives of the other tenants because you can legally keep six owls and a hen in your one-bedroom flat.
I'm afraid I don't see this being Dublin, or Oslo, or central Moscow as sufficient grounds for there not being a komodo dragon.
But, sure, even if we sort out the dragon with Solomonic brilliance, we can always wheeze up some untenable scenario in the end. An emotional support rhinoceros, say – the kind of thing offered instantly with chortling joviality by those whose black little hearts would be best pleased by denying the hamster, too.
It still matters whether we start with allowing or denying. Courts will always be with us, but a general right to pets would shift the burden of proving that a particular case is unreasonable to the landlord or tenants' association or whatever, and let the shrinks catch a break.
And, again, it's not just about pets, is it? I suspect you realise as well as I do that the ESA kabuki routine is not there to protect hypothetical neighbours from Six Owls And A Hen Guy. It's to protect, above all, the bourgeois sensibility from the scalding feeling that some low-status person (different, soft, needy, weak, psych-issues) claimed an extra privilege for nothing without Official Approval.
"whose black little hearts would be best pleased by denying the hamster, too"
How well you know me! Yeah, I think I'd ban hamsters. I'm not entirely sure a life in a cage in an artificial environment nothing like my ancestral one is a good life.
Mostly I do think pet-keeping is a form of cruelty. If you have a back garden or other space that your dog can run around in, okay. But we're seeing people talking about "floors ruined by dog's nails" because the animal is being kept inside pretty much all day long.
The small breeds that can be kept indoors are a different problem because we've interfered with the animal to produce the small yappy lap dog, but that's a different question.
Ditto with indoor cats - "oh I can't let my cat out because it would kill wildlife" - well yeah, it's a predator animal, this is its nature. Keeping cats inside all day is like prison, and if Mommy (it's generally women, but some men as well) is out at work then it's solitary confinement for the poor dumb beast.
No wonder they pick up all kinds of neurotic behaviors that the owners then stick up videos of on social media, chortling about "my cat is so dumb, look what he does here" or "my cat will constantly come looking for pets and cuddles". Because the animal is emotionally and psychologically disturbed by the unnatural life you're forcing it to live as 100% dependent on you and to be your source of unconditional love.
Fish are probably okay because they're fish, there isn't a 'there' there in the organism. I'm inclined to agree with Lewis' view when it comes to those who demand that they have a "right" to a pet and this over-rides anyone else's rights or objections.
From "The Four Loves", 'Affection':
"But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain - you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.
Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs", those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship, will be well advised to examine their real reasons."
How much all this unnaturality matters depends, I guess, on how strongly one believes in the animals' (or indeed humans') received telos. I expect I'd make a very poor Thomist.
There are better and worse ways of keeping pets. Cruelties definitely abound. I think declawing cats is a genuine cruelty, as is the perpetuation of brachycephalic dog breeds. I'm not keen on lop rabbits, either. And further down the line there is plenty of outright abuse and neglect. But then, that is true of almost anything humans do. Not least all that family stuff people keep raving about. They fuck you up, after all, your mum and dad. Sometimes it even spills over to social media, just like the silly cats.
A cat raised from birth in the home becomes a synthesis of evolved instincts (themselves dented by the millennia of life with and alongside humans) and its own upbringing. There's nothing morally superior about that same cat being raised in the wild, and most of the rationale for 'indoor cats' is their own safety rather than the fate of songbirds. And the kind of Cat Mummy mocked for her songbird concern probably also goes out of her way to provide the creature (already solitary by nature) with an IKEA-ful of 'enrichment'.
A dog is outright, purposefully, bred to be a human tool and companion, in varying proportions of the two. It has no business being anything else, even if we believe in the business of being specific things.
On the hamster-gripping hand, I don't know whether a cage with a hamster wheel, a sand bath, and the reliable provision of food and water lacks some essential hamster pleasure – proper burrowing, perhaps? – that makes it a bad tradeoff for the security and longevity on offer. They're near-sighted, territorial, solitary little buggers. What else do they want?
Lewis was right, being needed – the need to be needed – is a powerful psychological undercurrent of the whole enterprise, but he's over-egged the narcissism at play. That need is not a bad thing. I realise this kind of story is often seen as the punchline to a joke about snowflakes – because of course it is: different, soft, needy, weak, psych-issues – but I've known people who probably failed to kill themselves on some days because they asked themselves what would happen to the pet. (And if you don't believe that, recall Orwell's prisoner who stepped around the puddle on the way to the gallows...) The simplified fulfilment of that need, along with the simple companionship of something alive, probably accounts for a big chunk of the therapeutic effect. Maybe the pet is kept too dependent, maybe if it could read Atlas Shrugged it would weep, but in a world where pork chops remain a thing, I don't think the relative imposition is too great.
Of course, if you pushed back against somebody's demand for a 10 foot Komodo Dragon emotional support animal and they agreed with your view that, yes, they are just being a dick, then you are just hurting your more reasonable patients than your crazier patients who insist they really need a predatory carnivore monster to feel happy.
Isn't this partly a failure of law to define what exactly a "service animal" is? Or to write the term "emotional support animal" into law without carefully defining that? In some jurisdictions, a candidate service dog has to go through an approved training process with a certified organsiation, which lasts long enough that they can be really really sure Fido is a good boy. The result is that service animals are the animal equivalent of having a PhD from an Ivy, they're really expensive (though often covered by charities/insurance) but absolutely no-one got bitten by a service dog ever. Many dogs who narrowly fail the service dog training school still make excellent pets.
There *is* a definition of "service animal", at least by the 2020 HUD guidelines. Where it gets blurry is "assistance animal" or emotional support animal, which are not supposed to be "my pet dog/cat/bird":
"The Fair Housing Act (FHA) makes it unlawful for a housing provider to refuse to make a reasonable accommodation that a person with a disability may need in order to have equal opportunity to enjoy and use a dwelling.
One common request housing providers receive is for a reasonable accommodation to providers’ pet or no animal policies so that individuals with disabilities are permitted to use assistance animals in housing, including public and common use areas.
Assistance animals are not pets. They are animals that do work, perform tasks, assist, and/or provide therapeutic emotional support for individuals with disabilities
There are two types of assistance animals: (1) service animals, and (2) other animals that do work, perform tasks, provide assistance, and/or provide therapeutic emotional support for individuals with disabilities (referred to in this guidance as a “support animal”).
An animal that does not qualify as a service animal or other type of assistance animal is a pet for purposes of the FHA and may be treated as a pet for purposes of the lease and the housing provider’s rules and policies. A housing provider may exclude or charge a fee or deposit for pets in its discretion and subject to local law but not for service animals or other assistance animals.
What is a service animal?
Under the ADA, “service animal means any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including a physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other mental disability. Other species of animals, whether wild or domestic, trained or untrained, are not service animals for the purposes of this definition. The work or tasks performed by a service animal must be directly related to the individual's disability.
Performing “work or tasks” means that the dog is trained to take a specific action when needed to assist the person with a disability.
• If the individual identifies at least one action the dog is trained to take which is helpful to the disability other than emotional support, the dog should be considered a service animal and permitted in housing, including public and common use areas. Housing providers should not make further inquiries.
• If no specific work or task is identified, the dog should not be considered a service animal but may be another type of animal for which a reasonable accommodation may be required. Emotional support, comfort, well-being, and companionship are not a specific work or task for purposes of analysis under the ADA."
That's where it gets blurry. You're a landlord, you say "no pets allowed". Tenant comes back with a letter from their mental health professional saying "this is an emotional support animal". Maybe it's a genuine case, maybe they got a sympathetic doctor like Scott to back up that they really do depend on their pet, maybe they paid a hundred bucks to get one from an online website. You could tie yourself up in a court case over this, or you could just let them have the damn dog and CYA by "they gave me the letter".
An assistance animal is an animal that works, provides assistance, or performs tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability, or that provides emotional support that alleviates one or more identified effects of a person’s disability. An assistance animal is not a pet.
Obligations of Housing Providers
Individuals with a disability may request to keep an assistance animal as a reasonable accommodation to a housing provider’s pet restrictions.
Housing providers cannot refuse to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services when such accommodations may be necessary to afford a person with a disability the equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling.
The Fair Housing Act requires a housing provider to allow a reasonable accommodation involving an assistance animal in situations that meet all the following conditions:
A request was made to the housing provider by or for a person with a disability
The request was supported by reliable disability-related information, if the disability and the disability-related need for the animal were not apparent and the housing provider requested such information, and
The housing provider has not demonstrated that:
Granting the request would impose an undue financial and administrative burden on the housing provider
The request would fundamentally alter the essential nature of the housing provider’s operations
The specific assistance animal in question would pose a direct threat to the health or safety of others despite any other reasonable accommodations that could eliminate or reduce the threat
The request would result in significant physical damage to the property of others despite any other reasonable accommodations that could eliminate or reduce the physical damage.
Examples
A reasonable accommodation request for an assistance animal may include, for example:
A request to live with an assistance animal at a property where a housing provider has a no-pets policy or
A request to waive a pet deposit, fee, or other rule as to an assistance animal.
Filing a Complaint
If you believe you have been unlawfully denied a reasonable accommodation for an assistance animal or have otherwise experienced discrimination in housing, you can file a complaint with FHEO."
By the plethora of sites offering "we'll give you an ESA letter for $$$", there are clearly enough people willing to game the system that, in combination with the people who genuinely need assistance/support animals, somebody takes a case and gets it laid down in stone that you have to comply with the request for Susie to have her fur baby in the property without paying rent for it. Also, basically you will be asking the courts to define "what is a pet?" and see the commenters on this thread who are standing up for snakes, reptiles, spiders, etc. as cute fun cuddly friends. It'll end up that someone will protest that they have a pet elephant and it's discrimination if Jim's python is considered a pet but their Hanno is not:
"Hanno (Italian: Annone; c. 1510 – 8 June 1516) was the pet white elephant given by King Manuel I of Portugal to Pope Leo X (born Giovanni de' Medici) at his coronation. Hanno, an Asian elephant, came to Rome in 1514 with the Portuguese ambassador Tristão da Cunha and quickly became the Pope's favorite animal. Hanno died two years later from complications of a treatment for constipation with gold-enriched laxative."
I feel like if someone is emotionally supported by a snake, that's better for landlords than a cat or a dog, right? What would be any downside at all for writing an ADHD snake ESA letter? Wouldn't the existence of the possibility of losing a beloved pet cause enough emotional distress that keeping the pet makes it qualify as an emotional support animal?
"What would be any downside at all for writing an ADHD snake ESA letter?What would be any downside at all for writing an ADHD snake ESA letter?"
Because under the existing regulations, snakes don't count as "assistance animals". You would need a *very* good reason as to why it had to be a snake and not another animal, and if the client is only trying to get around the "no pets allowed" rule rather than having a genuine need, you the certifying person issuing the letter might (it's unsure) be in trouble:
"How do we differentiate whether it is a service animal or emotional support animal (ESA), based on the new guidance?
That takes us back to this concept of the ADA. Under the ADA, operators of public accommodations are permitted to ask if someone brings in an animal into, let’s say, a Target store. They are walking around the aisles with their dog in their arms or in the basket or wherever. And the manager of the store or an employee can walk up to that person and say,
“Is that a trained service animal?”
And if the person says, “Yes,” they are permitted to say, “And what work or task has this animal been trained to perform for you?”
And the customer is supposed to answer that question.
However, there’s no written verification, there’s no confirmation, there’s no verification of any of that information. If the animal is not a dog, then it’s clear, it’s not a service animal, because only dogs and in rare cases, miniature horses, are recognized as service animals. So, in housing, if someone says, “I don’t have to provide you verification of my service animal.” The answer is, that applies under the American Disabilities Act, but the ADA does not pertain to housing. The Fair Housing Act permits verification when the disability and the need for the animal are not observable.
If you can see that the animal is a guide dog, then you shouldn’t be asking for verification. But if it’s a dog that is a service animal for disabilities such as hearing problems or alert someone that they’re about to have a seizure, you can’t see that when you talk to the resident. In that case you can ask for verification. And if they say to you that’s not permitted, then you have to clarify, “I’m asking you this not under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but under the Fair Housing Act.”
HUD Assistance Animal Notice Key Takeaways
The notice also makes it clear the difference between domesticated animals kept in the home (traditional) and non-traditional unique animals such, goats, pigs, chickens, snakes, etc. The notice says the resident has a substantial burden to be able to show that they need a unique animal, as an assistance animal. Now, it is not impossible to justify a unique animal, but they’re going to have to explain in more detail than with a usual animal, why they need their snake as an emotional support animal.
We haven’t had this distinction in the past. This may mean that you need to revise your forms, to include questions about unique animals.. The other thing that the notice says is if you require the resident or verifier to notarize their information, you need to stop doing that."
With all due respect, I understand this was a serious article, but I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the human experience. We're a profound yet strange bunch us humans. Thanks for the insightful and interesting work.
Yet, every once in a while you see a story of someone who had no such letter but still insisted that they must be able to bring their emotional support tarantula onto a plane or into a restaurant or someplace where people have a perfectly reasonable reluctance to have them around. And you wonder what's wrong with these people?
When I rented a room in an old adobe structure back in the 1980s, some geckos had set up housekeeping in the room due to a leaky toilet. I couldn't claim them as emotional support animals, but I was always pleased to watch them on the walls, snacking on surprised insects. They made great roommates and kept the critters under control.
"Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge."
It's that last bit that makes me unsure. Let's take the assumption seriously that the cat really is an ESA. Sure, if your cat's carrier fits under the seat instead of you bringing a backpack, that's fair, it shouldn't need to cost more to bring them. But otherwise, why is it the airline's job to pay for healthcare for some subset of passengers? Especially when this might impose health care costs on other passengers (highly allergic to cats, deathly afraid of dogs).
"Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge."
It's that last bit that makes me unsure. Let's take the assumption seriously that the cat really is an ESA. Sure, if your cat's carrier fits under the seat instead of you bringing a backpack, that's fair, it shouldn't need to cost more to bring them. But otherwise, why is it the airline's job to pay for healthcare for some subset of passengers? Especially when this might impose health care costs on other passengers (highly allergic to cats, deathly afraid of dogs).
I had a somewhat heated conversation about this topic with my SO the other day actually. He was really mad that some woman had a dog that growled with a muzzle on it in Firestone. I was like "was it on a lease?" "Yes, but it was clearly aggressive." "But, you said it had a muzzle on and it's on a leash so what's it going to do?" "It might get loose." "Did the woman have control of it?" "Yes, she kept it close by." The most he could finally say I couldn't argue with was that the dog was clearly stressed out to be there, but that's not why he was mad about it. I don't get the dog hostility thing. Unless 1) the dog is loose 2) barking incessantly 3) literally in a kitchen where food is being prepared 4) someone is deathly allergic to dogs 5) peeing/pooping on the floor, why does anyone care if there is a random dog around?
It's an obnoxious problem, if for no other reason than it does have the feel that if someone is whiny enough and entitled enough they can get their way (bring their dog into a restaurant), and everyone else just has to put up with it.
Isn't it a no-brainer partial solution that as a society we should just collectively award people the right/privilege to keep a dog or cat in their domicile? I don't know if this would work with snakes but we have enough dog and cat lovers in this country that I could see this happening.
IDK if the intended consequence of this post was to create more ESAs, but thanks to it a friend just advised one of her students that, if she really misses her cats back home so much, it's probably not hard to get an ESA letter so the school will let her have a cat in her dorm. thanks Scott :)
In your patient's apartment, I wouldn't feel bad about. 'They get to take their pet into restaurants,' I'd feel medium bad about. 'They get to take their pet to work, regardless of the allergies of other people in that workplace, and everyone else just has to figure out how to live with it' I'd feel real bad about.
I've only ever seen this apply to apartments and airplanes.
Can vouch for Scott here. Restaurants that do not want non-service animals in their restaurant/are interested in actually enforcing the health code don't care if they are an ESA. Restaurants where the staff go "I'm not paid enough to tell people to take their beloved dog outside" don't even ask, so the ESA status also never comes up.
Restaurants I think I've heard of, but only second-hand. Workplace we're about to be dealing with from a transfer. I am not looking forward to it, or to the avalanche of other employees wanting to bring in their pets since X gets to.
If it's a legitimate service animal/ESA animal for a real psychological or physical problem, it shouldn't be too bad (the animal should be trained or the person knows what is involved to make this work). If it's someone who finagled a letter from one of these online services because they want to bring Mr. Snuggles to work, that's a problem. Any news from the previous workplace about how it went?
I think Scott makes it pretty clear that it isn't possible to sort the situations in to the two neat buckets you describe.
Moreover we can even imagine cases where the animal is *genuinely a huge help* to the person's mental state, and still has weird or terrifying downsides for other people in the vicinity.
This is definitely not a service animal (amongst other things, I don't think they've even got seeing-eye cats). I haven't circled back with the other workplace, because this isn't my problem and I'm worried that the more I look into it, the more it may somehow become my problem 'EC-2021, you've looked into this, why don't you--' Nope, not my monkey, not my circus. Figuratively or literally.
This whole essay is about how there is no such thing as a legit ESA. It's just a pet + $100 and a piece of paper.
ESA's are not trained. It's literally just means dog that makes me feel good to pet, which basically rounds to dog.
I think we all agree the status quo is absurd. I guess it speaks to my particular world view that I think we should resolve this by forcing landlords to accept dogs.
My understanding is, legally, private businesses don't actually have to accommodate emotional support animals. Practically speaking though, many people get emotional support animal documentation under the misapprehension that this entitles them to take them into private businesses without restriction, and will argue over this point with business owners. I suspect that this is only a small proportion of all people who seek ESA accommodations though; at least, anyone who'll hold that kind of argument in public probably isn't suffering from anxiety.
This seems about right to me. I've seen a lot of people bringing dogs into businesses where they probably shouldn't be the past few years, for instance. Though it's hard to know if this is because they consider them emotional support animals ("rightfully" or not), or if it's just because they see other people bringing dogs everywhere and assume it's ok. Also hard to disentangle from the more general breakdown in rule following, though that's another issue itself.
I've seen that movie in restaurants more than once. I've also seen signs on restaurants informing patrons that the ADA does not obligate them to accommodate their emotional support animals.
I think in New York at least, it's technically illegal to take any animal other than a trained service animal into a place where food is served, and the state law doesn't make an exception for emotional support animals? A business who allows them anyway could potentially get sued by another customer.
I think you're conflating general clinical anxiety with social anxiety. I'm fairly at ease in social situations but that doesn't stop me from having to go to the emergency room every now and then due to chest pain stemming from my anxiety disorder. Anxiety has many faces.
A decade and change years ago I worked in reservations at a large hotel. As part of the training we had to do a module on service animals and ESAs, and it was always a point of humor that we were legally required to accommodate dogs, cats...and miniature horses.
Where exactly is the boundary between miniature and full-sized horse? How large a horse can I bring into the hotel?
I imagine if the horse can support armored barding and carry a man into battle it's too big.
What if the man is a midget?
How do these stat up against halfling riding dogs?
Hell, yeah! Bring on the fury.
According to http://www.guide-horse.org/faq_horses.htm, the limit is 26 inches. But that seems to be the size they accept for training, I don't know if there's a legal limit
Edited to add: Also it turns out that horse height is an idiosyncratic measure: it is to the withers (shoulder) so the head is higher than this.
> Also it turns out that horse height is an idiosyncratic measure: it is to the withers (shoulder) so the head is higher than this.
Most animal measurements are stupid in this way. For example, animal length is conventionally measured from something like nose to anus. Though for some reason humans are measured differently.
This looks especially bad when the animal is a whale. The part of a whale that you would think of as the tail comes quite a distance after the anus.
In defense of the horse measurement, I imagine the position of a horse's head can and does move, making the measurement we actually do much easier to perform.
Not to mention the various things that can happen to tails, thus changing the length/height.
I think the boundary is when they tell you to get off your high horse.
This is one of those times when I wish we could "like" comments here. This is the good stuff and I appreciate it.
You can.
34 inches at the withers (top of the shoulder / base of the neck) to qualify for the American Miniature Horse Association, though the American Miniature Horse Registry will accept up to 38 inches
But not ponies? What if it's a ... little pony?
It could still be a dangerous kelpie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6AWRlhrYbk
I think life spoiled me; that almost feels like a furry "Succession" prequel fanfic...
Miniature horses for the blind is a thing. Some people are allergic to dogs or dog phobic, so there are fully trained guide horses, and apparently they work pretty well.
Horses are infamous for their fragile dispositions and tendency to spook at inoffensive, inanimate objects.
Those traits seem like they'd be absolutely disqualifying in a guide animal. Do you know anything about this? Have docility and stoicism been ruthlessly bred into the guide horses?
Well, I only know what I just read on http://www.guide-horse.org/faq_training.htm
under "How do you train a Guide horse not to "spook"?" which is that they desensitize them - and the problem is not new, since cavalry and police horses have the same issue. I would guess that a decent fraction fail out for this reason. Guide horses do not seem to have been around for long enough to be bred for stoicism, but I don't know what was criteria were used to breed from the miniature horses that they source from - other than size.
The problem isn't new, but it's also not easy to deal with. To my understanding, one of the primary strengths of war elephants was that they can't be charged by cavalry - regardless of how easily the cavalry could beat the elephants, horses just won't approach them.
You can solve that by accustoming your warhorses to elephants. That works and it was done. But to do that, you have to have elephants to subject the horses to.
I've seen someone in a discussion of horse behavior complain about the tendency to spook at things like "the old rusted-out tractor that hasn't moved in six years, but it's extra scary today" (paraphrased), which drew a lot of commentary along the lines of "yeah......". This kind of thing makes me squeamish about the idea of relying on a guide horse.
" since cavalry and police horses have the same issue"
Happened just a fortnight ago with horses of the Household Cavalry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2kLMpNDZCc
Allegedly the miniature horses are bred from, amongst others, pit ponies so they might have the traits of docility built in. I have no idea, though.
Surely if they managed to get horses to do useful tasks in WWI, they must be pretty trainable with loud mechanical noises around? I think there were also mine horses?
My neighborhood has feral horses, which seem indifferent to cars, but spook if a person approaches on foot, so it seems to be very much dependent on what they're most used to.
OK, but do you need your guide horse more when you're in a familiar context or an unfamiliar one?
And yet historically there have been many warhorses. There's a lot that proper breeding and training can accomplish.
Yes, but I've already mentioned sidethread that warhorses still spook at unfamiliar circumstances, and this was a common cause of military problems. Obviously there was a lot of investment in preventing this, but it happened anyway.
How about guide cats for the blind?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je4A6S2jYdA
Thanks for posting that - it's hilarious :-)
Oh I didn't question it - horses seem pretty smart. But the image of a dainty little shetland with a yellow "service animal" harness on, clip-clopping through the lobby and leaving little shetland horse-poos on the shiny floors as it guided its blind owner was so incongruous as to be really funny. Plus, someone would inevitably suggest installing a hitching post and water trough next to the valet station with all the Teslas and other fancy cars.
Funnily enough this kind of happened on the office park I used to work in - this was before Tesla, but there were plenty of mercs and BMWs. It was a tech hub, but there was a traveller pitch site nearby, and one of the travellers used to illegally graze his horses on the green areas in the office park. It was only on a tether, and sometimes used to escape.
They actually built a new route with a separate cycle/footpath/bridleway connected to the park, and I used to joke about commuting by horse.
I don't know if this is the place to link Limerick's contribution to world culture, but (note the warning about "this video is intended for a mature audience") - Horse Outside:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPFZrRD3J8
hahahahaha
Horses actually have some decent advantages over dogs for guiding the blind or helping people with mobility issues. They're a bit larger and sturdier, for one, and they also live about twice as long as dogs, so the money/time it takes to train them has better ROI.
Blind people who aren't in a hurry should get Galapagos tortoises. Large, sturdy, and live a thousand times longer than dogs.
There was a fun SNL sketch about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq8Xlbb3bOw
I thought airlines had cut down on this tolerance a few years ago; is it still the case?
I fly a lot (30-50 flight segments per year) and have seen maybe one animal on a plane and two in an airport over the last 3 years, though I wasn't particularly looking out for them. I guess if you're very allergic that might still be slightly annoying but the biggest problem is that people still -- even after covid -- like to violently cough all over you inside the airplane.
Yeah ~6 years ago a guy had a fucking LARGE German Shepherd (not even a normal one) in the middle seat with him. In coach. So the thing was literally all over my legs/feet and the other passengers. And he was jsut like "this isn't bothering you is it?" Which was fucking ridiculous.
I have hated these people ever since, but luckily since COVID I have barely seen any.
A large German shepherd is an above average middle seat neighbor, to be honest.
No it was a full sized man+ a German Shepherd.
So the answer to "man or bear?" in this case is "man or German Shepherd?" and pick "German Shepherd" 😀
I would have probably enjoyed that, actually, but I can certainly see how it could be a problem.
Is this referring to Snakes on a Plane?
I was so disappointed when I couldn't take my snake with me on a plane when moving from California to Pennsylvania. I ended up having to send her in the mail (presumably, shipped on a different plane).
How do you move on a plane? As someone who's made similar cross-country moves a few times, it's always involved driving for me, if for no other reason than "if I don't drive, I have to ship my car, which will cost a lot and then I end up at my destination without a car for the crucial first few days." Add up the costs of shipping the car, taking a plane, and renting a car at the other end, and you're probably not saving money over just moving by car.
In Florida, there are prominent signs in front of grocery store entrances indicating that ESAs are not service animals and not allowed in, citing the relevant state law. It’s definitely become an issue in other businesses.
I don't think we need snakes on a plane.
If the human leaves the ESA home alone, isolated, naked and afraid (when the Roomba fires up), could that not potentially make matters worse (for the ESA *and* for the guilt of the ESA's human)? And should that scenario be part of the rubric for the emotional support animal evaluation?
The ESA may not care the human works, may even experience relief, but may not. Potential solutions to ESA isolation include ESA daycare (but then the human is left working for daycare), or one of those Roomba things on Kickstarter that provides stimulation for pets instead of doing housework (but what if the KS campaign goes long- or fails?).
An ESA that needed stimulation but left home during working hours may come to wish someone would just take it and a 12 gauge out behind the shed.
I work for the government, and we have ESA around. I have ... mixed feelings about it.
It only officially applies in a few places like those two. But normal people don't memorize the complete list, and normal people in low-level public-facing service or retail positions really internalize "the customer is always right, or else the boss will yell at me".
Result, I distinctly recall a news magazine article by a woman who went around seeing if she could get increasingly ridiculous "emotional support animals" into increasingly ridiculous places. E.g, and IIRC, an Emotional Support Llama in a restaurant. Almost nobody offered a hard "No" until the ridiculosity reached the level of e.g. an Emotional Support Crocodile.
When I tried to find this article via Google, I learned that Emotional Support Llamas are now a Thing.
I think those last two only apply for service animals, AFAIK.
"Laws prohibit employment discrimination because of a disability. Employers are required to provide reasonable accommodation. Allowing an individual with a disability to have a service animal or an emotional support animal accompany them to work may be considered an accomadation." https://adata.org/guide/service-animals-and-emotional-support-animals
Not vouching for accuracy, merely what is being stated by advocates.
A lot of that is leaning on the word "may" to cover what's lacking. There is an interactive process when dealing with the ADA, and an employer can suggest or even require an alternative accommodation that allows the employee to complete the job. If the employee *can* complete the functions of the job without their requested accommodation, the employer doesn't have to offer the accommodation.
A lot of people have been pushing those boundaries and it's easier for employers to give in when the requirement is not too intrusive.
The employer can also determine that a function of a job is required, and deny employment to someone who cannot complete that function.
For an easy example, a person who worked at heights who said they needed an emotional support dog could almost certainly be denied, as the dog working at a height would be an issue. Even clearer, working in a clean environment (manufacturing clean room, allergy department at a hospital) could absolutely deny the accommodation.
I don't doubt any of this, but in our situation another office made the 'sure, we can accommodate that' decision and now the employee is transferring to our division. It's going to be really hard to claim we can't accommodate it, as it's the same job, just in a different office building. And I'm not massively concerned so long as it remains this one person, but then again, I'm not allergic to cats...
If you were allergic to cats, that would be extremely relevant. You don't have to offer accommodations that are literally incompatible with other employees' health. That's the sort of situation where any sane HR department will bend over backwards to offer an alternative accomodation.
Yeah, from an overall employer perspective that's going to be very difficult to deny, unless there are relevant factors different between the two areas.
One potentially relevant factor would be allergies among existing employees. At that stage the employer is dealing with two potentially incompatible accommodations and may need to find a significantly different solution, such as offering one or both employees alternate assignments, or something like an air purifier.
Did you read Scott’s article on Civil Rights laws? Reasonable Accommodation law is by far the most complicated and confusing of them. Any time an emotional support animal is requested, you need to do an interactive process with the employee to determine if the accommodation would be effective or if a less disruptive accommodation is possible. This involves getting documentation from the doctor, and bargaining back and forth on whether another accommodation would be effective. Would a stuffed animal work? A room with better lighting?
The employer can also argue it is an undue hardship, which is the most common route, but the law on that is very complex. Coworkers having dog allergies is a good one, hygiene is another good one, nowhere to have it urinate and dedicate is another. But that is also interactive. The employee could reply, what if I stayed at work an extra half hour and then in the middle of the day lengthened my breaks by 15 minutes so I could walk to the park and back. Oh and this whole process has to be done in 30 days.
In truth, I’ve never even seen a case where an employer denied an Emotional Support Animal, and then lost a lawsuit over it. But you never know if you will be the first and just the pain and expense of litigation is substantial.
There was a blind guy worked for the local council and he brought his dog everywhere (including, I imagine, to work) so in some cases I think the employer *would* have to permit the animal or make accommodations for the employee to have it around.
But just asking if your ESA crocodile can come to the office does seem like it would be in the employer's favour to refuse.
Yes, I was specifically talking about Emotional Support Animals. Service Animals, such as for blind people, are even harder to restrict, though theoretically possible
The main thing I know about disabilities law is ~20 years ago I was working somewhere where the ground floor was all showroom with a half dozen offices upstairs and only stairs to get up to them.
And this woman applied for a job there, came and interviewed and walked up and down the stairs just fine for the interviews, proceeded to be bad at her job and do no work. When called on this and put under discipline she then sued the company and they had to spend ~$2million putting in an elevator for her (because of debilitating back pain allegedly), and halt disciplinary proceedings despite her still not having done her job after like six months. And then another six months after that when the damn elevator was finally finished at great cost/disruption she abruptly quit and maybe had only ever used the damn thing like twice.
Well, a math professor of my acquaintance was presented with a letter from a student and a demand that he allow the student to bring her emotional support bat to class. An emotional support bat, not gonna lie.
What I want to know is how this works with another student who is terrified of flying mammals and gets triggered by the mere presence of the emotional support bat? I get triggered by dogs.
Too long, I tell you, too long has the feline community been forced to confront this injustice! Right the wrongs!
Ah, sweet flittermouse! But yeah, bringing your bat to class is taking the piss. Though the bat could well be smarter than the student and thus gain more from the lectures.
Good point. What if the emotional support bat is providing an unfair advantage?
How do we know the bat is not the one secretly memorising the information and then passing it on to the student during exams?
Zackly.
At this point, it’s the bat-student unit that you’re training. You don’t make the student take the exam without their eyeglasses, do you?
So which is the owner and which is the pet, then? If Bat Masterson wants a university education, let them sign up for it in their own right and not be exploiting a poor dumb college student!
What's more exciting about this is the prospect of student-student units. "Hi, we're Johndoug. We're taking four math classes this semester as a student-student unit, here's one standard tuition." And then they walk off, stuck together from hip to ear.
"What I want to know is how this works with another student who is terrified of flying mammals and gets triggered by the mere presence of the emotional support bat? I get triggered by dogs. "
The conservationists might be able to help here!
"When One Protected Species Kills Another, What Are Conservationists to Do?"
-- Scientific American, June 2019
A girl at uni routinely brought her possum (australian possum, significantly cuter than the north american opossum) to lectures and tutorials.
It was fairly small at the time and she mostly kept it in her cleavage as it was both nocturnal and required extra warmth since it was still a baby.
Nobody seemed concerned, and most people liked having it around. The girls thought the possum baby was cute and the boys, ahem, enjoyed the view...
Someone renting a nominally "pet-free" apartment and having to live with a yappy dog next door isn't amazing...
Somewhat relevant:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/basilisk
This is actually true in some places!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_animal#Miniature_horse
Does ESA status expire? If not, this should at least mitigate almost all aspects of the (admittedly infuriating) problem.
Ugh. Googled quickly. It typically expires every 12 months. Of course it does.
It's better than having the ESA expire every 12 months, especially if it's legally mandated.
Technically yes, but practically speaking, if you're using it to bypass landlord bullshit, once you've shown them paperwork when you move in, nobody ever asks for it again, so in reality it expires once every however frequently you move.
Presumably if using it for flying you would need to keep it more up to date, but that seems like such an excessively stressful situation that I'd bet less than 1% of people who get an ESA use it for that.
At least in California, the letters are only good for a year and the professional has to say that the patient has been under their care for at least 30 days.
But if you try to get rid of a tenant with an expired ESA letter (or force them to get rid of the pet), you are really playing with fire. I've done it once and it thankfully settled.
There was an incident in RI last month where an ESA pitbull killed and partially ate another dog at an apartment complex. No doubt one of many such incidents. I hadn't heard of the aspect of evaluating safety before. It seems like there must be some sort of protection for the authors of these letters, particularly those churning them out for such low fees, or the lawyers would have bankrupted them by now. Is that the case?
My understanding (IANAL) is that the prescribing doctor isn't liable. The sites I read say that the doctor just prescribed a pet, and it's the patient's fault that they picked a bad one. But all the psych literature says you should also evaluate the patient's specific pet for behavioral issues. Maybe this is just a courtesy and not legally necessary?
My ESA letter has language about the pet and its behavior being my sole responsibility. Presumably this is them covering their asses, but I'm unsure if it has any legal weight.
I looked up some sample letters online (all from sites swearing they're legit and all others are fakes) and it seems a very grey area.
One site's sample letter did require you to put in the name, breed and weight of the pet, so if you are trying to certify that Patient really does need their Emotional Support rhino, I think that the emanation of a penumbra of "why the hell did you give a letter for a rhino in a small apartment up five flights of stairs?"responsibility might hover round your head:
https://fastesaletter.com/emotional-support-animal-letter-sample/
On the other hand, another site's letter is just "Patient needs their pet" with no mention of what type of pet it is, so I suppose you might get away with "but they never informed me they were going to go out and get a rhino":
https://esadoctors.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Sample-travel-ESA-letter-e1556728226865.png
EDIT: Gosh, there are a plethora of sites out there offering these services, but this one seems to have some factual information:
https://esadoctors.com/emotional-support-animal-letter/
"An ESA letter should also contain the licensed healthcare professional’s signature and license number. It’s important to note that an ESA letter does not name the client’s specific diagnosis or provide detailed information about their condition or medical history. Under HUD’s rules, tenants have a right to privacy regarding sensitive information regarding their mental health.
An ESA letter may or may not have specific details regarding the ESAs themselves (i.e., their names, breed, size, etc.). This is because not all healthcare professionals are capable of verifying these characteristics of the client’s ESA. An ESA letter can also be issued prior to the client actually adopting their emotional support animal. An ESA letter is a recommendation on the part of the licensed healthcare professional, not a verification letter of the specific attributes of the animal that will serve as the client’s emotional support animal.
An ESA letter should be signed but does not have to be notarized. Housing providers also cannot insist that licensed healthcare professionals use a specific form or insist that the healthcare professional make statements under penalty of perjury. HUD instituted these guidelines to stop landlords from denying ESA accommodations by putting up additional barriers to tenants who had submitted appropriate ESA letters."
So you're not obliged to put in "I recommend that Jon Jonnson get his Emotional Support rhino", just that Jon would benefit from having an ESA. If he then goes out and gets a rhino, well, that's nothing to do with you.
Okay, there is genuine official guidance out there! From the Department of Housing in 2020 regarding service and assistance animals:
https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6660/hud-notice-fheo-2020-1-assessing-a-request-to-have-an-animal-as-a-reasonable-accommodation/
"Description
This notice explains certain obligations of housing providers under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) with respect to animals that individuals with disabilities may request as reasonable accommodations."
https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/PA/documents/HUDAsstAnimalNC1-28-2020.pdf
This is more to help landlords deciding if an animal is a pet or not, but there is sample of what is considered a reasonable animal (if you really need your rhino, you need to make that case) and what the mental health professionals should include in the recommendation letters. They're very adamant that an assistance animal is *not* a pet, and that merely companionship, etc. are not reasons to get the classification as an assistance/therapeutic support animal, but there seems to be a little bit of wiggle room when it comes to the "therapeutic" part:
"Assisting a person with mental illness to leave the isolation of home or to interact with others,
• Enabling a person to deal with the symptoms or effects of major depression by providing a reason to live, or
• Providing emotional support that alleviates at least one identified symptom or effect of a physical or mental impairment."
"As a best practice, documentation – typically a short letter - that is being requested as part of a reasonable accommodation is recommended to include:
Patient name
Whether the health care professional has a professional relationship with that patient/client involving the provision of health care or disability-related services
The type of animal(s) for which the reasonable accommodation is sought
Whether the patient has a physical or mental impairment
Whether the patient’s impairment(s) substantially limit at least one major life activity or major bodily function, and
Whether the patient needs the animal(s) to do work, provide assistance, perform at least one task that benefits the patient, or provide therapeutic emotional support related specifically to the disability. For example, a dog that is trained to detect the onset of a seizure for a person who has seizure disorder, and helps that person remain safe during the seizure is an example of an animal that does work to benefit that person specifically related to their disability. Alternatively, a cat, while not trained to perform a specific task, may provide assistance to a person with anxiety by helping the person deal with the symptoms of or alleviate disability-related stress—this is an example of an animal that provides therapeutic emotional support specifically related to an individual’s disability."
You would not be able to sue for much anyway. Sadly, the law treats pets as property, and their value is limited to the actual money value, irrespective of emotional value.
Well, in this case it was a dog that was attacked but 4.5 million times a year it's a human. The incident in RI reminded me of that somewhat viral video from a few years ago in Colombia where she was also attacked in an elevator by a pitbull and almost lost an arm, then the vid from last week in Philly, etc. It seems like even if it was a dog on dog attack the owner here would have a strong case for suffering/distress civil damages after her watching her dog disemboweled and eaten in front of her.
I also think it would be difficult to sue the doctor who authored the ESA certification, because the doctor is not qualified to evaluate, nor is she or he assuming a duty to evaluate, the safety of the dog itself. The only “treatment” being provided by the doctor is answering the question of whether this patient requires an emotional support animal. The responsibility for an attack and injury rests with the dog’s owner- who many times doesn’t even have insurance so you’re SOL even if you successfully sue.
I would hope that these doctors aren't dumb enough to prescribe a specific pet, as opposed to something vague and general like "my patient needs to have an emotional support animal for X reason and under Y circumstances." By not endorsing the specific animal that should alleviate much, maybe all, potential liability. Case law around pets is pretty clear that some pets are considered safe and normal, so there's no presumption that, for instance, all dogs are potentially a menace and lead to liability concerns.
From Scott’s description it sounds like part of the process is evaluating the specific animal; nobody gets “prescribed” a new pet, but rather a certification for an existing pet.
The HUD gave guidance on what kinds of animals may be classed as service or assistance animals:
"Animals commonly kept in households.
If the animal is a dog, cat, small bird, rabbit, hamster, gerbil, other rodent, fish, turtle, or other small, domesticated animal that is traditionally kept in the home for pleasure rather than for commercial purposes, then the reasonable accommodation should be granted because the requestor has provided information confirming that there is a disability related need for the animal.
For purposes of this assessment, reptiles (other than turtles), barnyard animals, monkeys, kangaroos, and other non-domesticated animals are not considered common household animals.
Unique animals.
If the individual is requesting to keep a unique type of animal that is not commonly kept in households as described above, then the requestor has the substantial burden of demonstrating a disability-related therapeutic need for the specific animal or the specific type of animal. The individual is encouraged to submit documentation from a health care professional confirming the need for this animal, which includes information of the type set out in the Guidance on Documenting an Individual’s Need for Assistance Animals in Housing. While this guidance does not establish any type of new documentary threshold, the lack of such documentation in many cases may be reasonable grounds for denying a requested accommodation. If the housing provider enforces a “no pets” policy or a policy prohibiting the type of animal the individual seeks to have, the housing provider may take reasonable steps to enforce the policy if the requester obtains the animal before submitting reliable documentation from a health care provider that reasonably supports the requestor’s disability-related need for the animal. As a best practice, the housing provider should make a determination promptly, generally within 10 days of receiving documentation.
Reasonable accommodations may be necessary when the need for a unique animal involves unique circumstances …
Examples:
• The animal is individually trained to do work or perform tasks that cannot be performed by a dog.
• Information from a health care professional confirms that:
o Allergies prevent the person from using a dog; or
o Without the animal, the symptoms or effects of the person’s disability will be significantly increased.
• The individual seeks to keep the animal outdoors at a house with a fenced yard where the animal can be appropriately maintained.
Example: A Unique Type of Support Animal
An individually trained capuchin monkey performs tasks for a person with paralysis caused by a spinal cord injury. The monkey has been trained to retrieve a bottle of water from the refrigerator, unscrew the cap, insert a straw, and place the bottle in a holder so the individual can get a drink of water. The monkey is also trained to switch lights on and off and retrieve requested items from inside cabinets. The individual has a disability-related need for this specific type of animal because the monkey can use its hands to perform manual tasks that a service dog cannot perform."
The worst ones are probably fly-by-night operations that just take the money and give you a letter, no questions asked, so good luck trying to track them down for legal liability afterwards (and they probably have some fine print that they were relying on what the applicant said and it was up to the applicant to be honest, in order to dodge responsibility).
The respectable or semi-respectable ones probably aren't venal enough to write you a letter for your ESA pitbull.
I actually got denied adderall from one of those online services because I was naive enough to answer honestly. I actually do seem to have ADHD since I now have adderall and it helps exactly the way it’s supposed to. But doctors don’t prescribe for ADHD if you are depressed even if the depression is obviously caused by winter and Covid lockdowns.
That... is not how logic works.
Popular claim: Adderall causes Focus in ADHD people.
Reality: Adderall causes Focus in everyone.
Galaxy-brained but wrong claim: If Adderall causes Focus in you, you do not have ADHD (which is the same as the negation of the popular claim, that Aderall *doesn't* cause Focus in ADHD people).
When I was in college, I saw this made as a completely serious claim, along the lines of:
* Painkillers kill pain in people who are in pain.
* Painkillers do not kill pain in people who are not in pain.
* The effect is different depending on whether or not you have pain.
* ADHD drugs have the exact same effect on ADHD people and non-ADHD people.
* Therefore, unlike pain, ADHD is not a real condition.
This was one of many arguments presented by this article in favor of the thesis that ADHD is not a legitimate diagnosis. (Not so much "you don't have ADHD" as "no one truly has ADHD because it doesn't exist.") It was interesting stuff, and I wish I could find it again now.
You may be interested in Scott's Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions series.
Sounds to me like it's psychiatry that's the racket. Or, at least, **the practice of psychiatry under the social and legal conditions that prevail in the U.S. necessary entangle it with many rackety things**, emotional support animals merely being one of many examples.
I don't know how you draw that conclusion from this post.
You listed two rackets that psychiatry is essential to in this very post.
Lawyers are essential to a huge number of rackets, including every racket in this post (since that's who drafts the laws). Is the law therefore a racket?
I was pointing out how one could draw that conclusion from this post. Also, yes.
I think another conclusion you could draw is that all of society is a racket, and therefore rackets are actually good!
Or rather that "rackets" defined in this way is too broad a category to be particularly useful
I can't tell - are you arguing, or stating the obvious?
There are non-racket uses of the law, but I think that, on the margin, the law is very much a racket.
What are the alternatives?
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm
I think the law and the government that enforces the law are both rackets. And I also think there is no alternative. Unlike libertarians, I don't think reducing laws will necessarily help anything, because most of them were put in place to prevent private rackets. There is no solution, or rather, the solution is to learn to live with suffering
"Is the law therefore a racket?"
Pretty much, yes.
Maybe 60% of it? A huge amount of legal work is literally just protecting you from enemy lawyers. If no one had lawyers there would be wildly less need for them.
As with the often fair attacks on civil rights law, I think takes like these don't give enough consideration to the problems with the status quo ante that caused the current protection measures, imperfect though they are, to be implemented.
Absolutely. This is why I reject libertarianism and minarchism, in a nut shell. Reducing the size and power of the government will just open the way for worse, less accountable people to seize that power.
"For someone who doesn't like lawyers, you sure keep a lot of them around."
"Listen, lawyers are like nuclear weapons. You got yours, so I gotta have mine. But the minute one of us pulls the trigger on them, the whole world goes to shit!"
--Dialogue exchange (roughly paraphrased) from "Other People's Money."
Yes.
https://youtu.be/R8-4iuqP2iw
I'm assuming they're talking about the plethora of entitlements given to the "disabled" under flimsy pretenses? Legally mandated accommodations, anti-discrimination laws, stuff like that.
Anything can be a racket. Figures don't lie, but liars figure.
Why not say it's the legal system that's a racket? Lawyers are easy pickings for such things.
When we were looking for a landlord while owning a cat, our landlord said they had police people living there and it's much worse than just a small cat. (not USA)
Police people? Sorry, I don’t follow.
Cops.
I still don’t follow. Do cops present dangers to cats? The landlord found the police undesirable as tenants? Is this a known punchline?
Violent corrupt authoritarians make bad tenants.
How so
It seems pretty clear to me that violent people make for bad tenants, both due to property damage (e.g. putting a fist through a wall) and due to making other tenants feel unsafe.
Don't feed the trolls.
My experience is that the best tenant is a reputationally-motivated rule-follower with a secure salary who stands to lose when colliding with the established authorities. Having law enforcement in the building and neighborhood also makes other tenants and neighbors feel secure and drives off the sorts of tenants you really don't want—criminals.
Certainly there is an argument that the guy who has a maybe-not-entirely-genuine medical marijuana Rx, or the lady who is keeping a cat that isn't permitted under the lease, will be made uncomfortable. But these are fringe tenants, not very desirable even if they have other good qualities.
The claim many libertarians will make is that most people engage in some behavior that is legally questionable, and are made uncomfortable by the presence of cops. Same way that kids are embarrassed by having their parents around.
I read this and imagined a uniformed Emotional Support Officer in a stab vest reassuring the patient with their presence.
The majority of housing where landlords are involved is the sort where the tenant next door having a dog is bad for one's mental health. Having a dog, oneself, only compounds the problem.
If the law were that every ESA has to have its vocal cords surgically removed, we could debate if that's humane but at least it would be in the 'mental health' direction.
When I found miniature ponies are a legitimate service animal (but that you need two or they become distressed)… well, thank God I met my wife shortly after that and she doesn’t find that as funny as I do.
How does that work with the landlord part of things? Surely nobody's keeping a miniature pony in their apartment?
I aspire to someday own an emotional support alpaca, but apparently they're supposed to be kept in trios
Get a small carriage and offer them rides. Can’t fail.
I need a few dairy cows to help with my anorexia, all that milk and butter keeps me weight-stable.
They should also keep you in a good moood.
That comment certainly helped, though I'm a bit miffed that I didn't think of it myself.
I'm quite certain there are people who keep a pony in their 300 square foot apartment, judging by the number of inappropriately-sized dogs in apartments.
Apparently miniature horses can be the size of large dogs, so if you can wangle it to keep a large dog in the rented property, why not a miniature horse?
Its very appropriate that this follows the discussion about discrimination law because it seems to stem from the same issue with overregulation and failure to fully consider all the costs and imperfect implementation that go along with legally mandating something.
Unfortunately, I fear this may be an insoluble problem in a democracy. The issue is that it's just not in the voter's interests to vote based on what policies make the world better but, rather, to vote based on what best advertises their values and expresses their feelings. A problem social media has only made worse. You advertise that you care about disabled people by supporting laws which make it illegal not to accommodate them or, when the pendulum swings back, laws which signal you think emotional support animals are bs by completely banning them and at no point to the incentivizes favor really weighing likely consequences much.
My best solution is to make voting more indirect (eg original electoral college but make electors your actual city/state legislators so they can't become purely a formality). But that's still not great.
A meaningful federalism (with sub-entities actually competing for people to live in) might be a solution, but I suspect this is not at all realistic.
Or outright splitting into more countries.
All hail city states!
(I put my money where my mouth is, and moved to Singapore.)
I was the one stumping for city states earlier, but you have indeed outdone me.
Singapore is the promised land!
How's local fertility?
About what you expect from a big, rich city in he developed world at the moment.
This. Splitting into more countries is the only solution that doesn't make my skin crawl.
Feel free to vote with your feet by also moving to a smaller, or at least more federated country.
Switzerland is pretty good at both being small-ish, and leaving her states lots of of authority.
I wish. For cultural and personal reasons I would be racked with guilt if I left my family behind in this country. Hell, It would feel very weird to live more then 500 miles away from my siblings, even if I was in the same country. Enjoy your freedom.
Fair enough, we all have to make our trade-offs and compromises.
I'm not sure it does - in the areas where local laws control things we end up, rather than getting a diversity of approaches, getting some municipalities in a race to be maximally exclusive (e.g. Atherton) while others are either stuck with the poor people and problems (e.g. detroit) or just too ideological to function (San Francisco). There's relatively little race for comparative advantage in preferential policies going on.
Per David Schleicher there's negligible partisan competition in cities because politics has become so nationalized that everyone chooses their party on the national level and hardly pays attention to the local level. https://volokh.com/posts/chain_1228735775.shtml https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/12/whats_wrong_wit_7.html Eliminating the national level would change that.
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
Is your assumption that no one getting to have pets in their apartments is a better world?
This seems to me like a case where capital is making the world a lot worse, and regulation is opening a loophole to help some of those people.
As Scott said, this would be less of a problem if the housing industry were so healthy that landlords were competing for tenants and had to offer attractive perks like allowing pets. But that's far from the state of things in most cities.
No, it would be better if people got to have pets in an apartment if and only if the owner of said apartment allows.
Capital isn't making the world worse here, nobody would be better off if the capital in question (the apartments) didn't exist.
People would be better off if they were not owned by capitalists, and instead by the occupants.
And if your next line is something like 'but they wouldn't have been built if the capitalists couldn't make money off them'... then yeah, that's part of the point.
Wealth inequality is so great that only a tiny cabal of elites can build anything of value, and they will only do so if they can use it to exploit everyone else to their own gain. The result is that our societal wealth and productivity is directed towards building systems that benefit the populace to only the barest level required to get their money.
Which, again, can work ok in very liquid markets with lots of competition. But works very poorly for things like real estate and housing.
Most people own a home, it's not a tiny cabal whose wealth corresponds to the cost of building a home.
A bare majority, yes, but something like 38% still rent.
But my point wasn't about who owns a home, it was about who has the ability to build new housing.
The vast majority of the 38% who rent will be owners later in life. Being a tenant is just a stage of life.
And some of those 38% are themselves landlords (own in one place, rent in another).
I'm honestly trying to understand your point, but I'm confused. You said
"People would be better off if they were not owned by capitalists, and instead by the occupants."
I interpreted that as meaning "People would be better off if the occupants owned the apartments."
That's home ownership, albeit not a single-family home.
But home ownership doesn't always make sense. People may not have enough cash on hand to buy a home, even if that is just one apartment. They may not want to get a mortgage at that particular time in their lives. And even if they do want to get a mortgage, doing so comes with its own costs (fees and taxes). If you can't or don't want to commit to owning the same home for a while then you may not recover those fees and taxes unless housing prices go up considerably. In some markets that might be the case, but it's still risky. The housing market is weird.
Plus, when you own a home, you liable for all the repairs. The cost of repairs goes into rent, of course, but it can still be time consuming and stressful to find a repairman that you trust, and sometimes costs go up unexpectedly. Having a landlord that is responsible for dealing with all of that can provide peace of mind.
Then you say that your point isn't really about who can afford to buy a home, but who can afford to build new housing. But all of the above still applies. You still have to have a lot of cash on hand or be willing to take on a mortgage, with all that entails. And if we are talking about multi-unit dwellings and not single-family homes, then you have to have even more cash, or take on an even bigger mortgage, to build a bunch of units you won't occupy (in which case, you become a landlord), or somehow coordinate with people who are willing to share the cost of construction and then occupy all the units. But that's a huge coordination problem, because everything I said above about home ownership still applies, except now it applies to dozens, if not hundreds, of people who are strangers to one another and who may not want to enter into the type of legally binding cooperative agreement to build an apartment build that would be required to make that work.
> People would be better off if they were not owned by capitalists, and instead by the occupants.
This is offtopic, but it took me a second reading before I realized you weren't talking about slavery and multiple personalities. :-)
A modest proposal going in exactly the opposite direction: split the concept of home ownership down the middle. Specifically, decouple responsibility for the bricks and mortar from the right to collect the rent.
Hear me out: the tenant shouldn't be forced to move out before the landlord can sell. Short of altering the structure of the building, the tenant should be able to do what they like to the property they live in - the cost of restoring it to a sellable state when they end their tenancy can be priced in and/or insured against. It shouldn't matter to the tenant whether their landlord is a rich individual, a giant faceless corporation or a government.
Meanwhile, it shouldn't matter to the landlord whether a tenant wants to paint their room red or yellow, pin up a poster, change the curtains, have their friend stay over, or own a pet; or, indeed, who the tenant is or whether it's the same person paying rent today as yesterday (provided they do pay rent).
When a landlord buys to let, to a first approximation, they have a lump sum and/or leverage that they want to put to work - what they want is to turn this into a revenue stream; that is, they want to buy a recurring payment and also some risk, a bet on being able to sell the revenue stream to the next landlord along in the future for a profit.
When a tenant rents a place, meanwhile, they want to live their life there - they want to be able to decorate and furnish their living environment as they please, they want to be able to share it with who and what they please, and they don't want to be kicked out and have to find another place on the landlord's whim.
Maybe not all tenancies should look like this. It's reasonable for the retired person renting out their spare room to want a say over what goes on there. But when a house is purchased by someone who do not themselves plan to live there - indeed, only interact with it between tenants, if at all - they really shouldn't get much control over the people who do.
Let landlords buy and sell the revenue streams they actually want to, without having to bother with the burdensome reality of owning a physical house and dealing with the actual people living in it. Let tenants live in rented property how they want, for as long as they want, without being unreasonably restricted or kicked out, provided they can afford the rent. It's simpler all around.
Georgist economics says letting landlords buy and sell revenue streams is the root problem, proposes fully centralizing that sort of rent-collection in a form that's accountable to the voting public, and decoupling it from more personalized property-management services. Possibly redistributing the revenue as UBI.
Historical experience shows over and over that free markets work better for making resource distribution decisions than central planning.
The worst problems arise when some of the participants are not free to shop around or walk away (as, e.g., with urgent healthcare decisions); the property market, tight and terrible as it currently is, is not yet in that place. The way forward, therefore, is surely to manage externalities and reduce the trade to its essence as much as possible.
As a user, when my ISP, telephone company, credit card provider etc tells me another company has bought them, I don't actually care: I still get the same service for the same price.
Meanwhile, the ISP shouldn't get to control what sites I visit, the credit card provider shouldn't get to control what I spend money on, the telephone company shouldn't get to control who I call; if they attempt this, I walk away. My ability to do so depends on there being a market for these things, with many participants; if there was only one, centralised, supplier, they would have more control over what I can do, not less.
If I am a tenant, I am buying housing as a service, and a change of landlord shouldn't affect me. The extent to which it does is a failure of the market and legislative environment. The landlord shouldn't get much say in how I use the service. The extent to which they do is a failure of the market and legislative environment. At least, though, if it gets really miserable, I do still have the option to look for somewhere else. Having only one, centralised, landlord would remove this.
Meanwhile, given the current shape of the world and the experience of the last decade or two of politics, I have very little trust in accountability to the voting public being any kind of strong driver of outcomes that align with my preferences. IME I am much more likely to be able to get things closer to what I want if there exists a large set of things to choose between than if there is one thing I allegedly have some tiny nebulous influence over.
IMO the problem with the housing rental market is that we treat it as one market, whereas it should be two separate ones. The landlord market for trading lump sums and revenue streams should be decoupled, as much as possible, from the tenant market for housing-as-a-service; just the same way that when we buy anything-else-as-a-service we don't have to concern ourselves with who the shareholders of the company we're getting the service from are or what trading decisions they make day to day; and neither do they care about us, save perhaps in aggregate.
> Georgist economics says letting landlords buy and sell revenue streams is the root problem
As a card carrying Georgist, this isn't correct. The root problem is that the price the landlord is able to charge for rent is in large part a product of the land value cause by the improvements created and paid for by the community surrounding the parcel of land. ie, if a parcel of land is next to a train station it will be worth a lot more, but what the landlord is effectively charging rent for is proximity to public transit that they didn't build (read: aren't taxed on proportional to the value they're able to extract from the improvement). Georgists have no complaint with a property developer building a massive apartment building next to a train station and then selling that building to a landlord. The issue is that the revenue stream for that property is a combination of the land rent and the building rent. We have no issue with the landlord acting as a property manager and charging the rents required to cover the loans for the construction, property upkeep, some profit margin, etc, but it makes no sense that they capture the land rent from the train station.
The prototypical case of this is the landlord who finds out that a train station will be built in X location in 5 years, and buys an empty lot next to location X. The next year when the construction of the train station becomes public knowledge, the value of their land doubles because the market correctly prices in how much more demand there will be to live there. At this point they sell the empty lot to a developer for a tidy profit, having done absolutely nothing to create value in the process. A Georgist economist would say that the land speculator's profit in that case should be taxed at 100%.
The problem is that a lot of tenants will just completely trash a place then move out after a few years and actually getting the money out of them to pay for returns is legal hell even if they have it (which they often don't).
This happens already and is independent of the renting mechanism.
The market prices this risk in. In addition to the rent, typically there is a deposit, which is kept to pay for cleanup if the apartment is trashed.
For people who find the risk of cleanup/repair costs for a place exceeding the deposit and whatever profit they make from rent to be unacceptable, there already are management companies that keep a larger portion of the rent but in return undertake to cover maintenance / cleanup during and between tenancies, and also cover the rent payments in the event of a large gap between tenancies.
I do feel that there is a gap between those extremes that is waiting to be filled - some kind of end-of-tenancy insurance, perhaps - but that is by the by.
" the cost of restoring it to a sellable state when they end their tenancy can be priced in and/or insured against.
...Meanwhile, it shouldn't matter to the landlord ...whether it's the same person paying rent today as yesterday (provided they do pay rent)."
Do you not see that the second part contradicts the first? "Oh, it wasn't me knocked a hole in the wall, it was the previous tenant who was a friend invited to stay by the original tenant who is now in Australia", good luck chasing after the money to do the repairs, and insurance companies will charge an arm and a leg in premiums to cover "so your tenant trashed your property then disappeared and now you have to repair it".
If I wake up in the morning and find that my car has been vandalised overnight where I parked it, I don't need to work out who did it before my insurance covers the repairs (which is great, since the police round here lack the capacity to do anything of that nature).
Why can't this work the same way?
The landlord shouldn't have to chase the tenant for the repair costs. This is a thing that's broken in the current system and shouldn't stay that way. Either they already have the deposit, or there is insurance in the picture (or a management company, which performs the same function and balances risk across their portfolio internally) or they've deliberately decided to bear the risk themselves so they get to keep more of the rent and therefore now have to pay out of their own pocket I guess.
If we expect landlords to give tenants more rights than presently, we do need to help balance their risk accordingly. I don't think we particularly need to invent anything new for this, though, we already have tried and tested mechanisms for this sort of thing.
That said, if we're imagining new possibilities, an insurance package tied to the tenant could also work - landlords could reduce rent / lower deposits to tenants with such a package, and tying it to the tenant would let insurers price discriminate based on risk assessment / past history just like they do for cars, including no claims bonuses etc.
"Short of altering the structure of the building, the tenant should be able to do what they like to the property they live in - the cost of restoring it to a sellable state when they end their tenancy can be priced in and/or insured against."
Would you consider a requirement to put about 10% of the value of the property in escrow an acceptable way to ensure the ability to restore the property to a sellable state?
No, because around here 10% of the value of a property is twice the annual wage for a cleaner, and I don't believe it's physically possible to do damage that will cost that amount to fix without doing things like breaking down load bearing walls.
No, sometimes you just want to live in a certain place for a couple years (like going to college), and buying a house and then selling it again is not worth the hassle compared to just renting one for a bit.
Buying and selling is a hassle in the current market where most people only do it once or twice in their life and it only applies to separate houses which are huge purchases.
If we had a system where people could buy their apartments, it would create a market for much more frequent and smaller transactions, and the market would respond with appropriate financial implements to that situation. Like car loans.
Buying your apartment is called a condo
I don’t think that makes sense. There’s a lot of fixed costs in transferring real estate ownership, and a lot of specialized tasks in maintaining real estate, and so there are real efficiencies and social benefits in having some people specialized to do that while others just rent, particularly for short term situations. It’s a lot of the same advantages for why restaurants exist instead of all cooking being done in individually-owned kitchens.
Communist USSR is not exactly known for its excellent housing
Thank you Godwin.
I don’t think owner occupancy solves the problem. You still have to decide whether the building allows pets in the individual unit, or doesn’t, and instead of an owner-operator for the whole building, you have a community of owner-occupants that need to set a collective policy. Any way that policy is set will be bad for some owner-occupants. What matters is having sufficient buildings that there is a market niche for some to do each policy, more than how ownership of those buildings is structured.
There's a big difference between passing a rule that applies to you and passing a law that only applies to strangers. To say nothing of democracy vs dictatorship.
Assuming that the co-op model is what would happen for apartment complexes, sure, every rule will be bad for some occupants. But the rules should be much better on average, because they're made by and for the people they affect. And it should be much easier to find a co-op that matches your preferences, because different people with different preferences can cluster, but all landlords have basically the same incentives.
Honestly I don't think pets belong in apartments at all, with the possible exception of fish. If you don't have a proper backyard you definitely shouldn't own a dog and probably shouldn't own a cat either. Animals shouldn't be cooped up indoors 23 hours a day.
...this sentiment in one ear, and "the outside world is dangerous and full of cars, and also pets have a huge, terrible effect on the ecosystem; they should never ever be let out; keep them indoor only!" in the other. Net result: no-one should have pets,ever.
I'm sympathetic to both of these, so I took it out of my own hands by getting a cat with serious health problems that means it can't be let out, both for its own health (needs meds twice a day) and that of other cats (FIV+).
Apartments and outdoors aren't the only options. There is such a thing as non-apartment housing, such as... houses.
Have you read this? It goes a bit farther.
https://mattlakeman.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/
Landlords are also capable of owning and renting out full houses, although it probably wouldn't be profitable in San Fransisco or New York.
Unless you're vegan, this argument doesn't make any sense to me. The animals we eat can sit cooped up in cages for basically their entire lives, and that's okay, but people can't have pets that they love and play with in their own apartments?
There also lots of small pets, like rats, hamsters, pigeons, snakes, lizards, etc that can get everything they need in a small amount of space. I mean, just look at how small the enclosures for some creatures are even at zoos.
Perhaps, but consider also The Repugnant Conclusion.
Many apartments have rodent problems, and (human) pest control that the landlord has to call is significantly slower than the domestic cat.
I've never owned a cat, but in retrospect perhaps I should have...
Why do you think landlords ban pets?
As far as I can tell, its 1) They accelerate degradation/increase maintainance cost of the building 2) Other tenants are annoyed by them.
Both of those are still problems with some kind of collective ownership. In general I dont get how capital is supposed to profit off something like that: Whatever money the ban makes them, why dont they just make that into an upcharge for getting a pet allowed, if that was so attractive?
The housing market is a lot better over here. Still, most appartments dont allow pets.
For a furnished apartment, there is also 3) the risk of the pet destroying an apartment's worth of furniture. The cost of replacing that (or the loss involved in moving from the furnished to the unfurnished rental market) can be much higher than the cost of cleaning and repainting an empty apartment that an animal scratched up / excreted in.
In a rental, there's a pernicious principle-agent problem (or maybe that's not the exact term, but related).
The renter doesn't care what happens to the property or property values as long as they can keep renting (indeed, they directly benefit from falling property values).
The landlord doesn't care about quality of life for the tenant, as long as they can keep their rooms full at market price (indeed, they can save a lot of money with various QoL-lowering measures, and having more churn makes it easier to increase their prices to keep up with the market/inflation).
So the renter and landlord have an oppositional relationship with wildly divergent incentives about how the unit should be used and treated. This encourages landlords lowering QoL and tenants disrespecting the property and neighborhood in a constant downward spiral.
That includes, in this case, landlords outlawing all pets, even ones that are likely to not be costly to them in terms of damages and property values; and tenants not caring about whether their pets will cause damages or lower property values, and not caring to give them the proper training/clean up after them quickly/etc to avoid that.
There's a reason pets destroy rented apartments faster than owned homes. When you own your own property, all the incentives fall on you and you can balance them optimally. When the incentives are misaligned because of an adversarial renter/landlord relationship, dumb shit happens.
I do wonder how much of this is (a) stated policy compared to actual policy and (b) a lack of "reputation."
Specifically, I rented an apartment for a while and was a "good" tenant. My rent was always on time, management didn't have to come talk to me about loud parties, the police didn't show up at my apartment late at night, etc.
Eventually I acquired a girlfriend and we decided to move in together to a larger apartment. Also, she wanted a cat. I explained to management that we wanted a larger place (which they had) and that moving there would be easier for us (short distance to move stuff, we know the management company and neighborhood, etc.). But we wanted a cat. Policy for the apartment complex was: No pets.
We were permitted a (single) cat in exchange for a slight increase in the rent.
I have no idea how common this is.
>indeed, they can save a lot of money with various QoL-lowering measures
That only works if they can surprise the tenants. Pets/no pets is known from the outset and will be priced in. This was my point: "Capitalist greed" is rarely a reason not to offer something, only to change price.
>When you own your own property, all the incentives fall on you
Yeah, for some reason I thought you were talking about collective ownership of the building rather than condos. What might also contribute though is that in many places tenants cant be held accountable for anything except not paying the rent, if that. I mean, you said that landlords will decrease QoL to increase churn, instead of just... kicking people out. Thats kind of symptomatic.
For 1, you're describing how things work in an efficient market with lots of competition and high consumer information and low friction costs. Maybe there are some lucky cities where the apartment rental market looks like that, but it doesn't describe any of the cities where we talk about the problems with housing all the time.
> you said that landlords will decrease QoL to increase churn,
I'm saying churn doesn't hurt them, they lower QoL mostly to save on costs.
>For 1, you're describing how things work in an efficient market with lots of competition and high consumer information and low friction costs.
I dont think so. What would be the incentive against offering your building with pets allowed and a correspondingly higher price? It seems to me that even a monopolist landlord would have some of his buildings like that.
>I'm saying churn doesn't hurt them, they lower QoL mostly to save on costs.
You said that it helps with raising prices. And with that too, why cant they just do that? It seems very much like youre trying to fix the side effects of fixing the market, rather than a problem with the market itself.
The real issue is that it's very difficult to deal with an irresponsible pet owner. In terms of the harm to the building or stuff that's easily handled by the deposit and/or a monthly pet fee. And most people are pretty responsible with their pets so don't impose much (if any) net harm to their neighbors.
The real issue is what about the person who leaves their giant husky home barking all day. Eviction is a crazy expensive process for a landlord and especially in this situation where it's hard to have a clear rule about what constitutes excessive barking so you may need to pull in the neighbors to testify in any eviction hearing.
Voting is generally secret, it doesn't advertise anything.
It depends what you mean by "democracy." If you just mean "people elect legislators to figure out all those 'law' thingies for them" and don't pay any more heed, then yeah, a known failure mode is "I demand you vote for all the nice-sounding things, and talk about trade-offs and complications is just defeatist!"
But "democracy" as it was practiced in its Tocquevillian heyday isn't just voting or legislatures. It means that ordinary people - not specialist legislators, bureaucrats, or other "public servants" - are the primary agents tasked with identifying, reviewing, and solving their community's problems, either through voluntary and fraternal organizations, or through communal participation in formal government bodies like town meetings.
Democracy as published by the Greeks didn't really involve much or any voting at all. They knew that this would just lead to aristocracy.
No, true democracy means that we pick leaders at random.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
(It's not quite as crazy as it sounds. I think filling up ca 600 member parliament, like the English Parliament or the German Bundestag with uniformly randomly selected willing participants might actually work.)
I'm not completely confident in such a model but would certainly be willing to give it a try. How about a multi-stage system? Town councilors who serve a term without being caught in any work-related felonies become the selection pool for state-level positions, then a term at state level without disgrace qualifies for federal. Simplifies the problem of fair random selection from an enormous population, mitigates risks of someone with poor impulse control being given vast power with no warmup.
That's why I suggested you fill up parliament at random. If you have 600 positions to fill, the law of large numbers is your friend. Then run parliament as per the established rules of your country. A few irresponsible individuals won't damage the system.
(And if 10% of people in the population have poor impulse control, I guess it's only fair that 10% of your members of parliament also have poor impulse control..)
I wouldn't want to pick single positions like president completely at random. The law of large numbers doesn't help you there.
A slightly more sophisticated version: instead of picking people directly at random, have everyone who's interested fill out a ballot. The ballot nominates one (willing) person.
To fill up parliament, draw 600 ballots at random. If multiple ballots drawn name the same person, use your favourite resolution method. (Eg you could give that lucky person multiple votes in parliament, or you could let people put second and third etc choices on their ballot, or you could pick the choice from the lucky person's own ballot (and so on in a chain), or you could just draw another ballot at random, etc.)
This is a bit of a cross between normal voting and sortition.
I like these randomised methods, because they ensure perfect (probabilistic) proportionality along any axis (eg left handers vs right handers, litte-endians vs big-endians), instead of just proportionality along party lines.
In Germany's current system, chancellor and president are picked (more or less) by a majority vote in parliament. Something like that would work in our sortition system as well to fill up individual appointments.
You could also pick a president at random. If you want to do that, I would suggest the random-ballot method outlined above, instead of directly picking people at random.
> A few irresponsible individuals won't damage the system.
> (And if 10% of people in the population have poor impulse control, I guess it's only fair that 10% of your members of parliament also have poor impulse control..)
There's a small but potentially non-negligible chance that the random draw of 600 parliament members has a run of bad luck, pulls *more* than 60 who are in the bottom 10% with regard to impulse control, plus a few malevolent narcissists eager to take advantage of the resulting chaos. Probably less risk of that than in a system directly based around the sort of popularity contests that narcissists train hard to excel at, but, maybe still worth being careful about?
Aside from egregious failure modes, tiered sortition would also ensure that, to the extent there are learnable skills involved in being a legislator, or unexpected personal challenges, anyone considered for the top spots has already had chances to find out what they'll be getting into and practice those skills in a lower-stakes environment, thus holding "willingness" to higher standards of informed consent for higher offices.
I would suggest trying different variants to run clubs, companies and then perhaps towns. So we wouldn't need to rely on our armchair speculation.
I am similarly sympathetic to sortition, but it's worth noting what happened in Athens. It came to be ruled by its generals, because the generals were (a) not chosen randomly, and (b) not term-limited.
There are good reasons that generals were exempt from those constraints - their performance matters.
But still, that effectively made them the government.
I don't think that was really the case. Athens had ruling officials *called* generals, but power always resided with the Assembly. At least until the Assembly led Athens into one too many wartime defeat and the city had a new constitution installed at spear-point.
All that would end up doing is strengthening the government bureaucracy at the expense of the parliament, since you'd have a crop of legislators with little or no institutional knowledge.
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The problem is writing laws to make people act civilized. Accommodating people is the moral thing to do, if you aren't unduly burdened by it, which you could judge yourself by whether you're harmed more by accommodating than the person you would be helping is harmed by being denied (service, a product, access to something, etc.). When you write a LAW to enforce this, it never works correctly, since the wording is pretty much impossible to get right.
What about charging a fine for trying to get into an elevator before the people in the elevator leave?
Not disagreeing in general, just gonna leave this here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/12/section/2/enacted
You might also consider greatly lengthening terms of office.
It would be fine if claims were legit. But it’s precisely because of the rampant abuse, as you’ve described, that screws it up for the folks who might have legit claims.
Keep it to seeing eye dogs. Clear….testable….verifiable disability with an objective benefit from the animal in question. For everyone else….get an app or a VR headset for your emotional comfort instead.
Animals really do work better than apps or VR headsets. I'm not saying that therefore anyone in poor health mentally or physically gets to have one for comfort no matter who it inconveniences. But you're making the situation simpler than it is by believing that little electrical entertainments work just as well. If only it were so simple!
You realize that service animals span way more legitimate functions than just "seeing eye dog", right? e.g. for people with fainting disorders, seizure disorders, mobility impairment, hearing impairment, schizophrenia, etc.
And you realize all the usage creep and abuse of the privileges of having a service animal, right?
"Usage creep" is a very loaded way of observing that the medical profession has found more uses for animals than just seeing eye dogs (by that broad brush, all of medicine has usage creep). Service animals are generally strictly trained and have specific purposes they serve, and generally there are very clear cases for each such purpose. There's very little "abuse" of the system, afaict.
The OP gives a specific example of such abuse….and how it’s easier even for someone as logically precise as Scott to acquiesce to them.
Time to eliminate the mushy indications and raise the bar.
...No, it does not.
The OP is about ESAs, not service animals. They are not the same thing (and are, in fact, legally distinct), and the OP even makes that clear 4-5 sentences in. Almost nothing said in the OP applies to service animals.
Which is why my point is to keep it to service animals for legit indications, like seeing eye dogs, and do away with all the soft (give or take bogus) indications that are ripe for abuses….like just about any ESA “indication”.
No. "Service" animals, unlike emotional support pets, are highly trained to perform a specific task, like alerting diabetics to blood sugar changes before symptoms occur, alerting to on-coming seizures and blood pressure problems, etc. This allows the owner time to stop and address the issue before it becomes critical.
Arguably, these dogs are even more useful and necessary than seeing-eye dogs, as smell-based alert dogs are detecting conditions *before* their owners experience symptoms. Blind people know they're blind and the vast majority already have strategies for navigating the world.
Likewise, there's a small population of highly trained and necessary dogs who aren't Labs-with-grab-bars, like the Border Collie avalanche rescue dog belonging to a guest who routinely stayed in my hotel as he traveled to and from ski resorts. She absolutely didn't *look* like the usual medical or disability service dog, but she saved several people's lives over her "career."
The high bar for "service" that you're is "Does the animal *proactively* perform a specific task to address a specific problem?"
And funny enough, that's already the legal definition of a service animal!
The US only recognises dogs and horses as service animals, even though many other species are trained to perform service tasks. It would be nice to expand (or entirely get rid of) the species limit, and focus on what task the animal performs.
What do service animals do for schizophrenia?
I suppose if it's a black lab named Harvey it can give the schizophrenic various commands.
I suggest training it for "Taaake yoouuur meeeds", "puuuut dooown the guuuun", "maaake aan emeeergencyyy appoooointmeeent wiiith Scooott", etc.
Sorry, all I hear is "Timmy's stuck in a well".
I'm aware of at least one case of a schizophrenic person who hallucinates people. They have a service animal trained to respond to a doorbell or knock. If the person hears someone at the door, and the animal doesn't respond, they know the visitor is not real.
> For everyone else….get an app or a VR headset for your emotional comfort instead.
Exactly! Why bother with the complexities of accountability and love for a flesh and blood creature that relies on you and reciprocates affection when you can download an app can play a comforting hum as it offers prompts for you to sit quietly writing about your loneliness?
Really, there's no reason why tenants should be allowed guests or roommates either; something like 99% of all neighbor/neighborhood disturbances stem from in-person social interactions, often between people who aren't even paying rent! Imagine how much we could cut down on both landlord expenses and annoyances to neighbors who hate knowing that other creatures exist without their consent by just giving landlords a little more discretion over what they'll allow in their properties.
And with how much the mediation of phones and the internet has already improved our social relations at scale (did you know only 0.04% of homicides or assaults over the past 10 years have occurred between people on an active skype, facetime, or zoom call? And that's worldwide!), there's not event really an opportunity cost here in terms of overall social/cultural health. We just need to get people a little more time on their phones, and the really serious issues like dogs barking and landlords having to paint between tenants will take care of themselves. Or. Well, as long as we also ban things like that in favor of phones, I mean.
The question isn’t “are pets awesome?” (They are). The question is how much special treatment, accommodation, privilege, or dispensation one can reasonably expect from others. Cuz if you want to bring your pet into a situation where pets are not permitted, that is what you’re asking for. My personal barometer is to always minimize imposition on others in pursuit of my “wants” and “nice-to-haves”. Ymmv.
>The question is how much special treatment, accommodation, privilege, or dispensation one can reasonably expect from others.
But before you can answer this question, you need to have defined a default from which special accommodation, etc. diverges. I'm not saying "pets are awesome;" I'm saying that the default state from which we're working here (i.e. nearly all US landlords get to ban pets for any reason) is what is absurd and needs to change in this arrangement, not the system for exceptions, as you were suggesting.
It simply shouldn't BE an exception to bring your pet with you to the place you move in. The onus should be on landlords to prove that they have a special need for their units to be pet-free, and they should handle pets that become an imposition on others on a case by case basis, similarly to how they already do with tenants themselves.
I was trying to at the very least highlight that there are two competing perspectives for who is imposing upon whom in the tenant-pet issue at hand (i.e. landlord vs tenant) and that to resolve the tension between those perspectives into coherent, effective policy, you need to consider even more basic questions like "what creates a flourishing society that reduces overall human suffering?" Which your suggestion of apps as a replacement for companionship led me to believe you did not consider particularly important.
Not really fussed about other situations like restaurants, bars, planes, etc.; they should for the most part be able to say no pets. As always, though, housing is different and needs different rules.
I agree the discussion is one of balance, and where that inflection point should be.
Your model only considers landlord vs tenant. However, more of the time, “all other residents/tenants in the building” is a third party that should not be ignored. And in a strata/multi-dwelling situation, I’d say let it be democratically decided. If the majority in the building want to allow pets, fine; if they do not, also fine. Any prospective tenant/resident knows the rules going in. If you choose to live in a building that does not allow pets…you’ve made your choice. If you then choose to acquire one, that should in no way obligate everyone else to modify their choices, simply to accommodate yours.
I actually love that solution for multi-unit complexes, tbh, but I think it's unfortunately a lot more likely for legislatures to succeed in passing a simple regulation that "you must rent to people with pets" than in forcing landlords to imbue an organization of their tenants with any legally-recognized decision-making capability.
Yes. Best response yet.
Everything is a housing problem (in Anglophone countries).
The whole discussion feels surreal to me, because landlords simply can't forbid you to have a pet where I come from (unless it's a dog from one of the officially dangerous breeds). The whole issue seems to be more about tenants rights than ESA.
Are there pretty strong rules about how the pets must behave?
It is extremely unpleasant to live next to a poorly behaved dog -- at least babies eventually grow up, and can't be left alone without a responsible adult.
Being eaten by your neighbor’s pet lion must be pretty unpleasant, too. It’s not a dog, so, _a fortiori_, it’s not a dog from one of the officially dangerous breeds.
You are missing the point I think. The spirit of the rules, in France, is that the tenant has in his house or apartment the same rights and duties as if they were the owner. There are general regulations on noise, they apply the same way if you own your place or if you rent it.
Reasonable accommodation laws do a lot more than just help tenants with pets. I've seen lawyers try to use them to get landlords to allow smoking in buildings, to allow tenants to violate noise restrictions, to have the landlord pay to move the tenants' stuff, etc. The laws are pretty terse, so virtually every case is a guessing game.
That's the upside to overregulation - the answer to your question is usually buried somewhere in thousands of pages of law.
>The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.
While I don't disagree about these things happening, I think I disagree with the idea that this is *all* that happens.
Basically: it's not my impression that 100% of people who want a pet in a pet-free apartment and can afford one of these letters will get one. It's not my impression that people without mental illness are as likely to know about these sites as people with mental illness, and it's not my impression that among people who know about these sites, the mentally ill and the not mentally ill will use them in equal numbers.
I feel like our community is sometimes too rules-lawyery about looking at rules and seeing what they hypothetically *could* allow, and then saying *that* is the result of the rules. Instead of looking at what they actually cause, in reality, in context.
'No pets' policies eliminate a whole lot of pets, even among the contexts where someone has the ability to potentially circumvent them with these sites. These sites are more likely to be used by the average mentally ill person than the average not-mentally-ill person (is there a less ableist word for this than 'sane'? cis-mental?).
There's a mushy middle of people abusing these sites to get pets in cases the law didn't intend, sure. But even controlling for wealth and savviness, I'd expect that the rules still accomplish what they're supposed to in most cases.
I think it's more that most people here WOULD this loophole without even thinking about it, and the only reason they think of for someone NOT doing that is a lack of knowledge about how to exploit it.
I would like to think that most people (even here) have a modicum of pride which would prevent them from pretending to have a mental illness to get some kind of benefit.
The only people I know who have ever used this loophole have been people who are already a bit iffy in the head, to the point where they're happy going to a psychiatrist and saying that they have some issue or other.
Why would pride prevent someone from using this? Everyone knows it’s a bullshit loophole. Everyone wants to have their dog with them in the place they want to go for free. So they use the loophole, they know it, and everyone around them knows it. People aren’t even thinking about pride, nor are they worried about appearing mentally ill when they use it, because it’s obvious to everyone they are using the loophole. It’s quite normalized. I’ve heard the term “just get one of those emotional support animal letters and be done with it” countless times when someone is complaining about not being able to take their pet somewhere.
If not pride, then perhaps integrity. Being willing to say only what is true, even at cost to yourself. It is frustrating when you're a person of your word and encounter various ways that society would make things easier for you if you were willing to bend the truth. Or it's frustrating if you wish you could stick to your word, but there are various ways society is dysfunctional and you do things the simpler way that involves lying. Which is what Scott is getting at when he says he suffers "a little bit of spiritual damage each time" he prescribes an ESA.
+100
Is it really lying though? Many people could truthfully say that they feel less depressed or less anxious when interacting when a pet.
And yet the vast majority of pet owners don’t do this!
Not like anyone would ever claim to be smart for using loopholes when they are to their advantage, since the loopholes are available.
> not-mentally-ill person (is there a less ableist word for this than 'sane'? cis-mental?).
"Neurotypical" might be what you're looking for.
Yup that was it, slipped my mind.
I think it's plausible that this is the case, but I do think there's a way that the equilibrium you're describing can break down: If everyone else is circumventing a system, then there's the additional motivation of not wanting to feel like a chump. When faced with the choice of gaming the system or following the rules, the pain of feeling like you're the only one who's being had might even be worse than the pain of having to pay the extra rent for the apartment that does allow pets.
And there are always people who are willing to start the process, even if only for the bragging rights (and the opportunity to condescend to the chumps who aren't clever/shrewd/man enough to to do the same). As more people start to follow suit it becomes harder to resist. If you were the last person on earth to not get an ESA letter, would you really not just get one eventually?
I think this sort of thing does happen, but I wonder under what circumstances it does or doesn't. Maybe if the process involves an amount of friction which exceeds some threshold compared to the anticipated benefit (unlike what seems to be the case now for pets with those 24 hour ESA letter websites) the ball doesn't get rolling. It could also be that if there aren't enough people who the system applies to the social factor doesn't get strong enough. How many people who have pets and rent from places that don't allow them would a given person know? Social media can affect this though.
This, so much. I do think there's a certain social technology that help prevent such spirals: being a high-trust society, where such things are "just not done". Where how you handle yourself in public still has some sort of emotional meaning to people.
The requirement for this to work is that society feels fair overall. I've spent a large part of my life living in a country where people are really nice, generous and kind, but there's this widespread belief that "they" (the government, the ruling class, whoever) is out to get you. This belief is unfortunately true to some extent. And that little bit of truth pushes the equilibrium of how people behave waaay to the side of "rule following is for chumps".
The "talking snakes" from Harry Potter are just normal snakes. The Parselmouths who can understand them are the magic part.
An underappreciated horror of the Harry Potter universe is that animals are widely known to have human or near human intelligence and the full suite of emotions, but people eat meat anyway.
Should cannibalism be grounds for leniency in murders, since it's less wasteful?
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/06/03
Well, our official Canon includes Harry freaking out that '"SNAKES ARE SENTIENT?"' and subsequently worrying a lot about what other life forms might have gotten an uplift by wizardry.
https://hpmor.com/chapter/48
Sort of like how they all agree that Hermione is right about house elves being slaves but they just wish she would shut up about it.
>Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier.
Yup. As I've said before, free markets great, capitalists bad.
It's not surprising that the rules made to deal with a crazy situation end up themselves being imperfect and weird, and not producing perfect solutions. When the world is this far out of whack, you can go into a legislative session with the best possible intentions, and still not be able to do any better than a weird half-measure full of holes that vaguely satisfices across a bunch of different interests and concerns. The best possible solution will probably look like that, too.
> free markets great, capitalists bad
Not so clear to me we need the second half of this. If we could build as much housing as is profitable to do so, this problem seems reasonably likely to just go away
I think part of the point of "capitalists bad" is that housemaxxing gets continually opposed by owners of existing housing for obvious incentive reasons
I don't really get the argument that the incentives of owners cause the NIMBYism, actually. Tenants generally outnumber landlords, since tenants rent one home, while some landlords rent out multiple ones. Tenants normally vote in the local elections, and they have an interest in increased housing supply; they should be able to outvote the landlords. Meanwhile, owner-occupiers who are neither landlords, nor tenants, have no clear interest: increased home values drive up their home value, but also the implicit cost of their housing, as their wealth is tied down. They may have an interest in housing shortage if they are considering moving to a different town, or they may have an interest in cheap housing if they are considering saving up for a bigger home.
And there is the argument that more housing allows more population, which drives up the desirability of the town (for the same reason bigger cities are more expensive in the first place), increasing rents (but also benefitting tenants, at least on average: housing becomes more expensive in this model because it's worth paying more for).
Owner-occupiers have an interest in driving up the cost of the home they currently own, which outweighs any realistic prospect of saving up for a bigger one. Even more so, they have an interest in preventing the real-estate bubble from popping, since that would mean they take an enormous loss - and possibly end up deep in debt, depending on how heavily leveraged their house is.
Tenants outnumber landlords, but have less time, energy, and money to throw at political engagement, since they're generally working themselves to exhaustion and then handing all their pay (beyond subsistence) to a landlord.
I don't see why owner-occupiers have an interest in driving up the cost of their home. Again, if the home you live in is worth $100,000 more, it doesn't matter (as long as you aren't moving) if at the same time you also need $100,000 more of your wealth tied down to have a place to live. Likewise if prices crash, and your home value halves, it doesn't affect you if it also means you only need half as much wealth as before to own a home. Even if you end up with more debt than equity, it doesn't change how much you have to pay each month, does it? I don't know much about how mortgages work, though.
How much an asset is worth affects how willing banks are to loan you money with that asset as collateral, and at what interest rates, which very much can impact how much you pay per month.
More generally, lots of people think of their net worth sort of like a score in a videogame, to be maximized as an end in itself - and that's not exactly an irrational strategy, since it provides solid strategic guidance in a variety of other contexts. Landlords can take advantage of that to establish a common interest with owner-occupiers in "improving property values" - often by legitimately socially beneficial means, making the area more desirable to live in - and then that existing political coalition is also leveraged to restrict housing supply.
Sabotaging some other community to drive property values down so you can afford a house there more easily would be more difficult (hard to influence policy in a place you don't live), likely involve doing things the locals don't like because they make the place less desirable to live in (thus provoking resistance, and defeating the point of you wanting to buy a house there in the first place), and is generally too Machiavellian for most people to think of.
Capitalists that specialize in owning and operating housing have a mixed interest here - they want more opportunities to own and operate more housing, but they want their competitors not to do so. It’s exactly the same situation as owners of shoe factories or massage parlors or whatever - they have an incentive to expand their own production but also want to cut competitors.
Low supply is a part of the problem, but there's a lot more to it. I wrote about this last year: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/congestion-pain-is-hyperbolic
Scott, I'm curious if you think that what you wrote here disagrees with what you wrote back here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable
*"You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people! You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real! You should believe that people experience auras - see eg Paranormal Misinterpretations Of Vision Phenomena, Colored Halos Around Faces And Emotion-Evoked Colors: A New Form Of Synesthesia (note first author!), the many stories of people seeing auras while on drugs, and my own Lots Of People Going Around With Mild Hallucinations All The Time! You should believe that people experience John Edwards - I think my parents voted for him in 2004!
I’m just not really in the business of coming up with convoluted explanations for why everyone who reports weird mental experiences must be lying in order to sound “quirky""*
I'm not sure how you read me as contradicting that.
My problem isn't that people who want emotional support animals are *lying*, exactly - I maybe made fun of the person with the snake, but probably she does feel better in some vague way when her snake is around.
My problem is that I am being asked to place them in a special class of people who get more rights than other people, whereas in fact they're just reporting the normal experience of having a pet (that it makes them feel better). This special class is supposed to outweigh other people's rights (eg the right of someone who doesn't want their neighbor to have a dog) and I don't feel like the process establishes that. You can imagine (as Scott Aaronson mentioned below) an equal and opposite process where someone certifies the neighbor as being "genuinely" "phobic" of dogs and therefore having a special right *not* to have dogs near them. Both could be true! But right now we interpret one person's desire for a dog as special, and the other person's desire to avoid dogs as non-special, and I'm asked to be complicit in that determination.
See also my last few paragraphs:
"Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.
But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.
I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever."
I agree that most everybody loves and enjoys their pets, and overall feels better because they have them. But if some mentally ill person has a terrible time loving and enjoying anything *but* their pet, and feel miserable most of the time except when they are with their pet -- then their situation seems importantly different to me. Analogous situation: Everybody enjoys eating, but somebody malnourished and underfed needs that food in a different and larger way from regular well-fed people.
I'm not convinced ESA standards are that high. Certainly I don't think they're that high as enforced. Maybe this is my fault for enforcing them poorly, but I think my experience is typical, and inevitable given the system.
Knowing several landlords and having listened to one of them complain about this literally a few days ago, I suspect your experience is indeed typical.
No, I agree that in general therapists will write letters for people who are not that bad off. I happen to see a lot of people who especially bad off because McLean Hospital's a referral source. But my observation is that pets do most people a lot of good. They're sort of in the same category as exercise in my mind -- something that helps most problems. Here are 2 stories from the last year of patients of mine who have never been hospitalized, and have benefitted greatly from animals they adopted:
A young guy with a work-from-home tech job was spending many hours a day on porn sites, smoking weed while doing it to intensity his experience. He had been the friendless, smart, weird guy fro 1st grade all the way through high school, then began doing a better in college -- had a couple girlfriends, a small friend group -- then became isolated again after college. He surprised me a couple months ago by announcing that he had adopted a kitten. Has seemed markedly better since then. Showed actual emotion when his cat was sick for a few days. Reported that he was spending way less time online, and only masturbating once a day instead of 3x, because his kitten demanded lots of attention. Enjoys playing with the kitten with his housemates. Overall seems less unhappy and more optimistic.
A middle-aged man who has lived through several sieges of panic disorder and OCD, now chronically depressed and anergic, one of the worst couch potatoes I've even seen in several decades of seeing avoidant people, decided to adopt a puppy. It was entirely his idea. He researched breeds online very carefully, as is his way, and bought a beautful little purebred pup. Had a big crisis in the first month because she disrupted his sleep, needed attention and activity all the time, and posed problems he was not able to solve. (One of the things that keeps him avoidant is the belief when he cannot do a difficult task that it's his own damn fault and a demonstration of how incompetent he is.) He was convinced life with the pup would never get better and yearned to give her back to the breeder, but could not bear the thought of how sad she would be if he abandoned her. So then he turned a corner and instead of sitting on the couch trying to figure out whether he could stand to deal with the puppy, he started "throwing things at the wall" -- just trying everything he could think of to keep her happy and occupied more of the time, and to get her to sleep thorugh the night. Some of them worked. She is now past the super-needy stage, and he really has extracted some great lessons from his experience, and that's what he's talking about now: Things that seem impossible to him aren't necessarily really impossible. Ya gotta keep throwing things at the wall til something sticks. Oh year, lovely bonus: My patient is I think dyspraxic -- has poor motor coordination. As a child he was not able to run -- the closest he could come was a weird-looking super-fast walk with stiff legs, body bent forward. And of course the other kids mocked him terribly for that. So the dog breed he got is one often trained for dog agility contests, where dogs do a timed run through an obstacle course. He's found someone near him who runs classes in training your dog for agility contests, and is going to enroll when his pup's old enough.
Neither of these people live in a place where they needed at ESA to have a pet, by the way. They're just striking examples of how much difference a pet can make. and yes it's an N of 2 (though I could definitely give you a higher n if we both had more time)
What if I pick an apartment because I know the building does not allow pets and I have a very strong dog hair allergy and therefore want to make sure that I'm not exposed to dogs?
What if I pick an apartment specifically because I'm a very light sleeper and dogs barking at night in the apartment next door is something I really want to avoid?
But then someone gets approval to override the building regulations and moves in next door. Then what? They get what they want and I'm out of luck. So there are consequences. Just not to the psychiatrist and not to the pet owner, so they are very easy to ignore and just say "haters gonna hate" or whatever.
Unfortunately the equilibrium here is "when a building says they don't allow pets, just know they're lying."
Yeah, pretty much. What ends up happening is probably that people who say "no pets means no pets" eventually get mad and organized enough to fight back, and the pendulum swings back until such a time where the "I need my ESA" crowd becomes sympathetic enough again.
Those are the genuine people, though. The racket part comes in where it's a woman with her stupid little yappy dog that she fakes up the ESA thing for, because she wants to bring it everywhere with her - not because she's emotionally dependent on it but because she doesn't want to spend the money on a dog-walker or inconvenience herself.
Those are the ones that impinge on "person who dislikes dogs" and "person who really does need their pet as their sole companion" alike, and make it worse for everyone.
Yes, I know. But there are always people who take advantage of special allowances intended for people with genuine need. I have written I believe 3 support animal letters, all in the last few years after they became a thing. Two were for people who genuinely fit the profile of someone who benefits greatly from having a pet. The third was for someone who is doing fine in life, but seeing me to discuss a very difficult situation in his family of origin. He is a kind and considerate person, if anything *too* worried about bothering other people, and if a neighbor told him his cats were activating the neighbor's allergies he would buy an air purifier or even get his parents to take his cats for him.
If an inconsiderate person with a yappy dog wanted an emotional support animal letter I would not write her one. I would tell her her dog didn't qualify as an ESA and also that I thought she would bring lots of hassle down on herself if she took that dog to a place reluctant to have one.
"My problem is that I am being asked to place them in a special class of people who get more rights than other people, whereas in fact they're just reporting the normal experience of having a pet (that it makes them feel better)."
This is how I feel about religious freedom law. Like, I totally respect the person who thinks they have to do or not do XYZ because of their religion and their employer should accommodate that. But why should that person get more rights than the person who thinks they have to do or not do XYZ because of a personal non-religious belief? (And yes, I know in some circumstances people can argue that their non-religious beliefs should get accommodation similar to religious beliefs, but de facto it's gonna be a lot harder for the non-religious person.) The religious person gets more rights because it's Certified Religion, when in fact they just have beliefs and practices and scruples as we all do.
I'm a big pro-religion guy but I can't get behind tax exemption for churches. Seems unfair.
I don't think there's anything to feel bad about - it's inherent in the accommodation process that people with disabilities are going to get accommodations that other people don't.
So if I don't feel like walking up a flight of stairs, I can't get a ramp or an elevator. But for someone in a wheelchair, they can demand (and get) an accommodation. That's an unavoidable consequence of giving any accommodations to anyone with a disability.
The alternatives (no accommodations, or everyone can request an accommodation, even without a disability) aren't particularly tempting. There's an element of unfairness in giving only disabled people accommodations, but there's a pretty big amount of unfairness in anyone having a disability in the first place.
So I'll take the stairs and count my blessings.
I think the situation is much worse than you describe, because what about people (like my daughter) who are terrified of dogs and only feel emotionally safe when dogs are *not* present? In the past, such people could feel safe in dog-free apartment buildings and airports and so on, where the only dogs were highly-trained Seeing Eye dogs and the like. But today the emotional support animal racket that you describe has made a mockery of no-dog policies and left almost no guaranteed-to-be-dog-free spaces anywhere, other than one’s own home. In the future, will people like my daughter be able to get their own psychiatrist letters that counteract or neutralize the emotional support animal letters?
But animal phobias are very treatable. The people I've written emotional support animal letters for (I'm a psychologist) have mostly been isolated people with chronic, painful mental illness that can be sort of ameliorated but not cured. Unless your daughter has other problems besides a dog phobia, the weight of misery these people are walking around with far exceeds what your daughter suffers even on days when she encounters dogs.
But the two preferences don't have to trade off against each other. We could have both buildings that allow dogs, and ones that don't, if enough people have strong enough preferences for each to offset the friction costs. Then someone who really benefits from a dog could go live in a place that allows them, and someone who doesn't want to be around dogs could go live in a place that bans them. Except that can't work if the law says that *all* places must allow ESAs.
The moral system implied here horrifies me. Even granting that the people who want ESAs get more benefit from them than they cause harm to others, that's obviously not enough reason to force landlords to allow them.
For one thing, pace experts such as yourself, there's no real way to quantify the amount of benefit someone gets from having a pet, nor the cost it imposes on others. If your pet ameliorates your incurable illness by 10%, but necessitates that I go through the trouble of curing my dog phobia, who is to say that this is a net benefit? Apples to oranges.
Second, and more importantly, the existence of a net benefit from ESAs doesn't prove it's a good policy. It's possible that there are alternative ways for you to ameliorate your suffering, besides an ESA, which don't impose costs on others (therapy, hobbies, human connexion, etc.). People need to partially internalize the costs their actions impose on others so that they are motivated to choose the socially optimal coping tool. Making it inconvenient or more expensive to have an ESA is certainly a way of doing that.
How's this for a moral system: People with dog phobias should get treatment for them, the same way we'd expect someone with nearsightedness to buy glasses?
Those people are only required to correct their vision if they drive.
That's why I said "expected", not "required".
Once again, there is no such thing as an irrational fear of something with a long, well-documented history of perfectly rational reasons to fear them.
But there are perfectly rational reasons for kids to fear swings and slides and bicycles too. It is possible on each of them to get quite a bad injury, and small painful injuries are virtually guaranteed. We are wired to sense the danger of height and rapid motion. I think we're probably also wired to fear large animals. And in fact virtually all phobias are of things with a real element of danger to them. I have treated people whose lives were severely restricted by phobias or OCD's where the feared thing was germs, chemicals, doing something that would make peers despise you, being killed in a plane crash, running over pedestrians, poisoning your wife with household chemicals, setting the house on fire. None of these fears are utterly irrational. The irrational part is that the person is seized by a conviction that these things are going to happen, whereas all are in fact unlikely, especially if you exercise reasonable caution.
Absolutely! Things like cars, steep staircases, food that's been out of the fridge too long, slippery surfaces...
Or, less sarcastically, dogs have a well-documented history of reasons to fear them, yes, but dogs also have a well-documented history of reasons to be perfectly fine with them. Probably >99.9% of all dog-human interaction hours are pleasant.
The difference is that people who want to indulge in uncorrected nearsightedness have no trouble doing so in their own private spaces, whereas the legal situation discussed here seems to prevent people from creating certain kinds of private dog-free spaces.
Aside from the psychiatric endorsement of their feelings (which Scott makes clear is pretty perfunctory), the situation here can be summed up as, "I like having X, therefore my landlord must not be allowed to prevent me from having X on his property." Doesn't this prove way too much? Should listening to death metal at 100 dB in the middle of the night be legally protected if I can prove it makes my depression better? Bear in mind that the only conceivable standard of proof for this is "I consistently say and behave as if it does."
Or even "I consistently say and behave as if it does while I'm in view of my psychologist."
Actually, I recall at least one of the 3 I have written letters for fretting out loud to me about whether it was legit to ask for. *They* raised the exact point Scott did : after all, everybody is fond of their pets. Did they have more right than others to having one? Real people who are members of groups you think are ripping you off do not necessarily behave the way they do in your fevered, angry imaginings.
Dogs are animals that make sudden, sharp, "I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!" noises as you innocently mosy down the sidewalk immersed in your own thoughts.
There's no reason it should be legal to own any dog that does that. And by "that", I mean barks either loudly or threateningly.
The selfishness of (most) people who keep dogs is astonishing.
Barking does not mean "I am going to kill you." Seek help.
I'm not speaking up in favor of forcing landlords to allow them. I'm explaining why it's not nonsense to take seriously the importance of pets to isolated, suffering people. I thought Scott Aaronson's example of a reason to object to having dogs in the building was a weak argument: animal phobias are very treatable, and anyhow dogs are everywhere -- in the park, getting walked down the sidewalk, tied to signposts outside Starbucks, sticking their heads out of passing cars, in some stores. I doubt that having a dog living in her building would add much to the tally of dog encounters Aaronson's daughter has. On the other hand, a dog that barks a lot is a pretty unpleasant stressor for everybody living near the apartment it's in, and that's not a weak argu,emnt. And a lot of people are allergic to cats. (I don't know whether having a cat in the apt next door dooms the allergic person to breathing enough cat dander to react. If it does, I also think that's a situation where an animal seriously affects their welfare.0
I suppose I don't think landlords should be forced to accept pets. Or, if they're forced, what if they were allowed to put a clause in the lease that gives them the right to demand that the tenant leave or give up their pet if it makes a nuisance of itself in any of various specified ways. And/or landlords could have the right to demand an extra bit of security deposit in case the animal damages the apartment, which some do. (I have gotten several no-pets landlords to accept me with cats by offering to give then an extra "pet security" deposit.) My own experience living in rentals is that pets would have been the least of the problems I had with the place even if I hated the sight and sound of pets. The biggest problems were generally other people: noisy tenants and landlords who did nothing about plumbing problems, impossible-to-open windows, etc. unless you used a crowbar to get them off their couch.
Like most other people in this rather ugly, polarized discussion you have lost track of the fact that I am not speaking in favor of making you, the landlords and everyone else bow down and let people with an ESA do whatever they please to you -- scare you with their pit bill, make your allergies worse, keep you up all night by leaving their dog alone and barking while they're out drinking or whatever. I have said multiple times that I understand there are competing interests here, and that being kept awake by a barking dog or having an asthma attack is a serious problem. I don't think it's right to just impose harms like that on other people. Seems approximately as bad as depriving an impaired, sick person of the comfort of a pet. I don't know what's a good solution. Best I can think of is permitting landlords to oust people's pets if they are a significant nuisance to people in the building, and/or requiring people who bring pets to pay an extra deposit, a pet deposit, which they will lose if their pet is a problem.
So the point I have been arguing is just that pets really do make a difference to chronically ill, isolated people in a way they do not for ordinary pet owners. And I did think Aaronson's objection was weak, so I pointed that out. All arrangements for people with
with a special needs have some people who do not have the need taking advantage of them. If you can find a way to cut down on that, fine. If you can't, and want to outlaw any sort of compromise arrangement that allows some people to have pets, OK then, but do it knowing that you really are taking away comfort from people who are in bad shape. No, stuffed animals and video games are not an adequate substitute.
I feel quite irritated at you and everyone else who is discharging their righteous indignation at me ("I am horrified by this moral arrangement") as though I am in favor of everything they are against: Stoopit woke policies, pointless systems for authorizing something that accomplish nothing, forcing people who are considerate and hard working to suffer indignities and discomforts for the sake of people who are not. I am fighting hard not to just write you off as a meanspirited asshole. That's not because of your beliefs, it's because you didn't pay attention to what I was saying, but reacted to a caricatured version that you built. This is how discussions fail.
Fair enough. My expression of "horror" was inflammatory and unnecessary. I'm sorry I irritated you!
I was responding to the particular comment you made in response to Scott Aaronson, which did not contain the qualifiers you've made here. I'll grant your position is more nuanced than was apparent just from that comment.
But I do think there is a real disagreement here, not just a misunderstanding. The issue is not whether people should be allowed to have pets. No matter what the law says about ESAs, many landlords will permit them, because renters with animals are a large group of potential customers. A quick internet search and review of a variety of sources suggests that at least half of all landlords permit pets in some fashion. I don't think there are major obstacles to renting and having some common kinds of pets (e.g. small dogs and cats). Some pets might be excluded much more often (e.g. loud or large dogs), but if the point of having the ESA is therapy, you should probably choose one that doesn't happen to have other undesirable characteristics.
Rather, the question is whether certain people derive a special and larger kind of benefit from their pets that overrides the right of an owner of a building (or airplane, or anything else) to exclude their pets.
I agree with you that dog phobia is not itself an important consideration. It's just a special, medicalized case of the general fact that my keeping a dog in an apartment building might bother my neighbors, possibly quite a lot. If you grant that my special need for a dog overrides my landlord's rights to exclude, I don't see how you can avoid opening the door to all manner of "needs" that renters might have, including the "need" to not be around a dog. There just isn't any good test to distinguish one person's "real" emotional needs related to a mental disorder from another person's mere preferences, or to rank them in order of importance. I don't think relative curability is a good test.
I totally agree that ESAs are very important to some people. I just don't see how that's categorically different from any number of human preferences which we could consider requiring landlords to accomodate.
I think the solution most consistent with a free society is to let people manage their own lives and property, with the result usually being about the best balancing of everybody's conflicting desires we can reasonably hope for. It is not the case that all needs require legal protection. Most needs are naturally met by voluntary arrangements in a free society.
I feel like the bigger issue is that “phobias are treatable” is too convenient: it erases the need to consider the perspective of a large class of people. Similar to saying: “everyone who is uncomfortable around any animal for any reason: get over it.” This sort of argument becomes common when people want to treat an issue as simple, and they are made uncomfortable by evidence that the path forward is morally ambiguous.
Yeah but that ain't what I said. I said *animal* phobias are *easily* treatable, and that in most cases professional help was not required. I added that parents can usually do it on their own with a little guidance from sources online. All phobias are treatable, in theory, but some are not a bit easy to treat. And in fact pretty much all illnesses are *treatable* in that there exist things that at least make the illness better for at least some people with it. It would be dumb and unfair to claim, for all illnesses set off by animals (for ex. asthma, which can kill the person who has it, or sleep deprivation because the animal barks all night) that they are treatable, therefore the person who has the illness should get treatment for it rather than objecting to having animals in their building. But that's not what I said. My point was that a child's animal phobia was not a strong reason for demanding that the child not have to live in a building with animals. But I also said elsewhere that other, worse, problems living with animals, such as asthma or being kept awake half the night by barking, were a strong reason for sparing someone the problem of living with an animal. I have no problem seeing the moral ambiguity here. What has happened is not that I simplified the situation to get rid of ambiguity, but that you simplified what I said so you could comfortable decide I'm wrong.
Ok well it looks like we largely agree - and sorry for straw manning you.
A lot of us have already decided that landlords are bad actors on society. So in our view it's no more immoral to closely regulate landlords than to regulate bookies, pimps or drug dealers.
Fair enough. But I think part of the case here is that not just landlords are adversely impacted by mandatory allowance of animals, but also other tenants.
Separately, the view that landlords are bad as a class doesn't quite seem analogous to the examples you gave. I think the mainstream view is that gambling, prostitution, and drug use are vices that the world would be better off without. Do you think that renting living space is a vice that the world would be better off without? That strikes me as a very odd view. There are times in most of our lives where renting is clearly preferable to owning, for many different reasons. It doesn't seem inherently vicious.
Private, for-profit landlords? Absolutely I want to see them gone. We don't need them. They are leeches. But actually no, in 2024 you can't take it as a given that most people want to eliminate gambling and prostitution. At last count, online sports betting was legal in 38 states.
My point isn't about private landlords vs. public, only that renting itself isn't a vice, whereas the other examples you gave are considered inherently vicious by many people, which is why they have historically been illegal.
I agree legalized gambling, prostitution, and drugs are increasingly popular, but that seems to prove my point, not yours. I favor all these things being deregulated. You seemed to be saying it was reasonable to regulate housing rental like we regulate those other things, but if we're moving as a society toward deregulating them, why would we be moving in the opposite direction on renting if you think it's a similar activity?
I had a moderate phobia of dogs, but I eventually overcame it after getting to know some people with chill, friendly dogs. Now it's almost all gone.
The weight of misery of living in a low-trust, dog-eat-dog society where everyone is forced to damage their souls (as Scott so eloquently says) far exceeds the benefits of ESA.
If having to write ESA letters & similar is the worst thing that happens to Scott, he's a lucky man, and I think he'd probably agree with that statement. What most mental health professionals fear most is having a patient commit suicide under circumstances that make them think they should have seen it coming. Next is patients going off the rails in some other godawful way that they feel they should have foreseen. Next is the professional discovering that he or she is incompetent. And then there's non-medical-professional life, where one's soul is damaged by being doxxed, by being publicly misperceived and attacked, by ending up in a situation where you have to choose between 2 things you think are both morally wrong, etc etc. Then there's the inevitable misery of the loss of parents and friends, and of course the dread of having one's children die.
And if the worst thing you have to do, Vitor, is something on the order of making a decision inside the framework of a stupid bureaucratic rule that forces you to choose between 2 lousy alternatives, you too are a lucky man. If that's enough to damage your soul you're a goner anyhow.
When you say they're very treatable, you assume that the person has money, time, and insurance to see a psychologist. How about instead we don't force them to live with a biting predator in the same building? I would also hardly call "I don't want to live in a building where I might encounter biting predators in the hallway" a mental quirk that needs to be treated.
Parents can usually treat pet phobias themselves. There are lots of online resources explaining a simple approach to doing it. As for calling a dog a biting predator -- come on! I absolutely agree that people who have dogs that bite or even just lunge forward snarling should not be allowed to bring the things into any setting where they might hurt other people: not apartment buildings, not stores, not parks, etc. But calling a dog a biting predator is like calling a car a child-crushing machine, a bike or a slide or a swing an armbreaker, a peanut or a bee a breath-stopper, a flight of stairs a coma-slope.
100% of cars I see have not been crushing children. At least 10% of the dogs I've encountered are trying to bite, lunge at, or jump up on strangers.
I'd say that 10% is about what I observe. So if I pass by 100 dogs this month, 10 will be trying to make some kind of contact with me. Zero will succeed if they are on a leash and I pay attention to how long their leash is and steer clear of them ( dogs have to be leashed outside where I live except specified dog parks). Based on my experience in places where dogs are not leashed, I'd say 7 of the lungers have clearly friendly intent, as evidenced by dog smiles, wagging tails and friendly licking once they have their front paws planted on me. (I don't much like dog's doing that, though. They get mud on me, and I feel sort of hassled and coerced.) The other 3 lungers were unfriendly but trying to scare me off with loud woofs and a lunge, not to bite. I have never been bitten by a dog, and grew up owning a dog and playing with all the neighborhood dogs, who roamed around unleashed all day. I'm fond of dogs and these days sometimes hang out in a dog park where they are off leash, and often pet strangers' dogs if the stranger's OK with it. But I'm decently able to read dogs, and also ask their owner if the dog's OK withbeing petting.. I can't even think of a time when I've seen someone bitten by a dog. But yes, of course it does happen.
On the other hand, in the 3 or so years when my daughter loved going to playgrounds, I saw at least a dozen incidents where a fall of some kind drew blood, and thousands of incidents where kids were distressed enough by something or other to cry. Also saw an adolescent fall off a swing and dislocate his shoulder.
As for the other dangers: Teen son of a friend of mine was hit by a car when he was on his bike. Flew quite a ways through the air but landed well and had no serious injury. Another friend has a son with a peanut allergy, and he once ended up in the ER because a baby sitter gave him something they did not realize was a risk. An adult friend went into anaphylactic shock after she was stung by a bee. She had not known she was allergic to them. A young adult I know just broke her tailbone by falling on the stairs. Oh yeah, let me add my own bike experience: I get around mostly by bike, biking to work and to the grocery store. Last year I had 2 falls: Once when I was riding in slush, which was not a bit slippery -- then I hit a frozen patch. The other time someone putting their trash out on the street did not see me and pushed his can right into my path. I slammed on the brakes so hard I lost my balance and fell over. Got off with just a couple scrapes each time.
So it seems to me that you have some selective attention going on..
What we need are strict, rigidly enforced leash rules. Not inhumane and cruel restrictions on where dogs can live.
Indeed, when I was very small, my parents visited a house with a very large, very friendly dog. It must have been taller than I was, and I was terrified of its attempts to be friendly - and this turned into a fear of all dogs. My mum recognised this was going to be a problem, made some enquiries, and found a nice blind man with a very well trained guide dog who I could make friends with at my own pace (she was a huge Alsation named Dorrit - one of my earliest memories). I haven't been afraid of dogs since then, and I am very grateful to my mum for taking that experience seriously and doing something about it.
Nah, let's just let the dog phobic suffer. Seems like the lesser of two evils.
There is no such thing as an irrational fear of something with a long, well-documented history of perfectly rational reasons to fear them. Such as just-barely domesticated wolves that kill tens of thousands of people per year.
Tens of thousands??
Google it. In an average year, dogs kill around 25,000 people worldwide.
30 to 50 dog bite deaths in the United States annually, with similar numbers in the developed world. Bob is showing how you can use true statistics to mislead and obfuscate.
Yes, I would be afraid if I knew that someone had a barely-domesticated wolf or cougar or such. However, I have never seen someone out in public with an animal like that. And it seems like there are simple ways to make sure a semi-domesticated wolf does not make it into an apartment complex. The landlords can and in fact should be asking for proof that the animal has a rabies injection. In my state "wolfdogs" are illegal -- I just looked it up. Presumably vets, who would be giving the rabies shots, have to report them, and they would be taken from their owners. Or landlords could require a letter from a vet stating that they have examined the animal and it is a normal, domesticated pet and gave no signs of aggressiveness.
Your scary stats do not apply to the US. Just looked up how many die from dog attacks here, and it's 30-50. I don't know whether any of those involve "wolf dogs." 35,000 per year die in auto accidents. Your risks from driving are 1000 times as great as your risk from dogs. Get outta that CAR, man! It's rational to avoid them, and also pedestrians have a right not to live in fear. Let's take the cars off the road.
I think he means "dogs in general are barely-domesticated wolves", not specifically wolves or half-breeds.
Maybe. Apparently wolf-dogs are a thing.
Yes they are, I know a guy who has one.
I agree with you about dogs AND I think we should work on gradually getting cars off the road.
Sorry, no.
I don't much like dogs. I have a dog (inherited) that I very much dislike for several reasons. I agree the pit bulls are dangerous and should be phased out asap. And I am one of the people who dislike the widespread overuse of the emotional support animal system.
But your statement is *extreme* hyperbole. My apologies if you are genuinely dog phobic, but it's offensively out of line with reality.
The dog has been domesticated for many tens of thousands of years. The dog is genetically distinct from the wolf, and its characteristics are basically those of a neotenous wolf. The vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of human-dog interaction is safe. 30 to 50 people a year die in the United States from dog attacks, it's mostly one or two breeds, and anyway that's about the same as the number of *lightning strike deaths*. We are talking "struck by lightning" levels of danger.
I don't *care* if it's tens of thousands of dog-related deaths world wide. Those are other, wilder dogs, not the dogs you are encountering in the first world, and it's statistical malfeasance against yourself or others if you insist on the global statistic instead of the one that actually applies to you.
Please, sir, restrain yourself.
> The dog is genetically distinct from the wolf
Then why are they still able to interbreed to this day?
> 30 to 50 people a year die in the United States from dog attacks, it's mostly one or two breeds, and anyway that's about the same as the number of *lightning strike deaths*. We are talking "struck by lightning" levels of danger.
This is largely due to our advanced medical infrastructure being pretty good at treating victims of dog attacks. In other parts of the world, it's not such a rosy picture, and dogs kill around 25,000 people per year.
> it's statistical malfeasance against yourself or others if you insist on the global statistic instead of the one that actually applies to you.
Why shouldn't it apply to me? I haven't spent my entire life in the USA. I've traveled, and even spent significant amounts of time living in places where breeds of dogs that are illegal here are relatively common. And so have plenty of other Americans.
>Then why are they still able to interbreed to this day?
They're not. A select subgroup of dogs at the far wolfish edge of dogdom is able to interbreed with wolves. Think of dogs and wolves as a pair of genetic bell curves, far apart and getting further, where a few percent of dogs overlap wolves well enough to interbreed successfully.
>This is largely due to our advanced medical infrastructure being pretty good at treating victims of dog attacks. In other parts of the world, it's not such a rosy picture, and dogs kill around 25,000 people per year.
That's pure speculation. What if I said it was because other places have substantial populations of wild dogs, as well as wilder breeds, as well as cultures of letting domesticated dogs roam free, whereas we have leashes and other behavior controls?
>Why shouldn't it apply to me? I haven't spent my entire life in the USA
Neither have I, but I take care to adjust my fears to fit the circumstances. I would not pet a random dog in Nicaragua. I would pet a random dog in the US, UK, Canada or Germany and fully expect it to be a good encounter, and the statistics are very clear that I would be in the right.
You're basically saying "I lived in South Africa for three months, there's so much murder there, I have every right to an intense fear of murder while I'm living in Austin, and I *will* continue to speak of the global murder rate rather than the local".
This do not match all I have seen regarding canis lupus subspecies.
AFAIK (not a professional, but zoology and population genetics are among my interests so I have more than casual knowledge on this), you can not distinguish dogs from wolves, apart from dogs being pets.
Defining subspecies is tricky (species are tricky already, but you have a somewhat clear cut interbreeding test), they are largely a matter of convenience anyway and it's legally and culturally interesting to sort domestic wolves from wild wolves.
There are a few wolf subspecies, a lot more dogs subspecies (because we care more about fine subdivisions in our pets than wild populations, and because human selection created more phenotypical variation), but I do not see how you can split wolves subspecies from dogs subspecies using only biological data in a coherent way (1 cluster including wolves only, another dogs only).
And, appart from size issue and behavioral issue, dogs and wolves will interbreed, it's the rule rather than the exception. Not always in the wild, there would be a need for human intervention, but that's also the case between dog subspecies (a chihuahua will not interbreed with a great dane) or wolves (because they are to far in term of geography and venturing in a new pack will not necessarily work anyway. So no, dogs and wolves are a single species, with multiple subspecies, even if it's not politically correct to say so... Like humans, even if it's not politically correct to say so exactly for the opposite reason.
Sorry, but I simply _don't believe you_. There is absolutely no incentive for your patient to say "yeah, I'd probably be ok without this animal going with me everywhere." There is every incentive for them to act like a utility monster, pretending that their suffering without their pet is unimaginable, so they can shift their costs onto random strangers that they don't care about.
And, anecdotally, every example I've seen in real life of an ESA has been somebody obviously abusing a system (that has no safeguards against abuse) to bring favored pets into an area that they're not supposed to go. In contrast, I know multiple people with crippling animal phobias, who would - quite literally - choose DEATH over close contact with them. The fact that you claim that the former are the ones with "serious mental illness" and the latter are whiners who just need a bit of therapy ... that does not at all describe the world that I live in.
* I said a bunch of things. Which are the ones you don't believe me about?
*I did not say or imply that people with animal phobias have serious mental illness. In fact a said that animal phobias are easily cured, usually without the help of a professional.
*You are right that there is no incentive for my patient to say "yeah, I'd be OK without this animal going everywhere with me." And I did not say or imply there was an incentive for people to be honest. or that all people getting the ESA's really need them. But (a) people with painful mental illnesses are no likelier than other people to be lying selfish pieces of shit and (b) in any case my letter would not enable them to take their animal anywhere except into their home -- not into stores, restaurants, etc.
*I dunno how many examples of mentally ill people with ESAs you have seen. I have observed and had substantial talks with perhaps 1000 people with serious mental illness, maybe 200 of whom have been patients I have spent many hours with. I'm pretty sure my N's a lot bigger than yours.
Except for the above inaccuracies you make some great points
Well, that's the point, as far as I can tell I've seen zero examples of actual "mentally ill" people with ESAs. All the ones I've encountered in real life have been, pretty clearly, abusers of the system. (Of course, I'm not a psychologist, I can't diagnose them or their complex internal life, maybe they're truly suffering greatly and only present as selfish manipulators, etc. etc.) I did say it was anecdotal! But, for now, I'm going to trust my lying eyes that the people you describe, the truly mentally ill for whom there is no possible solution except to abrogate the right-to-exist-in-an-animal-free-space of everyone else, don't exist in large numbers.
Go for it, SnapDragon! There are many benefits to staying ignorant of the facts about people with. mental illness. If you think they can't go more than 30 mins without doing something bizarre like talking to the salt shaker or masturbating in public then you can feel confident that anyone who has an ESA and isn't jerking off in Starbux or screaming about Martians is a lying piece of shit, and the whole situation will suit you by being simple. And if you think they are all lying pieces of shit who will say anything to get what they want then you are very well protected from painful thoughts about what life's like for them. If you think none of them get much-needed comfort from animal companionship you needn't feel bad about your eat-shit-and-die reaction to ESA's.
You seem to be implying that people who are annoying and manipulative aren't really mentally ill.
The natural next step is for psychiatrist letters to come with ratings indicating how much the person is benefited or harmed by the presence of certain animals so that whoever's psychiatrist letter has the highest rating in a given situation overrules everyone else.
Then there will be a mad rush of people competing with each other to persuade or bribe their psychiatrists into giving them the highest rated letters possible, and whoever does hold the highest rated letter among all will become the king (or queen) of pets, able to legally summon or banish any animal to or from their sensory sphere at any time. It will be wondrous and absurd.
...Or we could just have a healthy number of housing and other options with consistently applied rules allowing or disallowing certain pets, so that these conflicts of interest don't happen so easily. So many problems could be solved if there were just more places for different people with different needs. I personally would join your daughter in no-dogs-allowed-anywhere village while all the dog people could live in dogs-allowed-everywhere village.
I was so disappointed that the words after the first "rating" were not "how reliable the psychiatrist is", not that I know how one would measure that.
> So many problems could be solved if there were just more places for different people with different needs. I personally would join your daughter in no-dogs-allowed-anywhere village while all the dog people could live in dogs-allowed-everywhere village.
Unfortunately, that wouldn’t solve the problem of people who get much-needed comfort only from bringing dogs to no-dogs-allowed-anywhere village.
They say freedom of speech is the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear. It can be easily extrapolated to conclude pet freedom is the freedom to carry pets where they are not wanted. The more you can tyrannize others, the freer you are.
The distant future techno-utopian solution is to kidnap those people and put them into a simulation without their knowledge where they can do that without bothering any real people. Your last paragraph is why I think maybe there should be separate words for freedom-to and freedom-from.
> Your last paragraph is why I think maybe there should be separate words for freedom-to and freedom-from.
Maybe, but they’re still adversarial: the more freedom-from you have, the less freedom-to (to infringe on your freedom-from) others have.
> In the past, such people could feel safe in dog-free apartment buildings and airports and so on, where the only dogs were highly-trained Seeing Eye dogs and the like.
Didn’t we all use to get told that we totally must not fear that dog bigger than us, who can casually bite our head off for a snack any time it feels like it, and that if that happens, it’ll be solely our fault, since dogs sense our fear and can’t help preying on those afraid of them?
At the end of the day, everyone has to learn that others will take every opportunity to shake off their responsibilities at their expense, and that every weakness is an exploit waiting to happen.
Yes, I am indeed telling you that it's solely your fault. Get help. It's your responsibility to learn to co-exist with animals and if you can't, well, I guess that's tragic in a cosmic sense but it's a Your Problem, not a My Problem.
That is scary indeed. I hope you remember your words if you’re ever mauled or devoured by any animal, and blame only yourself.
What's this “any animal” BS? We're taking about dogs, man's best friend. That's the crux of the disagreement. Anyone trying to convince me dogs are semi-wild dangerous animals might as well be telling me the moon is green cheese. Its nonsense.
You did say "co-exist with animals" not "co-exist with dogs". Trying to pull a little motte-and-bailey here? Seems untenable.
Regardless, Caperu's experience is not unique. I personally escaped mauling once only by sprinting very fast; the dog later mauled another person. To the local authorities' credit, the dog was put down, but that won't un-maul that poor woman.
Eloquently said.
I like this post and hope it will stimulate good discussion. But also: I really enjoy the accompanying picture of the woman hugging a komodo dragon.
Edit: Emotional support komodo dragon
AI art is really good! I can't understand the people who hate it - I mean, I understand they're sad that artists are losing jobs, I just can't understand the people who call it "slop" or whatever.
I'd guess those are cached thoughts from when they WERE "slop."
As someone who dabbles in AI art generation as a hobby, most people use it to make garbage. Without significant filtering the majority of stuff I see when browsing new models is porn. Also I feel kind of degraded after spending an hour digging through a github page to figure out how a regional prompt extension works and all of the tutorial images are prepubescent anime girls.
What do you mean by "browsing new models"? Is there someplace where you see all the unfiltered things people tried to make?
Yes, you can see images generated by the model author and other people who choose to display them.
I'd guess he meant something like civit.ai.
It's because the beautiful thing about art is to know that someone made it.
That someone poured their soul into it. That every stroke is intentional and meaningful.
I agree AI art is really good and getting better, that's why I hate it deeply.
If it were bad, I wouldn't mind.
It makes me feel I've been conned.
Note that this feeling is not due to artist losing jobs.
To me, beauty is about looking at something and liking how it looks. I can look at a landscape and not think: "Ugh, I hate how no one put any effort into this." but "this is nice". I don't think I'm the weird one, but these days, who knows.
I'm with you.
I think I didn't make my point clearly. It's not about the number of human work hours it has taken to make a picture. It's more about the fact that, if it's real art, every little choice in it reflects the sensibility of a real person, and therefore, if I like it, I know I'm liking a person.
Also, it wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that very soon we won't be able to tell it apart from real art, therefore in practice we'll have to assume that any picture we see is AI made, which kills art as connection between us and the artist.
In my experience the way to tell is to look at the parts of the picture least relevant to the main subject, see whether they've got some consistent underlying concept to them, or are more like a pattern-filling, slightly-out-of-focus cliche.
I like a lot of art from people that I'd hate. And vice versa.
Hm. For me, it's one thing when the art is made by someone I know. And it's a somewhat different thing when the art evokes in me a particular memory, like when a friend and I were wandering around a city and found an artist selling their work and got some. Those mean something **to me**. And I suppose sometimes I look at a piece of art (or listen, or read, or whatever) and it "speaks to me" in some way.
But to me, the vast majority of art out there is simply either enjoyable or not, beautiful or not, tasteful or not. AI art often distinguishes itself by a complete lack of taste such that I find it hard to believe that any human could produce it (but as you say, that's probably a temporary state). Otherwise I don't see much of a difference.
But I haven't reconciled this with your point about the possibility of finding out that this entire comment section was AI generated. That would indeed put me off of it. :-)
We just need two different words for natural beauty and artistic beauty.
I agree, landscapes are beautiful, but they're not pretending to be human.
The picture on this post is a woman smiling and hugging a reptile.
It gives me the creeps, because it's fake.
It would be real if either:
- a woman had posed with a pet.
- a person had drawn it pouring into it their own experience of hugging a pet.
That's how I would have interpreted a picture like that before this technology.
"We just need two different words for natural beauty and artistic beauty."
I don't.
"It gives me the creeps, because it's fake."
I cannot even begin to understand the thought process behind considering this more fake than any other picture of something that didn't happen. Also, why it really matters that much.
"- a person drew it and poured into it their own experience of hugging a pet."
... but what if the artist never poured into it their own experience of hugging a pet? I can draw plenty of things I have never experienced myself.
"I cannot even begin to understand the thought process behind considering this more fake than any other picture of something that didn't happen."
You and I don't experience art in the same way clearly. Your brain and mine are wired differently. If you cannot even begin to understand, clearly there's no way I can explain it to you.
"I can draw plenty of things I have never experienced myself."
It's unlikely you can draw well something human without drawing on your experience one way or another.
Another person in this thread used the word "soulless" to describe this art. That's the problem. It's soulless. That this word even exists, and is widely used in relation to art, suggest that many people are like me, and want artists to pour their human emotional experience into their art.
I'll just chime in and say I'm with Caba here, AI art always feels fundamentally off to me, no matter how apparently skillful it is, and while it's got something to do with knowing that a human put effort into something rather than entering some prompts and pressing a button, I feel it ultimately does come down to 'wired different'. There are some AI artists I like, and they're the ones who put time into trying different prompts and negative prompts at different strengths, reviewing the output and selecting for the best, etc. I don't like music that relies to much on sampling or most fanfiction, I suspect for the same reason: it all just feels recycled and parasitic.
Doesn't matter though. People like me have clearly already lost.
It's strange to me that someone could make AI art beautiful to you simply by telling you it's human-made, or conversely make human art not beautiful to you just by telling you it's AI-made.
It seems like a bias that only causes you harm. Had you never heard of AI (and thought all images were made by humans) you'd experience so much more beauty.
Had you never heard that Santa doesn't exist, the world would seem so much more beautiful to you.
Isn't that strange also?
I'm not Christian, so maybe the analogy is somewhat lost on me. I don't really have an experience of a fictional character giving you gifts being more beautiful than your loving parents doing the same. But a continued belief in Santa is going to hurt you. What happens when your own children don't get gifts from Santa and you can only conclude they must have been naughty?
I don't see any harm in being able to appreciate the beauty in things not created by humans.
None of that is really my point though. I'm not saying it's better to believe false things if it makes the world more beautiful. I'm saying it seems like your perception is biased... false or illusory in a sense, and also harms you. The equivalent analogy would be if someone believed Santa was a demon who sucked the soul out of beautiful things and made art lifeless and unenjoyable anywhere Christmas is celebrated. You could be enjoying a beautiful Monet and this person could be looking at the same painting and saying that it just looks dead ever since Santa came.
Let me try another angle.
Imagine you discover I'm a robot. Everyone here is a robot. There are no humans on this website. It's all generated by chatbots.
Would it bother you? Would you continue interacting with me in the same way?
What would happen is that, all of a sudden, the meaning of every comment here would change.
You might continue to interact, but it would feel different.
Imagine if at that point someone told you: but Michael, the sequence of letters on the screen is exactly the same. If you can't enjoy people's comments in the same way you used to just because you've been told they're written by robots instead of humans then your perception is... false and illusory and biased!
That is absolutely one beautiful thing about some art. But it is not the only beautiful thing about any art. Mondrian and Pollock diverge from this in different ways, as do many of the classic Great Masters who actually left most of the painting to the assistants in their workshops.
But the assistants are human!
Insert obligatory Damien Hirst snark.
I agree with you, though. The essence of art is intent. Unless you're trying to say something specifically by using AI as a medium (the AI itself certainly has no autonomous intent, just yet) you're only using it as a one-armed bandit for illustration.
Thank goodness! Finally someone unambiguously agrees with me here!
It's so soulless. Annoys me as much as that corporate 'art'. You know the type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
So I just tune it out.
How is a tool that produces all possible artstyles the same as one specific, ugly artstyle?
They all signal a lack of effort, so my eyes glaze over.
I probably didn't feel the same way the first time I saw Corporate Memphis, but after years of it's existence, it's everywhere and it's boring.
'AI' 'Art' speedran that in like 2 weeks for me (maybe because it was all over my reddit feed before I unfollowed those subs. But the damage is done)
I get the complaint when it comes to the same artstyle being repeated endlessly, because that is just boring. But AI art is not just one artstyle, it's all of them if you want. My only guess is that your viewpoint comes from a lack of exposure. Most Ai Art generators have soft guardrails inbuilt so people can create nice looking pictures quickly with little effort. They all have similar looks though. If you however spend a little bit of time with the AI you can create all kinds of amazing pictures. If I only saw AI through the lens of quickly made reddit memes and fanart I would probably think all AI Art was the same slop as well, but I was on the AI Art Discords from the beginnings, and have seem some amazing, stunning, varied artwork. (And made some myself.) I think the whole thing tells one more about what kind of pictures end up being popular on social media sites. If you would have never seen any "human made" art apart from that you would think all human made art was soulless as well.
I'm not interested in generating AI art. It would quite literally serve me no purpose. I guess that's where the difference between you and I.
My exposure to AI art is what people put online and unfortunately, most of it is absolute garbage.
> How is a tool that produces all possible artstyles
...It really can't right now though. Most of the things these mainstream models produce has this weird, plastic sheen to them. It's like it's prioritizing for surface-level "polish" at the expense of everything else.
What are you actually using for AI art and what's the best free or at least cheap one around?
I'm using GPT-4 out of habit, I don't know if there's anything better or cheaper.
Midjourney is much better looking (but much worse at following prompts and certainly not cheaper), but Dalle-3, which is used for GPT-4, can also just be used for free with Bing, so it is indeed the best free one.
Bing Image creator. (uses Dall-e 3,same model that Scott is using.)
I heartily dislike the AI art I'm able to detect, including the piece on this post, which I rolled my eyes at before clicking through. There's a kind of inept, plastic-y quality to the lines, lighting, and many of the visual details that I find both unsettling and extremely tacky.
It's the visual equivalent of a turkey sandwich from an office park cafe which exists only to serve lunch to workers who don't have enough time to go somewhere else and must settle for an indifferent assembly of the cheapest pre-sliced deli meat, bread, and produce available for every-other-week delivery from a restaurant supply.
I mean, is that food?
Sure.
Is it worth consuming?
No.
So, the same as most human-produced art?
Sure, the same as *inept* human-produced art.
Edit: Although there's a certain specific quality to the ineptitude of AI-produced art that I can't quite describe. I can often see where inept human-produced art went wrong, but with AI-produced art, the *entire* image has gone (sometimes only subtly) wrong.
I agree with you. AI art has this strange uncanny plasticky feel to it.
I find it has a tendency to overfill certain kinds of scenes with people, like the illustration to the Hanson efficacy of medicine debate.
The art on this piece is good - the woman has the correct number of fingers on each hand! - and it doesn't have that surface shininess. It looks real enough. But it's probably produced by very high-quality AI. Most of the AI I see is the glossy fake stuff.
However the dragon does have an extra claw
I don't think it looks real at all.
It wasn't good enough to not look like AI art (as opposed to human- Photoshopped art), which is my entire complaint.
It doesn't matter how "good" AI art is if it's still obviously AI art, with its tacky, plastic-y AI art feel.
But once the technology progresses to the point that all AI art you see is indistinguishable from real art (and therefore you'll have to assume all art you see is AI)... will you stop disliking AI art?
I'm curious, because of all the people who commented on this thread, so far I'm the only one who has expressed a dislike of AI art regardless of whether it's ugly or pretty (in fact I dislike it even more if it's pretty, because the rise of pretty AI art makes it ever harder to know if a person made it). I want to know if the other people who have said they don't like AI art agree with me on this or not.
No, like CGI special effects in movies / TV, my objection isn't to the use of the technology itself, but to the noticeable ineptitude in rendering the final image.
CGI is not the same thing as AI art though, not even remotely.
CGI is literally human made art. It's like making a sculpture, or a doll, which you then pose.
AI art is made by a robot that interpret a text prompt. You just tell the robot "woman hugging a Komodo dragon" and that's it.
It's not in the same universe.
We have different objections here!
I only loathe *inept* art. Before all of the inept AI art, my loathing was directed at *inept* CGI, which is CGI that calls attention to itself due to its lack of believable detail within the established physical mechanics of the story's universe.
For example, human-produced CGI is often unable to believably depict gravity in a setting of normal earth gravity. Way, way too often, objects (especially CGI replacements of human actors) don't have enough weight or force moving through normal-gravity space. I notice that, it pulls me out of the story, and it pisses me off.
But I'm not distracted and angered by the CGI that fools me! That's great CGI! I had no idea that so much of Top Gun Maveric was actually CGI until I saw the "'No CGI' is Invisible CGI" series on YouTube! Good for the Maverick CGI team!
I'm sure a non-zero number of AI images have already totaly fooled me the way good, *invisible* GCI has totally fooled me.
If it's good enough to *totally* fool me, I'm fine with it.
A couple years ago, a blog post like this would either have a bit of stock photo that someone searched for, or maybe even a stolen and copyrighted image, or no image. I don’t exactly know what to compare this to, but it’s like how there’s now music in restaurants and shops, some of which is infinitely annoying and some of which is quite pleasant, especially when you stop into a shop whose manager shares your musical taste.
Yes, I'd love it if there weren't images on Substack posts or music in shops and restaurants.
But I know I'm in the tremendous minority on that one.
Some of it is really bad, and when you've seen a lot of it (e.g. as used on the covers of Kindle books in a cheap-o series I'm currently consuming as brain popcorn), it's off-putting. A combination of surface slick glossiness with distorted expressions and, when you've seen enough of them, only a limited set of faces and facial expressions.
It's fake plastic trees. You see a bunch of artificial flowers, and you go "Oh, those are really life-like!" But then you see bunches and bunches of them for sale in the shop and, all together, the fakeness stands out.
Artificial flowers (and Christmas trees) are a good example, too.
As not much of an art person, AI art all looks kinda samey, like the average of a billion actual pieces of art. Because that's what it is.
I'm aware that it can do some neat tricks like "making a face appear when you squint at a normal-seeming picture" that are much harder for humans to pull off, and I guess you could call that a "style" (though then I think you have to consider the magic eye images from the 90s an "art style" too). But if so it's not a super interesting style to me.
Of course if you look at the details AI art falls apart almost instantly. Your image, for example, has one completely black pupil, weirdly regular skin shape on the dragon, weirdly smooth skin, hair, and shirt fabric, where wrinkles have been attempted they don't make any sense, focus that's inconsistent, a billion other things that should make your brain go "uh...this isn't right." And the dragon has an extra claw.
To be fair, if a human created a piece like that you could chalk that up to artistic intent or choice. I kind of hate the "human art is better because it has SOUL" thing, because while occasionally artists are challenging the status quo or whatever, most human art is meant to just be kind of nice to look at. Effort doesn't guarantee success and lack of effort doesn't guarantee failure. If this is nice to look at who cares? But I can't imagine how this uncanny valley nightmare is nice to look at? So we're left with "why was it made to look creepy and unnaturally regular? What is the experience we're supposed to be getting here?" And the answer is "oh right these are just artifacts from the generation process, it doesn't mean anything."
So if it's not a good recreation of the subject matter, and its artistic choices don't mean anything, then... why?
Surprised by your taste! AI-generated images can have different styles and some look good, but the ones you use don't: they look plasticky and awkward. I'm not sure if this is a function of the generator (and GPT-4 can only produce this style), or simply the default style and could be changed by tweaking the prompt.
I don't particularly mind the images: I'm aware that people click on posts more if there's an image; I certainly don't begrudge you wanting those clicks; if the images were actually unpleasant I'd block them on my end. In this context, I don't care what the image (if any) is.
In a context where I'm actually expected to look at the picture (e.g. to appreciate it as art), my reaction is strongly negative, and I think similar to what Caba describes below. This is worse when the image looks good: it's a more successful con. I keep thinking of that bit from _Blindsight_:
"The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception become apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack."
My reaction is far less negative, or even positive, when the image is intended to probe the behaviour of the image generator itself, or is a stupid joke — I know not to look for depth that's not here.
I tend to dislike it because people misuse it by using a vague prompt and taking whatever is generated. It seems like filler that's meant to break up text or have any image rather than an actual illustration.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-mcdonalds-theory-of-why-everyone
I don't think that the AI image in this Nate Silver article about ballooning fast food prices adds anything. A stock photo of an old fast food menu (or a limited menu from Dick's Drive In or In-N-Out would illustrate what he was actually talking about.
Stock photos would also be called "slop" if they were used as carelessly as AI.
It falls into uncanny valley status for me. If you look at it enough there are certain tells and it just feels weird compared to art drawn by actual people.
Hayao Miyazaki once said (IIRC) that you shouldn't try to make a film for everyone. Human experience and thought is so diverse that a film for everyone would be a film for no one. That's why Miyazaki makes films primarily for himself.
AI art feels like it constantly tries to make art that everyone would like, with only a short prompt as a constraint. It feels like a Shoggoth threw together various things that humans are statistically predicted to respond positively to. It tries to wirehead the aesthetic part of one's brain, but isn't advanced enough to do it competently. That's part of why it's hated so much - the worst art is kitsch that doesn't appeal to you.
I didn't know about that, since I got here via an email that didn't have the picture and it doesn't display on the post itself.
Yeah I usually go to the posts via email too. I've started making a point of checking out the pictures now though ever since some discussion a few weeks ago in the comments of another post.
I think this is the second time someone has said there’s an image on a post and I haven’t been able to figure out how to see it! I think this might be something that is only for the app, just as comment thread collapsing is only for people not on the app.
"Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier."
The other side of this is potential landlords who decide never to rent at all because they know they cannot effectively ban pets. Same goes for all the well-meaning laws that make it somewhere between difficult and impossible to evict bad tenants.
I think this is a good point.
A while back I rented an apartment that was a small duplex sectioned off from the landlord's main house, where for $500/month we fit two adults, a baby, and a cat for several years. He was generally nice about it and we got along, but I could easily imagine small allowances adding up to discourage him from renting it out at all, and being forced to pay much more to a larger entity.
What then would the landlord do? Sell it? If to another landlord, then the buck is passed, and if to an individual, they can have a pet or not as they see fit.
Or, in the case of something like apartments, would the building then be torn down or left vacant?
What options would the landlord have if they decide not to lease it out because of not being able to ban pets?
Right now, so far as I can see with the housing shortage in Ireland, a lot of landlords *are* choosing to outright sell properties rather than continue to rent them out.
For institutional investors, I believe there was some advice about letting the units sit idle if they are in Rent Pressure Zones, where rent can only be increased by 2% per year, until prices go up high enough. If you're a big concern, letting some block of flats empty for a year or two years isn't going to hurt badly enough to force you to rent them out at a 'low' price when you anticipate the market rate going up.
I think in a situation where there is pressure on housing, "no pets or no home, you choose" is in the landlord's favour.
Which then means the Rent Pressure Zones have fewer apartments available to actually be lived in, thus increasing the pressure further. Point of a Georgist LVT would be to turn that sort of deliberate under-utilization of land into a bad investment, so institutional investors would stop doing it, and the space could actually be used for something productive.
That sounds like it would not improve the situation at all. At least int he current regime, the apartments come back online eventually. In your scenario they're gone forever. Of course, the whole problem is created by the "Rent Pressure Zone" legislation.
Why would they be gone forever? Institutional investors wouldn't be burning down the physical buildings out of spite, just selling to someone who was more interested in actually owning and using apartments than in low-effort ROI.
If they're renting out part of their house, they will simply not do that, and that section of house will remain empty. I have plenty of extra house and an extra bathroom, but would certainly not rent it out to a stranger under the current state of anti-landlord regulations.
Mao and Pol Pot enacted some dramatically darker regulations against landlords so maybe landlords today should count their blessings and be grateful they have what they do.
Reduced demand for rental properties means lower prices which means less incentive for real estate developers to go through zoning and environmental review and all the other barriers to building new housing. Ordinary supply and demand stuff.
More directly, I'm a single guy living in a 3 bedroom house in a college town. I considered renting out one of my rooms to make some extra money but unless it's someone I knew really well there's just too much risk, so that room just sits empty.
Even if the apartment allows companion animals, I know..people👀.. who have used ESA as a way to get out of pet rent and pet fees. I think I remember it being a way to also curtail breed restictions (ej pit bulls or large dogs).
Exactly. I had a prospective tenant (presenting with no mental problems other than a healthy sense of entitlement) who showed me her internet ESA letter and told me that she could make me accept her dog and not charge her pet rent. This in an apartment with carpets that have been maintained free of pet dander because there are *humans* who have asthma and allergies.
I second the comment by Nebu Pookins about the damage that this schnookery does to blind people who really need their guide dogs.
How about requiring proof of insurance for all support animals? Guide dogs would be cheap, they have papers. Getting State Farm to cover your ESA pit bull with no training? Not so cheap
I'm not a landlord in the United States, but if anyone ever tried this on me then I'd find a way to evict them.
Not only do I not want animals living in my apartment, I don't want people with mental illnesses living there either.
I think you could be sued for that. You could definitely be sued if your tenant found this comment and presented it in court as evidence that you were evicting them on purpose.
For the record, I suspect Melvin is a troll account, going by the number of deliberately provocative posts like this / generally being awful. They have expertly pushed my buttons before, but having seen the pattern I no longer react.
I'm certainly not a troll account in the sense of posting things that I don't actually believe. But I admit I gain more pleasure from posting my opinions that I know some people will strongly object to than my most unobjectionable of opinions. There's not much point in posting something unless someone is going to disagree.
You could be, but the risk is worth it. The reality is that connecting a landlord to their ACT account is pretty difficult.
I am an actual, real-life landlord, and yes, if I get an applicant who presents me an ESA letter, I find a reason to reject their application. If I have an existing tenant who presents me a letter, I decline to renew their lease or take the next opportunity to raise the rent to whatever rent I think they won’t tolerate. I do whatever is legal to remove them and I make it clear ahead of time (as much as I can) that this is exactly what I will do.
I don’t do this for spite. I like animals.
1) Allowing one ESA opens the floodgates. In my multi-unit properties, one tenant having a cat means in six months the property has a cat, two pits and a chihuahua.
2) It’s an open door to tenant conflict. Many tenants signed their leases believing that I barred pets. They are understandably frustrated and disappointed if they believed their home was a refuge from barking, dander, potential violence, etc. You cannot possibly pay me enough to stay awake nights fielding phone calls about barking, and the cops will only do so much, which is very little.
3) There is no deposit which can ameliorate the damages. Just the dog nails on the flooring and sills alone will eat an entire deposit. If the tenant does not trim their nails (and they never do) then the flooring must be replaced when the unit is turned over at a cost of 5-10k per unit depending on type. Urine and stains are equally unlikely to remove, wall scratches require new paint, etc. This is the most pressing issue for me as even if I pushed every rent to market (which I don’t) there is no way to afford the repairs.
4) I have learned that the sort of person who feels comfortable abusing this system also feels pretty comfortable abusing the lease and landlord. It’s hard to say who is an abuser because about 50% of tenants will accept a pet denial and the others will slowly reason their way to breaking the rules.
5) Ultimately just as the tenants have lots of ways to do an end run around my prohibition of pets, I have lots of ways to legally make it clear that I’m going to make their choices to break our agreement cost them as much as possible until they leave voluntarily. None of these are easily proved. I don’t need a reason to raise rent on one unit and not on the others. I don’t have to give a reason to fail to renew a tenancy if I don’t want to and I don’t have to keep any sort of legible record of my reasons for accepting and declining tenant applications (and in fact I do not!).
I’ve been living with the risks of lawsuit for decades and it seems a small price to pay for peace of mind. I am happy to defend these practices against reasoned argument; I thought somebody ought to represent the ownership side.
I appreciate this look into how the real world works. It seems like an eminently reasonable stance, enforcing rules you are perfectly justified in making, even against those who would flaunt them.
*flout.
I am an occasional landlord, and I second everything written here.
Before I would demand a pet deposit, and it's usually something like 3x the normal deposit, and even then it's not usually enough. So I stopped allowing pets. If someone ESA'd me, their tenancy would become quite difficult quite quickly.
Completely gutting all carpets, furniture, walls, frames of a house and replacing them is expensive, and tenants never pay up. They always assume it's super-cheap to replace all this stuff. I've had tenants quote me what they assume it should be to fix their shit, and it's usually between 1/10th and 1/5th the actual cost.
Thanks for the honesty. This is why I'm not attached to liberal democracy and am open to using brute (legal) force to wrangle problematic groups like landlords. You just admitted you routinely violate the law, which I appreciate, and if landlords don't play my the rules, why should we? Better to act than be acted upon.
If the law is unjust, is it unjust to break that law?
I will evict them ... in Minecraft of course.
The "in Minecraft" fig leaf might not be viable, per the arrest of Richard Golden.
Ironically, you don't seem very mentally well yourself. Definitely something odd going on upstairs unless you are very young, like 15 years old or something.
Coincidentally, a blind person in Seattle posted today about their experience being kicked out of a restaurant because of the blind person's service/guide dog. It seems like maybe the staff equivocated the service dog with being an emotional support animal, and perhaps was cynical that the dog even met that low bar.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/1cn6mcu/blind_person_with_service_dog_kicked_out_of_a/
Presumably this is in response to the extremely low barrier to getting one's pet categorized as an ESA, and possibly a widespread practice of people not even meeting that barrier and simply claiming (lying) that the pet they wish to take with them into the restaurant is an ESA.
In the video the person asks, "What is going ON out there that would lead this man to believe I'm lying?"
I suppose it would be harder for a blind person to notice.
I find the thing where no landlord allows pet weird. As a landlord I've had people with dogs and cats, and they've never caused me a problem.
But also, have people tried to offer to pay a bit more in exchange for being allowed to have pets? I can imagine most tenants compare places in large part based on rent, so landlords want to advertise the lowest price they are willing to accept, for which they aren't willing to deal with pets; they set rent based on what other landlords charge for similar homes, who also don't allow pets. (Sort of like airlines making the base ticket fee low, with minimal service, because that's what people compare.) But if tenants offer enough to offset the costs or risks—which may not be all that much—it's in the landlords' interest too to allow the animals.
We sold a house with wooden floors which went for sale again a couple years later. We went to the open house out of curiosity. The floors weee absolutely destroyed with dog scratches everywhere.
Yeah, you’re talking (by square foot and location) tens of thousands in damages in just a year or two—costs which cannot be offset by any reasonable deposit or increase in rent.
I had a landlord initially refuse to rent a 3 bedroom house to me because my wife and ai had a cat.i pponted out that my middle aged, declared cat would do far less damage than children enwpuld do and we had no kids or plans for them. It is all a part of the negotiation (and being a great tenant who can get references)
This is pure nosiness on my part, but I did briefly work in social housing, so I'm curious: if it was just you and your wife, with no kids, why did you want a three bedroom house?
Was it just that this was the only one for rent in the place/at the price you wanted?
In America, where middle class people love big suburban houses, it would not be completely out of the ordinary for a childless couple to want a three-bedroom house: one to sleep in, one guest bedroom, one home office (for the husband or wife or both).
Exactly. Had a lot of stuff too.
Also, in most areas two-bedroom houses are pretty rare and one-bedroom houses are damn-near nonexistent. A three-bedroom house would be the smallest house you can get, if you don't want an apartment.
Yeah, when I was on the housing market there were very few two or one-bedroom places (and those that I did see tended to be poorly maintained and have only one bathroom, which were dealbreakers for me).
Also reminds me of the situation with medical cannabis before recreational use was legalized in California. A friend of mine went to the weed doctor to get a prescription for CBD oil to help with some pain. She brought all kinds of documentation, medical records, etc. The doc was like "lol wut" and handed her a script for more weed than she could possible consume.
Yeah, this was my experience in Michigan too. That time I had enough dignity to not participate but all my patients would just go to some practice with a name like 420Doc or whatever and get their prescription after a 15 minute appointment.
What, are you telling me that some people were using the medical cannabis exception for naughty purposes and that the weed version of pill mills started up? I am shocked and appalled, I tell you, even more so because we were assured nothing like that would ever happen and the only people looking for medical cannabis were doing it purely for genuine medical reasons!
(Honestly, thirty seconds thought would have told anyone this would happen, but I suppose enough 'I am a responsible non-criminal enjoyer of weed, it should not be illegal' types were able to put pressure on to have laws changed. And of course, it made things worse for people genuinely seeking medical relief for medical problems).
Do you see a difference between people without ADHD wanting Adderall and people without glaucoma (or whatever other condition cannabis supposedly treats) wanting weed?
To be blunt, no. Both sets are trying to get around the rules and obtain benefits by faking having the problems for which the drugs are prescribed.
Indeed, if I take the reports online seriously, Adderall is easier to get than weed?
Okay, I don't see a difference either. I just support both groups because I dislike "the rules" it looks like you support.
Depends on where you are. I can literally walk 10 minutes in either of 2 directions to 3 pot shops, fully legal by state and local law (although not by federal law). It's cash only, and they check IDs, but other than that it's a normal shop.
I mean the whole medical marijuana movement was obviously a wedge the whole time.
However as one of those "I'm a responsible non-criminal enjoyer of weed", it really, really should be legal and seems to be moving that way monotonically anyways. I've lived in a southern state with harsh drug laws most of my life and it's always been trivially easy to get and a significant fraction of the population consume it regularly. It's a joke to have it classified the way it was for so long, this is just policy catching up with reality.
> And of course, it made things worse for people genuinely seeking medical relief for medical problems
Can you expand on this claim? What's your theory of how it made things worse for people who need medical help? For example, did medical weed make it harder to get cancer treatment? I can't think of a way that it did, but maybe you had something more specific in mind that this general statement is pointing at.
On Pettable, if you select too many "right" answers, and say you're suicidal, they don't give you the letter and instead direct you to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Snakes are a fantastic and clean pet that have essentially no way to cause any property damage. They should be a landlord's best friend but aren't due to harmful stereotypes and moronic property insurance wording denying all tanks regardless of if they actually contain water
I'm maybe biased here because of a family story that my uncle's pet python escaped the day before he moved, he couldn't find it, and he decided to just move and leave it as a "surprise" for the next person to move into the apartment.
That happens but it was likely hiding very close to where he kept it, if he wasn't moving it would have eventually just turned up. Even if the new tenants found a new snakey friend ball pythons are docile, completely harmless, and cute - nothing bad would have happened. Compared to leaving a dog cat hamster bird etc. behind it's infinitely better for safety and avoiding property damage.
You can say that because you know about snakes and are used to them. A stranger who finds a "surprise" python in the new home is not going to be calmly wondering if it's 'cute and harmless'.
Suppose you came home to find a stranger in the place whom you did not know, did not expect to be there, and looks like he might be dangerous. Are you going to be "oh, a cute and harmless fun new friend!"and be totally chill with the idea of strangers just popping out of thin air in your home, or are you going to demand explanations about that, and that he gets the hell out?
C'mon, buddy. You know how scared people are of snakes. Leaving behind a python is ruthless.
pythons are cute and harmless
I realize that. I love snakes. But your average person finding a snake in their home will be terrified for their life. Terrifying someone like that is vicious.
Sounds like more of a problem with your uncle than the snake. I'm a landlord who does not want pets in the apartment (luckily there's nothing like support animals in my country) but I would have zero problems with a snake. Probably the animal least likely to damage property out of all of them.
The only possible problem would be the risk of the snake escaping and then scaring a clueless neighbour. (and then the media reporting about it and drumming up panic over snakes as pets, which actually has happened multiple times in the recent years in my country and has led to nonsensical laws requiring people to undergo useless training before having reptiles as pets, despite the fact that most pet reptiles are as harmless as you can get when it comes to pets.)
"most pet reptiles are as harmless as you can get when it comes to pets".
"Most". I have no objection to snakes myself, but I don't think requiring training is useless. See that Florida case (what is it with Florida?) about the idiot owner of a python and what happened her two year old child (one story says the snake was the property of the mother, another says she and her boyfriend - not the child's father - were co-owners of the snake):
https://abcnews.go.com/US/python-owners-12-years-girls-strangle-death/story?id=14373295
"Florida python owners Jaren Hare and her boyfriend Charles Darnell were each sentenced to 12 years in prison today because the snake escaped from its cage and strangled Hare's 2-year-old daughter.
Hare, 21, and Darnell, 34, were convicted last month of third degree murder, manslaughter and child neglect.
The little girl, Shaianna, was killed two years ago when the couple's pet Burmese python escaped from its enclosure and strangled the girl in her crib. The snake's tank was only equipped with a quilt for a lid.
A medical examiner testified during the trial that the albino snake named Gypsy was underweight and trying to eat the girl. The snake hadn't been fed for a month when the girl died and was severely underweight at only 13 pounds, the Orlando Sentinel reported. The snake should have weighed nearly 150 pounds, the Sentinel reported."
The story gets even nastier and more tragic when further details come out, but I think the main point here is that these people should not have been allowed keep any kind of pet, they clearly had no idea how to manage the snake and were neglectful and cruel to it, and a law about training before you can keep reptiles as pets sounds sensible and not idiotic from this angle.
Nine out of ten people who want to keep pet snakes probably are reliable owners. But there is always that tenth fool.
> See that Florida case (what is it with Florida?)
There's nothing *particularly* crazy about Florida; the reason we hear a lot about "Florida Man" stories is that the state has some of the strongest public records transparency laws in existence, so it's a lot easier to find out about their crazies than other states' crazies.
I have long known this was the case, but I wish it were otherwise; I enjoyed believing that one of the fifty states drove ordinary men to madness. It made the world a more interesting place.
I think you meant to say 99/100. People also underfeed or abuse dogs, cats, or other animals sometimes. I don't see how this is any different.
Also, Burmese pythons are already super illegal in Florida anyway.
To be fair, that type of behavior would be received with abject horror by many snake keepers, who put a lot of stock on responsible practices and are still recovering from the Holy Thursday massacre.
Context: Florida bans the keeping of some snake species. This ban is retroactive, existing keepers are given 90 days to get rid of their animals. Most reptile owners think this is ridiculous and attempt to fight the restriction to get an exception or extension for existing pets.
Meanwhile, snake breeder Bill McAdam receives a call by Florida Wildlife Control to inspect his facility, as an escaped (and now illegal) python was found nearby. McAdam complies, FWC officers instead show up with a bolt gun and shoot 35 of his snakes.
This by itself is not a suitable method for euthanization, the snakes are alive although fatally wounded and continue to move for ~20 minutes. Among the animals killed is a legal-to-keep boa constrictor, body cam footage suggests the officer realizes the animal is not a python and shoots it regardless. The escaped python is found to be an unrelated animal.
McAdam's employee records the process, and the entire reptile-keeping community is beside themselves for months (which is how I'd heard of it, I don't keep reptiles myself but they're adjacent to fishkeeping groups and news travel).
Not to belabor the point, but that story has nothing to do with snakes being a problem and everything to do with your uncle being a problem.
If the python was small enough that it could actually be unfindable in an apartment, it poses as much health and safety risk to the next tenant as a forgotten mouse trap.
The most likely outcome of that story is that the incoming tenants find it, freak out, kill it, and then have to clean up the mess.
The outright impossible outcome is that the snake causes any significant harm to the incoming tenants (not counting harm from them panicking). Pythons do not have venom, they aren't a disease vector, they can't carry fleas, and if they're small enough to be lost in an apartment, they aren't strong enough to hurt even a small child worse than a mousetrap would.
Can’t we find a way to call a snake tank a cage if it has a hole in the bottom or something?
The usual material is glass (works well with under-tank heaters), which is rather difficult to put a hole in. I've used a repurposed fish tank with a custom lid that worked quite well.
There's also the matter of substrate, which would make a mess if it can spill out through the bottom.
My last snake lived in a vivarium - built from wood, with a glass front. Definitely not a tank ;)
Scott thinks this is about housing and mental health. Other people think this is about balancing individual rights, the public good, economics, and animal rights, etc.
I'm going to up the controversy yet AGAIN and say...
This is a problem about dogs.
Aquarium fish do not bark all night long for no reason. Cats do not physically bodyslam you to the ground because they're "excited to see you!" Hamsters do not regularly leave their cages and leave massive shits all over the neighborhood. People don't walk by off-leash domesticated iguanas on the street and think, "wow, that creature could literally overpower, kill, and maim me before anyone has a chance to stop it, guess I'll just have to trust the owner with my life, even though I know nothing about them other than the fact that they paid $50 to adopt an animal at some point and also don't feel the need to obey local laws, which is always a good signal of responsibility!"
When people have issues with pets, most of the time they have issues with dogs. Pets are great! However, all kinds of pets can be beneficial and dogs have the most downsides in dense, modern urban environments. In the past, people used to let all kinds of animals run loose in cities until we realized that it was gross and dangerous and so we found better ways to do things. Now, we have regulations against owning horses and pigs and roosters in densely populated city areas. Maybe it's time to consider the same about dogs. We have strict licensing requirements around a lot of things that can kill people--like cars, guns, explosives--so why do we assume any random person has the right to own a mini-wolf up until the point it actually maims someone, no matter how much fear and mayhem it causes?
A lot of apartment buildings have started allowing pets under 50 pounds and I'm all for this, because really it's the only protection I have against having people's dogs forced on me all the time, and also it's unfair for my clean, well-behaved indoor cats to be classified in the same category as giant pitbulls that could easily terrorize entire neighborhoods.
I think it's great if you want to have a dog, but move to the country with the other people who like large, high-maintenance mammals so you can give your dog a good life. Nobody should have the "right" to try to keep a husky in a one-bedroom apartment.
Not necessarily arguing against some of the anti-dog sentiment, but from a landlord's perspective, I heard a lot of concerns about cats ruining the furniture and walls. As someone who owned quite a few cats in the past - those are perfectly reasonable concerns.
I'd be happy to pay a security deposit and agree to an annual or quarterly landlord inspection for my cats. I think the problem with dogs is that there are so many things that could go wrong (noise, sanitation, wear and tear, danger) that landlords can't even draw up a contract for everything. With other types of animals, there are a few predictable things that could go wrong. For instance, if my cat claws up the apartment, it's pretty straightforward to assess the monetary damage when I move out and charge the deposit (or have me pay for the furniture up front so it's not the landlord's problem). And I think it's reasonable not to allow aquariums in particular units that are prone to water damage.
Dogs are also somewhat unique in that they are the only common urban pet that requires daily outdoor, meaning that they are automatically everyone's problem.
Many landlords solve this by requiring pet insurance.
Unfortunately, many also solve this by just not allowing pets.
Yeah, e.g. mine doesn't, but that just seems like a trivial matching problem.
Yep, as a sometime cat owner, mine did the same thing. Carpets, too. Fortunately, the first time around, my landlord was reasonable, and just charged me for carpet replacement and general repair at the end of my tenancy. And the second time around I was my own landlord, but that didn't stop me from noticing the damage.
Cats can be bad for carpet. As for the furniture, isn't that the tenant's problem?
That greatly depends on the specifics, of course. Cabinets and closets, libraries, doors - plenty of furniture and furniture-like objects are not uncommonly owned by the landlord. All of the above is literally the case for the place we're renting right now.
Yes, you can offer to pay for the damage. But a landlord might just say they don't want the hassle and the arguments about the extent of the damage etc.
Another problem with dogs is that they are fucking large. I sat on an airplane next to a lady with a huge dog by her feet. It was incredibly awkward and uncomfortable.
Not exactly the issue that Scott was originally commenting on, but you're spot on. The only "pet" problem in cities are dogs. No other common pet is nearly as dangerous, makes so much noise , or fouls the street as much as dogs. I'd 100% vote to get dogs out of cities and apartments just like we don't keep pigs there. With the possible exception of small old-lady lapdogs, but whatever, they could get a lap cat or a lap rabbit. Pet rabbits are underrated anyway.
As others have commented here (and as a landlord) , I disagree. Cats are also a huge problem. We rent out our apartment with furniture, and I know enough cats and people with cats to know that most pieces of furniture do not survive their encounters with cats unscathed. (The smell can be a problem too depending on the owner, but that's of lesser concern.) Yes, you could let people pay for it via security deposits, but that's just a hassle. The same goes ofc for other pets prone to scratching, biting and pooping everywhere, so sadly most mammals and birds. Fish can be a problem due to water damage. Reptiles, insects, snails etc would be completely fine if people knew more about them and were not irrationally scared of a lot of them, that goes both for landlords who forbid them and neighbours who are petrified when they think of the harmless corn snake or tarantula escaping. So sadly, all pets have problems.
That's not so much a disagreement as a different point as far as I can tell. As a landlord you get discretion, your relationship with the tenant is a market transaction so it's ultimately a negotiation between your and their interests. There's nothing about the things you mentioned that cannot be compensated with money, and you're also perfectly allowed to say "no pets, no exceptions".
What Farkling* was talking about is that dogs are quite unique in the externalities they impose on the rest of us, with no recourse - neighbours putting up with the barking, the excrements on the street (even when the biggest part gets picked up) and the possible agggressivity of the animal.
Cats can be a problem, too, but they are incapable of maiming or killing anyone, and I don't think you can honestly compare them for that reason.
Actually... Cats are very much capable of maiming and killing people. Cat bites are extremely prone to horrible infections that have led to amputations and even death in rare cases. (Serious cat bites are very deep and very hard to clean.) Of course it's much more rare than dogs killing people but still, very much possible.
The likelihood of an unprovoked severe cat bite is low enough to be negligible. A cat's main method of defending itself is to scratch.
House cats rarely/never bite unprovoked though; they don't spontaneously impose themselves on the welfare and comfort of others in the same way that dogs do.
You're truly the worst.
Worst of the worst? Ok, I'll say it gently but it amounts to the same. I think that dogs, with the possible exception of tiny lapdog types, are a bad match for the dense, indoor environment of cities. They're great in the countryside, but my rule of thumb is at least you need a backyard.
You should get help for this extreme irrational fear of dogs, as it could actually *provoke* dominating behavior and/or aggression in some animals that would otherwise leave you alone.
Are you joking? I would reverse this-- every dog owner should get professional dog training so they can keep other people safe. If your dog is stronger than you, and can easily rip the leash out of your hand, you cannot legally own that dog. Why should the average person have to tolerate dogs?
I'm fine with the idea of people being required to have dog-handling skills, actually.
With dog-handling skills, there's no such thing as a dog being able to rip a leash out of your hands, much less "easily." I've walked many large, untrained dogs (although they didn't stay untrained for long, lol), and had a 100lb Rottweiler mix who lived to 14, and I've never been "pulled," much less actually dropped a leash.
As a first principle I put the well-being of dogs and owners over the well-being of the dog-phobic. Why? Well that question isn't valid because it's a first principle.
What, precisely, is irrational about fearing something with a long, *long* history of unprovoked, maiming attacks against human beings?
The extreme rarity of maiming attacks today.
It is the owner's responsibility to control any tendency towards aggression in their dog, regardless of what a human does. Your comment is blaming the victim.
I agree with you that every owner should have control over their dog.
However, the objection to "blaming the victim" is, as almost always when that phrase is deployed, counterproductive to helping a person avoid being a victim when facing another person who fundamentally doesn't know or care they are victimizing a person.
"You should get help for this extreme irrational fear of dogs, as it could actually *provoke* dominating behavior and/or aggression in some animals that would otherwise leave you alone."
The second half of your sentence is a good refutation of the first.
On second glance, I'm interpreting her comment quite literally. No judgement, just "if you don't want to be attacked, you should try this non-intuitive step to reduce your risk".
That was literally my intention.
I'm actually not afraid of dogs and the fact that you read into that is very telling. I think they're loud and smell bad and I don't like how they get special treatment in the public eye (what other privately owned animal gets its own fenced off section of a public park, paid for with public funds, in a city with limited green space?) Your comment is especially ignorant considering young children are a significant number of dog attack victims, precisely because they can't control their body language.
I'm also just a very small person and have spent my entire life--yes, as a child as well--being unintentionally injured by friendly dogs simply because of the laws of physics, while their owners stand by helpfully telling me to "be more assertive" as I'm being physically overpowered faster than I can react. It's actually surprising that I've been hurt by dogs more times than I can count and haven't developed a phobia.
I hope you get help too :)
As someone who was also a small child, was occasionally knocked down by a family member's not-well-trained English sheepdog and who is only 5'2" today...
...but who also learned to handle horses at 11 years old, stood down a neighbor's two escaped charging Rottweilers at 14 and scared them back into their yard while her friend panicked and ran, and who has never been fully jumped on, much less injured by a dog despite occasionally encountering and handling strangers' large, untrained dogs...
Other people's dogs are indeed something you can have some control over. Since you aren't phobic, per se, I recommend watching some Cesar Milan clips of his work with large, boisterous dogs, paying close attention to his instructions on body language and physical corrections when a dog intrudes on one's personal space.
LOL you might want to pick a different example. I youtube up Cesar Milan and this is the second video I watched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ihXq_WwiWM
*gets bitten* -- "I didn't see that coming."
I also didn't. I know dogs pretty well, and I thought he had that sucker under control, then BOOM.
Largely I'm with you though. I think this sort of thing is an outlier. And that dog probably would not be allowed around people in any uncontrolled environment, but sometimes dogs get territorial about something unpredictable for humans.
I should have specified "whole Cesar Milan episodes!"
Without even clicking on the link I knew which one it would be. That dog was the worst case he ever handled (he later conceded he wasn't the right fit for that particular dog and referred the owners to a different behaviorist trainer) and that was the worst bite he's ever received, which is why it's among the most-watched clips - it's an extreme exception to the norm!
Or put another way, in this one case, "dog bites man" is so noteworthy it racks up 35 million views.
I should have provided this link for a Cesar Milan overview, as the interviewer is scared of dogs and Cesar's explanations of his principles are very basic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAdUq16Jxc8
Cesar's primary commandment, "No touch, no talk, no eye contact" (upon meeting a dog, especially an excited one) is key. Ideally it would be adopted universally, because it is so damn effective!
He has another framing device, "dog, breed, name," to describe the hierarchy of forces shaping an individual dog's behavior. Despite what the "furbaby" type of people might think, all dogs are first DOGS, a different species with a profoundly different sensory experience from humans and profoundly different motivations.
Then, while all dogs share important core traits, a dog's breed further shapes their sensory experience, temperament, and behavior.
The "name," which is to say, a dog's individual experiences and relationships, are actually the *least* influential forces on his behavior. People who begin by understanding the dog as a dog and honoring the dog's need to be a dog *before* it is a companion to a human will have better relationships with dogs!
I can't believe how far I had to scroll down to see one sane person making this comment. Scott thinks "society is hostile to pets?" Where does he live? I see dogs in the grocery store, the CVS, off leash walking around the neighborhood, in coffee shops, restaurants. The employees are not allowed to intervene, for the most part. My neighbor has a doberman who is off leash multiple times a day with no electric collar. So far, so good? I guess he has good liability insurance? I used to have dogs, the last one died a few years ago. After she died I started realizing how irritating, expensive and gross most dogs are. I think you should need a $500/yr annual license to own a dog, be legally required to take training lessons if the dog weighs more than 50 pounds, and you should be fined thousands of dollars or face jail time if you breed dogs without a license. It's the hubris that annoys me more than anything else.. just this assumption that everyone else will tolerate your dog for no reason other than you think it's great or you were lonely during covid.
I’ve always had dogs, and own a gigantic purebred Rottweiler. But I also have a lot of property out in the country and he is never walked off property without a leash. In addition, we took him for extensive obedience training as a puppy. Dogs aren’t a problem. Irresponsible owners who don’t train their animals, assume everyone else will love them, and let them off leash in public areas are the problem.
Agreed. I don't see how society is hostile to dogs. Almost every day I go for a run (along residential streets, or walking paths, or in parks) I either see dog mess or unleashed dogs. I've seen people with their unleashed dogs in the park less than a quarter-mile from the dog park. People will bring their dogs to pick-up volleyball games, then act shocked when their dog starts barking at another dog there, or at a dog walking by. They'll bring their dogs out of their apartment buildings to poop and then not bother to leash the dogs or to pick up the poop. Now, the majority of dog owners will display good etiquette. But the 10% that don't ruin things for everyone, dog owner or not.
80 years ago, Americans outside of a handful big cities used to be able to virtually have All Dogs Everywhere At Any Time. Outside of courthouses, churches, a few posh restaurants, maybe the library. That's the normal baseline we expect as dog likers and I for one resent any deviation from that norm. I have never even owned a dog and I demand that level of toleration for dogs. Yesterday.
Thank you!
A lot of people don't realize that dogs are domesticated wolves — literally the same species of animal, and still able to interbreed with wild wolves — and a lot of them still have more wild wolf in them than dog-lovers would care to admit.
I agree with the last sentence, but want to push back on the rest.
It's all about the owner. A dog that is well-trained and cared for will not bark, bite, jump, chase, or do any of the things you mentioned. A good owner will not bring their large dog onto a crowded plane.
Dogs, unlike cats, do not carry behavior-altering parasites.
People get emotional about animals, and we end up with situations like we're seeing here: good owners resent being lumped in with bad ones, even if the bad ones create victims who are entirely justified in their dislike of pets (or specific pets).
We need to find a way to make pet owners be good owners. I don't know how to do that, but I think the solution will look less like banning all dogs and more like whatever we end up doing to get people to stop blasting TikTok on the bus without earbuds, or bringing screaming children on the plane.
Not all dogs are trainable. Not all dogs can be well cared for in an apartment setting. Unfortunately "it's the owner" is a phrase now most associated with pitbull apologism for good reason.
"And it’s harmless enough with Fido - he really is a good boy. But I’ve had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake." I would take the snake over a pitbull.
"Emotional support" animals demonstrate a decline of trust within society. I do not recall going through these nonsense growing up, where the only animals you would see in restaurants were dedicated seeing-eye dogs. Now it is rare that I don't see a dog in a supermarket. Going along with that is the massive increase in pitbulls. It is a dangerous breed that has no place in modern society, yet their owners really don't care when they kill other animals and even humans. Animal shelters are overrun with the breed (and often lie about what they are). I just don't trust many pet owners these days or have any respect for terms like ESA or "fur babies".
I agree I'd rather live in a building with an emotional support snake than an ESA dog. However, this isn't really a pitbull problem. The best data on this topic available at the moment suggests that:
1) Small dogs are actually the most likely to have biting issues.
2) Large dogs bite less but their bites are more damaging. The breed doesn't really matter.
3) The biggest predictor of dog bite incidents overall is irresponsible owner behavior/poor owner supervision.
All of this says to me that letting random people have dogs of any kind is just a bad idea. As long as irresponsible dog owners exist (and they do), the public will always face the possibility of dog attack incidents. Trying to argue over which breeds are safer is just a matter of trading bite frequency for potential bite severity, which is not satisfactory to me. I'd rather feel safe at home and in public without risking getting bitten at all!
Pitbulls maul, they don't bite. And that behavior is not just "irresponsible owners" (and they do have the worst owners), but is actually bred into the dog. The function they were bred for is in the name. The breed has no place in a modern society.
I don't have one, but I have heard pitbulls are excellent dogs for the family, just not for intruders and strangers. The "no place" comment isn't necessarily true.
Maybe you should google "pit bull toddler" and see what comes up.
Have you? One of the first hits is a Snopes article which comes up False.
There ARE some news stories of attacks, but they aren't too descriptive. One says "Pit bull advocates and some experts say that the breed is not inherently aggressive but can be trained to be." (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/11/15/texas-toddler-mckenna-martin-pit-bull-attack/71599219007/)
Are you referring to something specific?
My brother-in-law had a pit bull which was very patient with his children, letting them pull on his ears and face, punching him (lightly, as small children are only capable of doing), etc. He never displayed any aggression I saw, and I wasn't even close to the family.
Someone else I knew had a pit bull who often said how gentle the dog was.
Anecdotes are not evidence, of course. But I stand by the "no place" comment being untrue. After all, some have had an excellent place.
I don't think the issue is how many pit bulls kill people, but the fact that they easily CAN. After all, that's why people are not allowed to keep tigers or lions or chimpanzees as pets. Not because every wild animal will kill a human, but because they are capable of it and it's impossible to predict which ones will, under what circumstances.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/14/us-news/3-month-old-baby-mauled-to-death-by-family-pit-bull-in-nj-reports/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/baby-sister-killed-pitbulls-memphis-b2197336.html
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/dog-kills-2-year-old-virginia-boy-in-maryland
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13211575/baby-mauled-death-pitbull-mix-heartbroken-animal.html
The 3 pit bulls I've known have been incredibly sweet and gentle dogs, and I think it's about the owners. Perhaps bad owners who want aggressive, dangerous dogs tend to focus on a couple of breeds, meaning that those breeds are the most likely to be trained to be aggressive and dangerous.
Small dogs are definitely more aggressive, but I'll take that yapping furball that put my ankles in severe danger (I had to look *down* to see what was making such a ruckus) over a bigger, quieter dog that, if it snaps, will mutilate or even kill me.
Poor owner behaviour is certainly to blame most of the time, but you get idiot owners who love to post photos of the pitbull lying beside their six month old baby. And it's not all the underclass stupid violent young men who do that, it's 'respectable' middle class women. Then they're amazed when their cuddle bug eats the face off someone.
Honestly, I think the best rule for dealing with aggressive dogs derives from the Law of Moses. They didn't have rules for pet dogs — dogs were considered among the worst of "unclean" animals — but they did have rules for aggressive oxen. If an ox gored someone to death, the ox was to be killed. One strike and you're out. And if the ox's owner knew that he had an aggressive ox, and shielded it from responsibility, and then it killed a second person, that was regarded as murder and both the ox and the owner should be put to death.
This makes a decent framework for dealing with aggressive dogs. If a dog attacks and harms someone, except in self-defense, put the dog down. One strike and it's out. There's no place for such animals in civilized society. And if it can be shown that the owner was aware that they have an aggressive dog, and didn't let the dog be put down, and let it keep happening, then they're legally liable for any subsequent assault and maiming as if they had committed the act with their own hands.
I would say "self-defense or defense of something it's supposed to be defending." A dog biting a burglar or attacker isn't something I'd want a dog put down for.
The rest of that though, fantastic framework.
Is it declining trust in society or is the logical result of the ADA?
Take the question of why there's so much bullying and trouble-causing in schools. You could see it as "cultural decline." You could also see it as the inevitable result when people who don't want to be somewhere are forced to share the same space. Kids are forced to attend school; while public schools face a lot of difficulty in expelling students.
Another example is rent control. When landlords are forced to rent at below-market rates, they're not going to be very nice to their tenants. Good luck getting them to fix anything.
The law can shape culture to agree, and an incentivization of bad actors and/or lack of enforcement against them can contribute to the decline in societal trust. Especially when people aren't allowed to enforce boundaries and are even forced together as you say.
Agree with poster below. This is NOT a “pit bull problem”. It’s a pit bull OWNER problem. Staffordshire terriers (and other similar looking breeds often called “pit bulls” by the general public) when raised like any other companion dog, make perfectly gentle family pets and good companions.
About biting. I’m from Texas, a progressive Democrat. Texans traditionally have pretty strong beliefs about how things should be done, and that one-strike rule is one of them. I love dogs (obvi). But the taboo against biting humans should be so strongly held in a dogs mind from puppyhood that absolutely nothing should be able to break it except when protecting its owner from a serious threat (and it shouldn’t be punished for doing that, either).
It is believed that if a dog spontaneously breaks that taboo without legit provocation it means the dog is de facto mentally ill, or is physically injured / ill in such a way that the mind is affected. (Barring the latter situation, IF a cure is expected to heal the dog’s body, then mind, eg the biting was a one time event and all may be forgiven. TL;DR: if you handle an injured animal don’t blame them if you get bitten).
Back to the case of biting = mental illness. In which case, “take em out back and shoot em”. One strike. This Is The (Texas) Way
There are too many healthy good dogs sitting in shelters that need forever homes, that do not bite people. Please adopt them instead of trying to rehabilitate a biter.
The obvious objection is that dogs aren't fungible and people get attached to their particular dog. But I agree nonetheless.
>a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.
Isn't that a social net-positive? Restricting this nonsense to the upper classes means that you're less likely to step onto a United flight with 25 pitbulls. This is essentially a polite-society privilege, and those *always* get ruined when the underclass is let in.
Not on topic, but if you've ever seen one of those billboards that says "Exactly WHY are ferrets illegal in California?" then I promise the affiliated website is more insane than you probably imagined.
WARNING for truly horrific violent and graphic content (never thought I would be saying this for a ferret website, but whatever): https://www.legalizeferrets.org/
Uh... am I missing something? The website is perfectly normal.
It's quite ugly and runs badly on mobile (but so does substack), but I don't think that qualifies as truly horrific violent and graphic content. Seems normal to me as well.
The only horrific content is the site creator's utter stupidity. "Why are ferrets illegal in California?" My immediate guess was "not a native species?" and turns out I'm correct.
The only native USA ferret is the black-footed ferret, an endangered species as its main food source - prairie dogs - has been driven out of its habitats by encroaching human development of both ranches and cities. The domestic ferret is a European import and all it takes is a couple to escape from captivity before they wreak havoc in the wild. They are domesticated polecats, and "Ferrets are obligate carnivores, that is, they eat whole small prey, including the bones, organs, fur and feathers. They are efficient hunters of rodents, rabbits, small birds and snakes."
https://happyhollow.org/explore/zoo/education-ambassador/domestic-ferret/
Does this idiot not know the history of imported species? The grey squirrel is not native to the British Isles, and its introduction from the USA in 1911 led to it competing with, and often out-competing, the native red squirrel:
http://www.wildlifemanagement.ie/grey-squirrels/
"Grey Squirrels were introduced to Ireland from North America around 1911. The species quickly established itself and rapidly spread throughout the country. They cause significant damage to certain species of tree and pose a serious challenge to the continued existence of the native red squirrel.
Every year Grey Squirrels cause millions of euro in damage to trees on forestry, woodlands, country estates, stud farms and golf courses. They usually tend to attack beech, sycamore, elder and hazel trees between 10 and 40 years old, although this will vary depending on the species of tree. They attack trees by first stripping the bark from around the trunk and branches (commonly known as bark stripping), discarding it, and then feeding on the soft vascular tissues underneath. This will most likely result in serious discoloration or death of the tree. They are more likely to cause damage to trees during the time period during which the carbohydrates stored in the tree roots is flowing upwards to the branches and leaves between March and August.
The spread of the grey squirrel has been mirrored by a worrying retraction in the number of native red squirrels. Our native reds are simply out-competed by the larger and more robust greys who have a more varied diet and can eat acorns before they are ripe. Greys can also act as a carrier of the parapox virus, which has a deadly effect on native red squirrel populations."
This mush brain thinks that "After all, they’re called Domestic Ferrets!" is a compelling argument, or at the least a cute slogan. Ferrets are hunting animals, that's why they were domesticated, and just because Chuckles here thinks they're cute and furry so he/she/they should be allowed keep as many as they like isn't a good enough reason.
"But Officer, Killer my darling pitbull never harmed anyone before! Well, apart from that neighbour's dog, and my cousin's cat, and the kid riding by on the bike, and of course he was a rescue because his old owner went mysteriously missing, but I swear, he's a sweetheart!"
> They attack trees by first stripping the bark from around the trunk and branches (commonly known as bark stripping)
Is that explanatory comment really necessary? 😆
Maybe dryad nightclubs are more common than I thought? :-)
I once wanted legal Xanax and adderall, when I was young enough that I thought it would fix all my problems, and just looked for the most expensive cash only psychiatrist I could find. I figured that was the gatekeeping hurdle.
And it worked?
The other casualty (besides apartment carpets!) is increased skepticism and hostility toward real service animals. My teenage daughter is completely blind and has a well-trained guide dog. However, many places she goes people are so sick of having to deal with misbehaving emotional support pets, they lump her into the same category until conclusively proven otherwise.
It's trivial when there's an abundance of options. As it is, with a market greatly tilted towards the landlord, this translates into a significant hurdle for pet owners. I'm happy I don't have a pet just now, honestly.
Ive never had trouble finding apartments in nyc that allow dogs. Is the experience generally different elsewhere, such that this loophole is required to overcome market failure?
I've had some patients who report problems, although in some cases they're poor or dependent on government programs and it might be something like "none of the three low-income apartment complexes in my area)
Or maybe they say "can’t find any place that allows dogs" when they mean "would have to pay 10% more than for an otherwise-equivalent place that doesn’t allow them".
Or maybe "I went to an apartment building which allows dogs but decided I didn’t want to live there because of all the noisy-dog-owning neighbors. The new place is great, very quiet, no noisy animals other than mine!"
Makes sense. Market rate apts are expensive due to nimby but still function as a market at that higher price point. Low income housing is different entirely. Ive known a land lord who demanded bribes from his tenants. In an environment like that they wouldn't be likely to accept pets or anything else slightly undesirable.
What if your dog helps you turn into a superhero? Perhaps "not having super-strength" counts as a "limitation"?
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Astro-City/Issue-47?id=120885
I’m so sick of the classist meanness of landlords in general - and it’s all just an excuse to charge renters exorbitant extra amounts of money which will never be returned, no matter how perfect the condition of the property, *just because* 😡 😡 😡
And I'm sick of the classist meanness I encounter as a landlord. (luckily only online) I have always given the entire deposit back to the people renting my apartment and generally help them out a lot.
Do not worry friend, there are pockets of the world where your service doesn't go unnoticed: https://www.reddit.com/r/LoveForLandchads/
I believe your problem would, by convention, be called "REVERSE classism."
No, dogs really do damage property.
Often service animals are given privilege above humans. My wife is allergic to dogs and cats, and if she is sat in an airplane near a service animal, the staff doesn’t know what to do and most of the time they will tell her she can’t fly. They don’t want the risk of anaphylaxis during the flight, but they also don’t want ADA up their ass. I find that insane. I think humans should be given priority.
> I think humans should be given priority.
So do most people. The question is, which human to prioritize? The one with allergies, or the one with the disability that gives them a legitimate need to have a service animal?
Just restore freedom of association and let people decide for themselves.
Which people?
If Andrew has a service dog he takes with him everywhere he goes, and Bill has a severe dog allergy, Bill may have a legal freedom to associate, but in reality he lacks the de facto freedom to associate with Andrew. But Andrew is under no such constraints. Should Andrew be allowed de facto veto power over Bill's actions in the name of "freedom"? Or, conversely, should Bill be allowed de facto veto power over Andrew's, in the name of protecting him from very real harm?
This is a dilemma with no easy, simple, "just do X" answer.
"But Andrew is under no such constraints. Should Andrew be allowed de facto veto power over Bill's actions in the name of "freedom"? Or, conversely, should Bill be allowed de facto veto power over Andrew's, in the name of protecting him from very real harm?
This is a dilemma with no easy, simple, "just do X" answer."
There's no easy answer, I'm saying get the government out of it. Let them make their cases to employers/landlords/whatever, with nobody being able to threaten a lawsuit.
> I'm saying get the government out of it. ... with nobody being able to threaten a lawsuit.
In a land famous for a legal climate where "anyone can sue anyone for any reason," that is a contradiction that is literally impossible to accomplish.
The best we can hope for — and I'd love to see it happen! — is the passage of safe harbor laws, that allow a person who is sued on spurious grounds to make an early-stage motion to preemptively dismiss the suit as baseless and hit the plaintiff with fees for wasting his time. (For example, look at anti-SLAPP laws.)
>“Should Andrew be allowed de facto veto power over Bill's actions in the name of "freedom"?”
If freedom of speech implies freedom to not speak, and freedom of religion implies freedom from religion, then Andrew should be free to not associate with Bill in the absence of the dog *and* Bill should be free to not associate with Andrew in the presence of the dog.
I see no dilemma.
The dilemma is that both of them wanting to be on the same airplane at the same time was never a "freedom of association" question in the first place as they don't actually know each other, nor are they associating with one another per se; they're *being associated* transitively by way of their mutual association with the airline.
Both of them bought a ticket and have a right to a seat as legitimate, paying customers. Andrew needs the dog with him; Bill can't safely be around the dog. Both of them individually have a good reason to be on the plane, but the plane can't accommodate both of them. So what's the best policy here?
Airline's plane, airline's choice.
Seems to me like they could seat these people at opposite ends of the plane...
Hm, coulda sworn I'd read some Replicant Crisis stuff awhile back about how many ESA studies didn't hold up so well and the net effect was probably roughly nil...did this change in the last few years?
This was a frustrating issue at my workplace even before the recent general societal decline in rule-following writ large. We allow full-bore Service Animals, but not ESAs or anything else, by decree of the Health Department. There's very little appetite for enforcement though, precisely because Troublesome Animals are already an indication that dealing with the owner might be a huge headache too, and the escalation isn't usually worth it unless something's really egregious. (Basically, some other customer has to complain to us about it first, we won't make the first move.) So one just gets used to barking dogs while grocery shopping. But maybe you fail the LUK save and instead it's the off-leash mutt who likes sniffing and nibbling on bread loaves. Or the incontinent one who, uh, leaks a trail across the store. Or the oblivious owner who puts her dog right on the register, along with her groceries.* Or the poorly-trained dog who, uh, evacuates in the produce section. At least the owner brought a poop bag to scoop up the evidence...which she then disposed of in the demo food prep kitchen. And that's just the ones I remember. (It's also always, always, always dogs. Never had issues with cats! Or that one guy with the bird!)
*My next customer immediately afterwards was a devout orthodox Muslim who was deeply grateful for me doing a complete deep-clean sanitizing of the whole counter before he unloaded his cart. Grateful that guy didn't escalate to a manager, that would have been A Whole Scene. And I wouldn't even blame him, it's ridiculous that our hands are tied even with something that outrageous. Competing access needs are a difficult problem, but not this difficult, I think...
> Replicant Crisis
That's an Interesting typo. You probably mean "Replication Crisis"? "Replicant Crisis" sounds like something from "Blade Runner", which was based on the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which featured a world in which many animal species had gone extinct or endangered, and humans take care of artificial animals to show how good and empathetic and socially-well-adjusted they are...
(Sorry if this comes off too punchy, I'm a bit on edge, but I thought it was a cool connection, given the post.)
>full-bore Service Animals
Are mini horses small-bore service animals?
Contrast this with where I am, France, where tenants have a legal right to keep pets.
Isn't this another example of bureaucracy and friction being the active ingredients?
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/30/bureaucracy-as-active-ingredient/
I feel like there should be a distinctions between service animals who do something concrete (guiding dog, seizure dog, etc.) and those that don't ("I get calmer when I pet him"). The latter is true for anyone! Why is there even a need for a certification? Either allow these pets or don't.
...There is a distinction. "Service animal" refers to only the former category, not the latter. ESAs do not fall under the legal category of "service animal", and are governed by different laws.
The optimal amount of fraud is not zero. The optimal amount of fake support animals is not zero. If seems to me that this could be rationalised as follows:
- psychiatrists (and other medical professionals) are only required to attest that the person has the problem in question -eliminating things they can't reasonably evaluate.
- ESA certificates can only be obtained from a professional who is actually treating you for that problem. .
- the safety and good behaviour of the animal must be evaluated by a licensed expert in the animal in question. Alternatively, this could be required only if someone raises the issue of whether the animal is will behaved and safe
This would reduce the problem of fake support animals, to those who are just pets of people who do have a real problem and just want to keep their pet, and those who are prepared to spend the effort to con a psychiatrist that they have a real problem. And for the former I have a lot of sympathy anyway, as even if the animal is not helping that much, being required to give up your pet is likely going to make your depression worse.
IMO the optimal number of legitimate ESA certificates is zero.
Fun fact: in my country, it is illegal for landlord to ban tenants from owning animals, "provided that doing so does not cause the landlord or other residents in the building inconvenience disproportionate to the conditions in the building. If keeping the pet results in increased costs for the maintenance of common areas in the building, the tenant shall reimburse these costs to the landlord." (literal translation of our Civil Code)
That sounds like a really good system!
What does your country do for people in apartments who don't want to hear yapping barking dogs? Can they also demand reimbursement?
There is a so called "night calm period" from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., enforced by police fines. Admittedly, at least in the capital city, enforcement is somewhat light touch, though definitely existing; all public musical performances have to end by 10 p.m., and outdoor pub seatings are closed by that hour. But, like, don't move to Prague if you want quiet nights, even though people are bigger problem than dogs.
Calling police on barking dogs is, I think, somewhat contrary to Czech social norms, but if you call them, they will show up and have a word (maybe even fine) with the owner. It is a thing that sometimes happens; I just googled that there is at least one case where dog owner tried to get their fine thrown out in court, but failed.
Another thing that would be fixed by Land Value Tax.
Love. love. love. this. Could be the perfect opportunity to officially launch my business which is called Tree of Life Mental Health Services with its BOLD mission statement which is as follows: OUTCOMPETE AND CUT OUT ALL PSYCHIATRISTS FROM THEIR ASORTED RACKETS AND START MAKING SOME SERIOUS FUCKING COIN
"But do you really want your patient to lose their beloved Nagini just because you refused to write a letter that has no legal requirements and no downsides?"
There are downsides - just to OTHER people, not to the patient. I'm for example deathly afraid of snakes. So if someone with an ADHD approved snake sat next to me on an airplaine, I'd have to find a seat far away from that person or leave the flight. And that would cause a lot of anxiety.
If an emotional support cat gets seated on a flight next to someone that has a cat hair allergy, who has to leave the flight?
"So if someone with an ADHD approved snake sat next to me on an airplaine, I'd have to find a seat far away from that person or leave the flight. And that would cause a lot of anxiety."
This is why you need to get your Emotional Support Anxiety mongoose approved, so if the ADHD snake is seated beside you, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi can take it out!
Again, best comments.
Mongeeses are forbidden in the United States, which gives me a cause to fight for.
You can join forces with the Californian ferret lady and she can update her billboards/website to "And also mongooses should be legal!" 😁
You have a genuine medical condition which only this specific animal can help with, the Disabilities Act should have your back. Emotional Support Mongooses for all!
There's a typo: "papers with tiles like" => "papers with titles like"
Well you are going the easy route and not the responsible one. But this issue has reached insane levels and there really no way to single handedly fight it.
I really don't get it tbh. If anything I would get a little thrill from in expectation helping someone plus also screwing over the suits and landlords. I would take joy in writing the most dramatic letters ("In accordance with decades of best practice in emotional support animals, bo reasonable psychiatrist could refuse Walden his crucial support hamster. Depriving him of the support offered by this hamster would set his treatment back a decade and would be in contradiction with the vast bulk of the available scientific literature"). Okay, maybe not that over the top, it's got to be believable but you get the idea.
Am I just a psychopath with regards to the local issue of not respecting rules that I think are harmful or are you especially conscientious?
There is a difference between "this is an elderly/isolated/genuine problem person who needs the companionship and support of their pet" and "this is someone trying to get around the rules on 'no pets' by faking a disability".
I'm generally on the side of tenants versus landlords, but there are reasonable concerns for people renting out their property, and if they've had bad experiences with people keeping pets before (e.g. cats clawing furniture and stairs) then they're entitled to say "no pets here".
So a hamster? Probably not that big of a risk, especially if Walden really is reliant on Hammy for comfort. But if Walden is breeding and selling hamsters? Not so much. And if it's not a hamster but reptiles or spiders? Yeah, I'm sure you're very careful they never get out, Walden, but that's not something I want to risk my professional reputation on.
Okay, it's Florida, but I sympathise with landlords requiring "no king cobras in/on the property, please!"
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2016/02/08/news-6-investigates-exotic-pet-escapes-from-florida-homes/
Since 2006, FWC has investigated at least 45 snake escapes.
Of those, 19 involved Burmese pythons, the single-most reported escaped species over the past decade.
• In June 2015, workers discovered a nearly 9-foot Burmese python slithering around their construction site on US 192 in Kissimmee. No owner was identified.
• An 11-foot Burmese python with no identifiable owner was captured at an apartment complex on Walden Circle in Orlando in 2009.
• A 14-foot albino Burmese python became the largest snake to escape over the past decade when it got out of its cage on Summerland Key in 2007. The python was later found in a nearby bank parking lot.
The most horrific escape of a Burmese python occurred in July 2009, when 2-year-old Shaiunna Hare was strangled to death in her Sumter County home by a 9-foot snake belonging to her mother’s boyfriend. According to investigators, the malnourished python that asphyxiated and bit the sleeping child had escaped from a terrarium covered with only a quilt. Jason Darnell and the child’s mother, Jaren Hare, are now serving 12 years in state prison for aggravated manslaughter.
Besides the danger to small children and pets, FWC officials are also concerned about the impact Burmese pythons will have on Florida’s environment. The agency believes escaped or intentionally released pythons have contributed to the invasive snake’s explosive population in South Florida which could decimate native animal species there.
...Although most escaped snakes reported to FWC have been non-venomous, four cobras have gotten loose, including the one that slipped away from Michael Kennedy’s Orlando home in September 2015.
According to FWC’s escape report, a large tree limb that broke off during a storm damaged the roof of Kennedy’s garage, causing rain water to leak inside. The dripping water weakened the manufactured wood on the cobra’s cage, allowing it to push open a screen and slither out.
The king cobra was captured more than a month later when a neighbor heard a hissing sound in her garage coming from behind her clothes dryer.
FWC issued Kennedy a $366 fine for failing to report the cobra’s escape until the day after he discovered the 8-foot snake was missing. The agency is also seeking to revoke Kennedy’s permit to possess venomous reptiles, a move Kennedy is challenging.
Meanwhile, the state attorney has charged Kennedy with maintaining the cobra “in a manner and condition which resulted in escape from its enclosure, constituting a threat to public safety." Kennedy’s attorney is asking a judge to dismiss the misdemeanor charges, claiming the law is vague.
In 2001, FWC cited Kennedy after different cobra escaped from his previous home in Orlando’s College Park. A neighbor who found the snake in his garage shot and killed it."
I mean, would *you* write a letter of support for Mike and his cobras, because you want to screw over the suits and landlords and neighbours who object to hissing sounds from behind their dryers? I would not like to be the German apartment resident who encountered a venomous snake in the stairwell!
https://www.eurogroupforanimals.org/news/call-legislation-dangerous-animals-germany-after-poisonous-cobra-escapes
"The last incident with a dangerous wild animal occurred in Herne (NRW) on August 25, 2019: There, an escaping highly toxic monocle cobra kept the police and fire brigade's forces on the job for days. A resident had discovered the venomous snake in the stairwell of the apartment building. All 30 residents then had to leave their homes. Four houses had to be evacuated. Fortunately, the snake was caught in a garden by a reptile specialist after a few days. The city of Herne seized a total of 22 snakes in a young man's apartment. It is unclear who will bear the costs for the large-scale operation. Animal welfare and animal rights associations have been calling for the introduction of a dangerous animals law in NRW for years. It is not just about protecting people, because the private keeping of wild animals and exotic species is also a major problem for animals, the environment and species."
The last part is just not true, the vast majority of exotics pets has no potential to harm anyone and especially, in germany, no potential to harm the environment. Most reptiles, including most snakes, are completely harmless, nearly all of those that are not are illegal anyway , and they can't harm the ecosystem if they can't even survive a single winter outside. The proposed law in NRW is pure populism. The venomous snake was already illegal. Making other, harmless snakes illegal doesn't do anything. On top of that is ofc the fact that dogs kill so many more people pretty much everywhere and no one demands to ban all dogs or mammals. (not even all potentially deadly dogs, which is a lot of them. At best a couple of the most dangerous breeds are banned, if at all.)
You want to create a lower-trust society.
That ship has sailed. You live in the society you have, and acting like you live in a high-trust society when you don't does no one any good.
We make it worse one lie at a time
It's still a high trust society in rural america. (Which maybe explains why us hay seeds get rolled when we visit the big city.)
It's not really a binary classification. There's a continuum of higher and lower trust societies. The US has degraded, but there's still plenty of room to fall -- there are _much_ worse places out there. There's also plenty of room to improve.
Each decision made by each person moves the society some tiny distance up or down the scale.
"I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on."
— C. S. Lewis
Wow, that sounds like it would be a great motto for this kind of discussion site. I wish I could slap it in the title bar of every web browser, ever.
So? Extant low trust societies and high trust societies are equally garbage in different ways. The stakes are so low as to be virtually non-existent.
I don't think most people would agree. People who "vote with their feet" by immigrating obviously don't think the stakes are so low.
Oh, I see, you are just using high trust society as a proxy for wealthy, developed society.. And in doing so you are blithely skipping over correlation vs. causation questions and implicitly pushing your biased version of history.
People acting in an untrustworthy manner causes society to get less trusting. People try to avoid interacting with untrustworthy people.
You're assuming that low trust societies become that way because of the cumulative individual choices of ordinary citizens, and vice versa when it comes to HT society. And I'm saying that's BS (classically) liberal historiography. In a modern Westphalian state, the individual does not matter. Only a relative handful of elites make the choices that define the nature of society. The classical liberal story where every individual matters is a fairy story to keep the little people victim-blaming themselves for society's ills instead of blaming those in power.
"Am I just a psychopath with regards to the local issue of not respecting rules that I think are harmful or are you especially conscientious?"
Not everyone shares your grievance against landlords.
...why bother with the psychiatrist or the certification mill? Just go to Amazon, buy a dog vest that reads "Service Animal" for $5, and pitch a fit if anyone asks you questions. ESA isn't just a racket, it's a racket within a scam - they don't get any special legal protections at all.
The website of one of the services Scott linked, which I am grudgingly going to admit is probably one of the less shady services out there, does caution the applicants:
"Are ESAs allowed in all public places?
ESAs are not entitled to the same public access rights as a service dog and are therefore not always allowed in all public places. A legitimate ESA letter entitles ESA owners to reasonable accommodation when it comes to housing and can also allow the individual to travel with their animal on ESA-friendly airlines. However, ESAs may not be allowed in certain establishments such as restaurants or hotels unless such businesses are already pet-friendly. "
But I agree that the kind of person who wants to have their pet classified as an Emotional Support Animal in order to get special treatment is more likely to ignore that a (legitimate) ESA is not the same as a Service Animal, and to demand that the restaurant/etc. let them in, and to dress them up in the vests and what-not to make it more convincing that this is a "real" "legal" service animal.
They don’t sell them in a size that fits my hippo. I should probably sue, but what’s the point?
Minor note but airlines do not require a letter.
1) under five year old DOT rules, emotional support animals are no longer permitted on board (they must follow standard pet in cabin rules)
2) service animals require just a self-attestation. Here's a form https://media.united.com/assets/m/502945e7b63afeb9/original/U-S-Department-of-Transportation-Service-Animal-Air-Transportation-Form.pdf
It seems that there is a distinction between service animals and emotional support animals, but I'm with Darkside007 that the people trying to/willing to game the system (maybe they've self-diagnosed that they have a Condition and so that means their pet is really a genuine service/support animal) won't care about the distinction and will try to force their way and threaten to take a court case:
https://www.certapet.com/emotional-support-animal/
"The Air Carrier Access Act went into effect in 1986 and prohibits discrimination in air travel on the basis of a person’s disability. This law requires air carriers to accommodate the needs of passengers with disabilities, including the accommodation of service animals. Because of the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA), service animals are permitted to ride in the airline cabin with their handler (provided the animal is not too large or too heavy) and a person with disabilities cannot be charged a pet fee when traveling with their service animal. This law applies to all flights of U.S. airlines as well as flights to or from the United States by foreign airlines.
Airlines may, however, request specific documentation and/or 48-hour advanced notice if a service dog is boarding a flight, such as an official document from a licensed mental health professional confirming an individual's mental or emotional disability and their need for their assistance animal.
For a psychiatric service dog, this document will take the form of a Psychiatric Service Dog Letter, also called a Psychiatric Service Dog Travel Letter. For emotional support animals, this document is commonly referred to as an ESA Letter, or more specifically, an ESA Travel Letter. The allowance of emotional support animals onboard flights varies from airline to airline, however, so travelers should always contact an airline in advance to confirm any policies or restrictions when it comes to emotional support dogs and other types of assistance animals. Travelers may also opt to book their flight with an ESA-friendly airline to better suit their travel needs.
If at any time, an airline staff member is violating a disabled person's rights under the ACAA, that individual has the right to speak with a Complaints Resolution Official (CRO). The U.S. Department of Transportation advises that "A CRO is the airline’s expert on disability accommodation issues. Airlines are required to make one available...at no cost, in person at the airport or by telephone during the times they are operating.
As of January 11, 2021, the U.S. Department of Transportation allows each individual airline to determine its own policies and regulations when it comes to emotional support animals.
While airlines such as Delta, United, and Air Canada no longer recognize emotional support animals as a type of assistance animal, these air carriers may still permit individuals to travel with their comfort animal as long as the individual pays a pet fee, the way pet owners typically do when traveling with a companion animal.
There may, however, be restrictions in place in terms of an animal’s weight, size, or breed, so ESA owners should always contact their airline of choice ahead of time for more information about the air carrier’s policies. Those with concerns can also opt to travel with one of several ESA-friendly airlines that still permit emotional support animals onboard flights. These airlines will require proper documentation (in the form of an ESA letter) in order to confirm that the animal’s presence is required to help with emotional conditions or a mental disability."
I see what you mean about the form, though; you can just write yourself in as the trainer of your "service" animal:
"The Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) of 1986 prohibits discrimination towards individuals based on their disability and their need for a service animal.
Because Psychiatric Service Dogs are considered service animals, this Act, which was passed by the U.S. Congress, also applies to them.
Thanks to the ACAA, your PSD is able to ride in the cabin with you whenever you need to travel via airplane. As a result, you don’t have to worry about your animal facing any dangers related to traveling via airline cargo.
When booking travel in advance (typically 48 hours or more), you’ll need to submit a U.S. Department of Transportation Service Animal Air Transportation Form.
The form asks for basic information such as your name, your assistance animal’s name, and a description of the animal. The form also asks you to attest to the animal’s health as well as their training and behavior.
The ADA allows owners to self-train their PSDs, so if this describes your situation, you can simply enter your own name into the Trainer section.
Once you sign and date this document, you’ll then need to submit it to the airline for validation. Usually, the airline will have a special portal on their website dedicated for this purpose. If you have any trouble locating the portal, be sure to contact the airline’s customer service team for assistance or for more information on ways to submit your document.
If you’re boarding a flight that’s 8 hours or more in duration, you’ll also need to complete and submit a U.S. Department of Transportation Relief Attestation Form.
This form asks for information about your flight (estimated duration, departure airport, arrival airport) and additionally asks for information on how your animal will relieve itself (either the service dog won’t have to relieve itself during the flight, or the animal has been trained to relieve itself in a sanitary manner, e.g. through the use of a dog diaper).
If you’re booking your travel less than 48 hours before departure, you can present both of the above forms at your airline’s check-in counter."
That information is inaccurate/outdated. DOT adopted new rules 5 years ago that absolved air carriers from having to transport support animals. However all that is required to bring an animal on board without the pet fee (and without it having to stay in the carrier) is to declare it a service animal. You self-certify, no medical provider letter is necessary.
This actually does work because people who were bringing Noah's Ark onto the plane tend not to also be people good at doing advance paperwork.
What's more annoying to me is when people get those fake "service dog" vests for air travel. Fake ESAs are bad enough but ultimately mostly just an inconvenience to everyone around them; while OTOH it actually does genuine harm to people with service dogs by faking one.
Because REAL service dogs are specially trained, and when they're in public, they're *working*. If normies start getting the idea that every service dog is just like a dog in the park, and they can go up and distract it and pet it and what not, that could lead to catastrophic results for the people who depend on them.
I was at a burger joint and there was a boxer so marked. My experience of boxers inclines me to think they are too stupid and primitive (I’m not happy unless your hand is in my mouth so I can taste it forever! I hate the left rear wheel of the lawnmower and will pursue it around the yard barking at it! I hate your cat and when she taunts me I will jump through the window screen to get at her! But I love you and when you pull up in your car I will jump up and rake my claws across the finish! I know where another couple boxers live and I will make my way into their house and jump in bed with their owners, whom I do not know - yet!) to be service dogs. But in any case, this particular boxer was clearly chomping at the bit to be off after the hundred things taking his fancy. It was kind of funny because your typical service dogs (well, in the past) tended to have a dignified, even chilly demeanor that did not encourage petting. Sometimes they even displayed a “no petting” sign.
But even the friendly ones, were pretty locked onto their owner when at rest.
As dogs often are, say on a restaurant patio. They often look steadfastly away from you, as if unwilling to risk their bond with the dude next to them that has the French fries. Sometimes they seem dismayed that their owner has not rewarded them with a look in five minutes - but that doesn’t mean they’re going to exchange pleasantries with you.
My favorite dogs are those that love humanity. These are usually country dogs, ranch dogs.
But re the service support boxer, we were joking that he’d be off like a shot, saying, “Uh, hope you feel better!”
Huh. You know how sometimes the best way to learn is to teach? And how helping other people with their problems can help you deal with your own? I wonder if dealing with a dog like this can help with low executive function, or something like that.
https://www.insidesocal.com/sgvcrime/files/import/22063-mojo.jpg
I don't know if it's new parenthood and the stresses that come with it, but I'm finding Scott's recent articles resonating more and more with me on the spiritual level of Grumpy 😀
I've long considered the "emotional support animal" thing a racket. Part of this is my natural tendency to go "what the heck is this new therapy-speak fad?" about "we used to call those 'pets', why do you need a fancy new name?", but part is also down to reading the people online boasting about how this One Weird Trick meant they were able to get their dog/hippo/crocodile onto the plane, or into the restaurant, or wherever by claiming it was an emotional support animal. There have been other posts on social media from people asking not to do this, as you can dress up your dog in a vest you can buy online with "emotional support animal" or the like on it, and the restaurant manager or airline rep has no idea if this is legit or not, and so they're afraid they might be sued and they let you bring the animal along.
And it's not trained, because it's a pet not a therapy animal, and it causes trouble. And this then poisons the well for people who genuinely *do* have therapy or support animals that have been properly trained, because now the restaurant or airline is sceptical and suspicious. "Yeah, you have a vest and a letter, but so did the last person, now take a hike".
It's a pity that it *has* to be a racket for legitimate doctors, where people do depend on pets for companionship but they're not technically "emotional support animals" or therapy/service animals, so you have the choice of "write a letter that I know is inaccurate" or turn the person down. The "pay us and we'll certify your emotional support rhino" sorts get a lot less sympathy and much more short shrift from me, and their clients with "I wanted to bring my sweet little pitbull Killer into the daycare centre but the meanies there were afraid for the kids - you nip at *one* toddler! - and so I need this letter".
For the genuine cases, I think it's better to err on the side of sympathy and write the letter, but also to tell the "this is my emotional support python" types to take a hike. EDIT: They can pay if they want the privilege, and I think it's a bit rich of one of the "pay us $200 and we'll write your letter" sites to be sniffy about "scam sites":
"Is a Registry Site or Emotional Support Animal Vest Required?
An individual does not need to register with any ‘national databases’ or ‘registry sites’ to prove their animal is an ESA. While many fraudulent sites claim that an ESA will need a registration number to validate its status, this isn’t in any way the case and is simply the rhetoric of typical ESA scams. All that’s required to confirm that an animal is an ESA is a legitimate ESA letter signed by a professional licensed in mental health.
However, many ESA owners still choose to outfit their animal in special vests or harnesses that clearly distinguish the animal from an ordinary pet. An ESA ID card is also a common item these individuals make it a point to have on hand. These items help communicate that a comfort animal is ‘on duty’ and therefore shouldn’t be disturbed. These items also help communicate to personnel such as a landlord or an airline staff member that the animal provides needed assistance that supports certain disabilities."
An anecdote from my time in social housing! My boss' boss used to be a social worker, and she regaled me with the tale from years back when she was working in Dublin. One client of hers was an elderly man living alone and he had been admitted to hospital for an emergency. When she went to see him, he was concerned about Flashdance. She eventually got it sorted out that Flashdance was his budgie, left alone in the home with nobody to look after it and since he'd been admitted to hospital so suddenly he hadn't been able to arrange care for it. So she went out to the guy's home, managed to talk some local police into helping her get in and retrieve the budgie, and pet and owner were eventually re-united. But ever after that, every time a police car passed her, someone would lean out the window and go "How's Flashdance?"
Oh boy, that website is a gold mine, and it's probably not even one of the scammier ones!
"Emotional support dogs are the most common type of comfort animal. This is because emotional support dogs tend to be easy to train and because dogs in general are typically allowed in a greater variety of places such as dog-friendly public parks and other dog-friendly locations. However, cats and rabbits can also be ESAs, as can miniature horses.
Exotic animals such as sugar gliders, snakes, and certain types of amphibians, birds, and insects can also be designated as an ESA. However, an exotic animal may not be entitled to the same reasonable accommodation as domestic animals. For instance, airlines that allow ESAs typically only permit dogs or cats onboard, as some animals (especially untrained ones) can pose a risk to public health. For these reasons, mental health professionals will typically recommend that an individual select a domestic animal as their ESA."
Ah, yes: the emotional support Shetland Pony. How unreasonable of the airlines not to permit those to travel along with their owners! Though having scoffed at it, seemingly miniature horses are indeed used as guide/companion animals. I still think it's slightly creepy to have deliberately bred such small animals, but there you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_horse
A big benefit of having a seeing eye miniature horse as opposed to seeing a dog is that horses live about two times longer, so you get a better ROI on all the training and investment in the animal.
There are also some people who use service animals to help them walk, and miniature horses are sturdier than dogs.
My ESA would be a Manul.
https://smea.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2017/03/CURRENTSBLOG_Cat_2.jpg
https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/unusual-wild-cats__880.jpg
Of all the animals in the world, I feel like it's the only one who truly understands me. BRB, filling out an ESA form so that I can bring the Manul to the office where it will eat all the ESA bunnies and such.
I cackled at that first picture. Clearly the emotional support animal for me too.
I knew someone whose freshman roommate, assigned by the college, brought a dog to live with her in the dorm. In fact, it was so much still a puppy it was not fully house broken - thus it seemed unlikely it had had any special training in the support way - which was connected to a particular newly-defined ailment which I’ve forgotten, but which was felt to be dubious - not “senses a stroke” or something.
People love dogs, so even though this acquaintance was not thrilled about sharing a dorm room with a dog, and its messes, I am sure plenty of others would have been perfectly happy with it, or nearly so.
Still, it suggests an abandonment of common sense for the administrators to feel that a dorm was a good place for a dog, there being no yard to leave it in, and the job of taking it out multiple times a day seemingly incompatible with being a college student - if in fact college in this case involved more than living in a dorm with your dog.
some context on the lighter side: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/pets-allowed
How much would be solved by requiring a similar level of training for ESAs as service dogs. That is proven obedient and well behaved dogs are allowed almost anywhere but poorly behaved dogs are restricted
Thanks for the nice summary from the psychiatrist's perspective. But I don't think you do justice to the "racket" implications. I've had no personal exposure to emotional support animals either being allowed or disallowed, but there were some stories about emotional support emus, ostriches, turkeys, snakes, and alligators causing significant disruption (not to mention sanitation issues) on airlines. These stories seemed to me to be cases of people deliberately gaming the system - either because they were rich and wanted to show it, or because they wanted to pull a prank without concern for the effects on others.
Again, no personal experience, but I understand that airlines are now much less accommodating, which I think is a good thing.
Even a hundred years ago, many if not most people spent a LOT of time in contact with domesticated animals, because horses were big in transportation and there were a LOT more farmers. I tend to assume that things like the nine poodles I saw a guy walking on a leash the other day are in large part a replacement for tens of thousands of years of human evolution (genetic and cultural) spent hanging out with non-human animals.
I just sent this piece to my wife, who works in psychiatric epidemiology research (speaking of rackets, research funding is definitely one where taxpayers are concerned). It seems like it would be right in that field's wheelhouse.
The doctor letters are indeed a racket. I have a friend who daughters thought they'd like extra time writing the SAT etc. They had some doctor write a letter saying they have a disorder related to menstruation needing extra time on all tests.
Sociopaths, milking the system for some advantage. Not just the kids but the parents too. This is the type of upbringing that I think leads to creating an Elizabeth Holmes.
I hope they pay some price for it but maybe they never will. They'll get into politics or the like, get far, and run everyone else's lives too.
> Sociopaths, milking the system for some advantage.
The real problem is when enough of them get away with it that it no longer becomes so much of "you get an advantage if you do this" but rather "you need to do this or you're under a disadvantage compared to all the dishonest people who have normalized this form of cheating." ( https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-chump-effect )
If the people with whatever bullshit disorder is fashionable get the extra time, why shouldn't everyone?
Get a doctor's letter and they can too.
HEY. "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." - Martin Luther King Jr.
My mother and sister got their yorkie emotional support certified after a referral from a friend so that they could travel with him and basically take him everywhere (supermarkets, restaurants, you name it, the dog was there). Neither of the has even been to a psychiatrist in their lives. The only one who needed any emotional support was the dog, who had extreme separation anxiety, was a general pain in the ass, and would piss everywhere.
Honestly, aren't all pets ESA's, otherwise why have one? I'm sure there people out there who love the smell of cat pee or knit sweaters from their huskie's shedded winter coat but most of us (grand, unsupported generalization) have pets because we get some sort of positive emotional feedback. Otherwise, they're farm animals.
I'm in favor of thwarting ESA requests whenever possible, not for the public's sake, but for the "patient*, to prevent them from burdening themselves with an obligation they can't afford.
The times I've had low-income acquaintances or coworkers worry about how their pet is going to fit into a current crisis are countless. "My job is making us to back to the office and I can't afford a doggy day care for my high-energy purebred!" "My cat ate part of an Ikea plastic plant and the vet wants $5,600 to remove the intestinal obstruction!" "My boyfriend kicked me out, I need to rent a room somewhere because I can't afford my own place and oh by the way I have two cats..." "I want to go on vacation to see my parents, but pet-setting is so expensive..."
These are all incredibly preventable issues: Don't own a pet if you don't have the disposable cash to support it *and* all the impacts owning it will have on your lifestyle.
So good of you to take these decisions out their poor, stressed hands and do the cost-benefit analyses for them. It's so frustrating when one's low-income acquaintances can't solve these simple problems for themselves, I'm sure they'll be very grateful for the help. You did do a cost-benefit analysis? No? Well, no matter. Once people know that you're in the business of preventing others from owning pets if you decide it doesn't fit the budget you haven't seen I'm sure they'll volunteer all the relevant information going forward. I doubt anyone would ever fail to mention the benefits they derive from their pets should they ever succumb to the desire to complain about unexpected expenses in front of you.
"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off." — Colin Powell
And yet pissing people off is not evidence justly welding power. My complaint is that assuming responsibility for someone else's decisions on the basis of very limited and biased information is actually pretty irresponsible.
And if someone really believes that someone they know is making their lives worse by having pets, the responsible thing to do is to tell them and risk actually pissing them off and complicating that relationship, not to kvetch about the irresponsibility of poor people in a forum where you anticipate a good reception.
They're not asking to own pets. They're asking to own pets and then have others forced to put up with them.
OP is in favor of preventing people from having ESA allowances (like living in an apartment building they can afford) because it would prevent some poor people from owning pets, which they believe is good. I'm arguing against OP's wild overconfidence about what's good for other people, and their willingness to bar people from making this choice for themselves, on the basis that they hear people complain when things are expensive.
That said, I think it's quite rare that anyone is actually forced to put up with an animal they otherwise wouldn't because someone else has an ESA letter. The airplane situation is legitimately bonkers, but how often are people differentially bothered by ESA animals in apartments? These days, most of the time you see a dog in a public place like a restaurant, it's because the restaurant or store or whatever simply permits them. ESAs generally don't get special admission to stores and such, that's only legally required for service animals. Some people are happy to take advantage of the general confusion and other people's conflict aversion and buy a vest for their untrained pet and bring them everywhere, and I think these norm defectors (who not coincidentally have often defected on other norms) should be punished (with loud booing) for ruining things for everyone. It seems like all the negative externalities of pet ownership and especially pets in public have been blamed on ESAs in this thread and I don't think actual ESA animals are causing much of their consternation.
"OP is in favor of preventing people from having ESA allowances (like living in an apartment building they can afford) because it would prevent some poor people from owning pets, which they believe is good. I'm arguing against OP's wild overconfidence about what's good for other people, and their willingness to bar people from making this choice for themselves"
It's not a choice for themselves, though, it's a choice for other people. I think if you're demanding a restriction on other people's liberty in order to allegedly benefit you, they have every right to question that benefit.
"That said, I think it's quite rare that anyone is actually forced to put up with an animal they otherwise wouldn't because someone else has an ESA letter."
So should we amend the ADA to exclude ESAs? There is a common rhetorical technique of saying "we need law X; law X doesn't really do anything so all criticisms can be dismissed."
Could you elaborate on how getting an emotional support animal makes choices for othe people and infringes on their liberty? Regardless your answer, do you think that getting an ESA is more restrictive of liberty than prohibiting someone from having an ESA if they are poor, or denying ESAs as a matter of policy just because it leads to fewer poor people having pets?
I'm confused about your second point as the ADA does not consider ESAs service dogs and ADA protections don't apply. ESA laws apply at the local and state level and mostly concern housing discrimination. I don't have a strong opinion about whether they should be made more or less strict as a class. What I do have a strong opinion about is that there should be penalties for impersonation (imdogination?) of service animals that are actually enforced.
I’m not totally sure they’re even asking for pets so much as the city animal shelters and rescue groups put out constant appeals - clear the shelters days and so forth - to an impressionable public tenderhearted about animals.
Similarly there is an “everybody do your part and take a dog home today” mentality mixed with a lot of judgment about how the people who’ve taken those dogs home, treat them - eg reporting when dogs are left in yards to bark, calling the police when an animal is in a car with the windows partway down on a warm day, picking fights with people who let their dogs run the green belt trail off leash (which is technically, letting their dogs have some fun).
That's right!
Taking on an optional animal dependent that one *predictably* can't afford to properly care for is irresponsible and, ideally, should be as difficult as possible.
I like dogs so much that I don't have one, because I am single, don't have anyone else to help me routinely care for a dog when I work late and travel, and I don't have the (functionally) unlimited funds to spend on veterinary care should they need one and/or have pet-sitting or doggy daycare were my job situation to change.
And thank *FUCK* for that, because my condo was damaged by a sprinkler break caused by a regional catastrophe and my insurance company refuses to pay for me to live elsewhere because my bathroom is still usable even if the rest of the living space is not. And thus, for months, I've been living in the basement unit of very generous friends, who welcomed me but would not have welcomed my dog.
And I've breathed many sighs of relief that I don't have the dog I long for, because I'm a more responsible "too-poor-for-a-pet" person than my peers who give into the temptation to get a pet they can't afford.
As to your comment below, I have in fact urged "poor" people thinking about getting a pet not to do it, citing the ways it is likely to be severely complicate many of life's common challenges.
There's no point in saying that to people *after* they've gotten a pet.
> Taking on an optional animal dependent that one *predictably* can't afford to properly care for is irresponsible and, ideally, should be as difficult as possible
I agree that it is irresponsible to adopt a pet you can't afford. Our disagreement is about what kinds of actions are appropriate for others to take to try to prevent that outcome. Since you can't selectively make a process more difficult only for the people whose designation is the intended outcome of the process--you can't make it "as difficult as possible" only for people who shouldn't have pets to get pets if the point of the difficulty is to prevent those people but not others from having pets--what barriers to pet ownership do you propose as a matter of public policy, in the same spirit that led you to recommend Scott deny ESA requests as a matter of personal policy?
Sure! I'd be totally up for animal shelter having income-based requirements.
*Responsible* dog and cat breeders will verify a potential owner's financial stability, and some even require a home inspection prior to handing over a puppy or kitten. I'd be up for that as an industry standard or even regulation as well.
There would always be stray animals and scofflaws, of course, but I wouldn't let "perfect" be the enemy of "good" here, had I a magic wand.
I agree that a check of financial stability could be reasonable, but the devil is in the details. You described the money necessary to care for an animal responsibly as "functionally unlimited". Roughly how much money do you think a person needs to make/have access to to be a responsible pet owner? A higher bar means you can feel more confident that an individual pet will have a good outcome, but it also means fewer pets will be adopted and more will be euthanized.
Well, my phrasing about veterinary bills being "functionally unlimited" was a bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary on the sky-rocketing costs of American veterinary care now that so much of it has been rolled up by private equity firms.
I'm not a finance expert and don't want to be drawn into naming a specific number, but off the top of my head, probably whatever the updated number of that "people don't get any additional happiness from making additional money over $70,000" study would be.
In other words, enough money that routine financial stress isn't a thing (no month to month worry about paying routine bills), and common unexpected emergencies can be absorbed either by income or an emergency fund without great concern about the immediate or long-term future.
For example, my ex-boyfriend's two year old shelter rescue cat ate part of a lily in a bouquet of fresh flowers, severely poisoning himself. He was in the vet equivalent of an ICU for like two weeks, had follow up visits for testing and shots weekly for like three months, then the appointments moved to once a month, and then will need tests every six months for the rest of his life. His food had to be switched to an expensive formula for his permanently damaged kidneys (or maybe it was his liver?).
My ex is wealthy enough that none of the stress of this event was financial. He certainly would have preferred to not have to spend that kind of money on veterinary care, but he had ability to do so without negatively impacting his financial health.
That's about where someone should be in order to have a pet (or at least, one they are prepared to euthanize rather than take on crippling veterinary bills, but many/most people aren't emotionally capable of doing that).
I'm not at his financial level, which is why I don't have pets. Yes, a non-zero number of the pets-I-didn't-have were euthanized in the years I've made the sometimes tough choice not to have a pet, but that doesn't override my obligation to myself to not take on an obligation I can't easily afford.
The BIG STAKES game was the draft, (for) now, defunct. Donald Trump beat it with bone spurs. Many of the rest of us took the rifle, not willingly in most (my) case. Certain doctors benefitted richly. Their patients are among us today.
As a former landlord in Georgia, I can tell you ESAs only serve to skirt around pet charges and bans. We allowed pets for a charge. The ESA lets them have a pet with no charge. (You also can't refer to them as pets, because that is offensive or discriminatory or something.) We limit breeds and size, the ESAs allow pit bulls for everyone. The ESA gets the animal in the door, however, the tenant still has to abide by laws like leash laws and noise ordinances. However, I had no luck trying to evict a resident who refuses to abide by the rules with her ESA pit bull that scares all of the children in the community. Did I mention that if that pit bull bites someone else on property, I would be sued for not taking proper precaution to protect that other resident/guest? Yeah, that's why I am a FORMER landlord. You can't price that lawsuit into your monthly rent or pet charge.
“But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep”
This reminds of grade inflation and teaching: in theory we want rigorous teaching and honest evaluation of students. In practice, when I taught undergrads, all the incentives ran towards grade inflation: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/. I was a gatekeeper for grading but no one had any actual interest in whether the grades I or anyone else gave reflected much of anything.
Students not surprisingly prefer higher grades to lower ones.
From your article:
> Colleges mostly know that the students will pay tuition (or rather, their parents and their loan originators will) if they are happy with the educational product, and professors know they are more likely to keep getting paid if they have fewer student complaints rather than more. Colleges have set up programs that are designed to graduate students with limited skills but real tuition money.
IMO this is the root of the problem. Colleges have a severely perverse incentive here, as they're entirely unaccountable for the results of failing to educate students. If they were on the hook for 50% of any student loan default, you'd see a lot of improvements in selectivity and educational quality being made out of sheer self-interest.
I was thinking that there was potentially some useful space between "bring in police to (simultaneously) thrill and harass campus protesters" (admittedly some half at least are probably not students) and give them the grades they actually earn by doing activism around the clock instead of whatever their schoolwork is.
True, they are probably not enrolled in very difficult courses - and their professors are probably only too ready to give them extra credit for protesting, as they once gave extra credit for *voting* (!) when I worked at a poll in the big university library and discovered the kids were happy to stand in line for 3 hours watching Netflix on their phones, to get this quick A.
So maybe it would make no difference, but I was thinking it was a sign of our affluence that we can basically pay for kids to attend college, and pay for them not to attend but rather to protest, and then give them grades they've not earned - because the system is set up not to fail anyone.
With all due credit to The Incredibles, a system set up not to fail anyone fails everyone.
A thought about incentives: the university rankings should reward high fail rates rather than (or in addition to) high selectivity.
If Harvard had an 80% failure rate, but people were still lining up to get into Harvard, it should mean that a Harvard degree was very prestigious indeed.
This does have to be adjusted for the student body: a community college could easily get a failure rate that high. I think part of the problem with grade inflation at elite universities is that the students there are expecting to be graded as if the other students were completely representative of the rest of the country (which means they'd get an A, of course, just like they did everywhere else).
We’re talking about a letter that’s trivial to forge, I assume? And it can’t be revoked if an animal is causing problems?
The only problem here appears to be cost and its consequent disparities. I'm very happy there are measures in place to restrict people's ability to impose on others with their beloved nuisances, and suspect removing these barriers would simply result in a new office pet daycare racket. In fact, I wouldn't mind making pet ownership and distribution more annoying to achieve universally. There's an awful excess of irresponsible and net-negative pet ownership out there.
can we use the price system for anything? 😫
> Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.
I can't help but wonder, is there any research on the opposite effect? A mentally healthy, emotionally stable person like myself, who also owns a cat, finding that it does somewhat *increase* anxiety because she just doesn't learn to get out of the way of people's feet when they're walking, to keep claws tightly sheathed at all times when being cuddled, to stay away from food being prepared, etc...
Pets contribute heavily to my (post-traumatic) anxiety because they are ANOTHER creature (in addition to humans, but at least in the developed world nowadays the humans dependent on you are not likely to die on you unless you're a doctor or adjacent) likely to die on my watch. Nothing makes you realise that you can't save anyone than sharing your life with a small, relatively or completely helpless being whose natural lifespan is a quarter of human's. I completely fail to understand how depressed/anxious people don't get affected by this.
Meh. That one doesn't bother me too much; that's just life. When I was in elementary school, we had a few outdoor cats that I loved very much. One day, one of them got hit by a car while I was at school. My parents never tried to cover up the truth. They didn't say that he'd been sent away to a farm upstate (that would have been tricky to pull off, as we were living on a farm at the time!) or any of the other pleasant lies you hear about in such situations; they told me he'd been hit by a car, and let me see the body. I had a good cry, and then I dug a hole and buried him, and eventually got over it.
The thing that bugs me is when the pets are too dumb for their own good. I strive to be someone who lives a good, moral life and does no harm. But both my wife and I have accidentally stepped on or kicked our cat multiple different times, because being human, we don't have 100% perfect awareness of our surroundings at all times, and the kitty just cannot seem to learn to STAY AWAY FROM THE FREAKING FEET! And I find that inability to learn irrationally irritating. I know she's going to die in a few short years, and I'm OK with that, but I don't want to be the cause of it, even accidentally!
That's very sane, and I used to be like that most of my life before my brain broke, but yes, the "you stupid cat, don't make ME be the cause of your demise" definitely loads on that ;)
My general point tho was that pets are not unequivocally emotionally beneficial for everyone, in various ways.
> and the kitty just cannot seem to learn to STAY AWAY FROM THE FREAKING FEET!
Huh, the cats I grew up with learned rapidly which set of maneuvers in "being underfoot" were safe and which weren't, but maybe that was from being around children? I don't think either of them was particularly smart...
In my experience many cats should by all rights have gotten stepped on, but the only way to teach them that is *by stepping on them*, and if you are obviously not taking care not to hurt the cat, then *you* are the bad guy, right? So they don't learn. Children are an exception because they might step on the cat but then *they* get a pass for being children; they aren't expected to know better either.
I think there may be an important life lesson here.
> Sorry, I refuse to believe a snake can help you with ADHD, unless it’s one of those talking snakes from Harry Potter and it whispers “Concccccentrate . . . conccccccentrate” in your ears every time you start slacking off.
I should point out that the Harry Potter mythology is very clear that all snakes do this, and what's different about Harry is that he can understand them.
I want an emotional support animal that can petrify people via eye contact.
A badger would do the trick.
Get the badger to growl menacingly, then ask for a donation to your favorite charity, Ex-convicts With Schizophrenia, with a sadistic grin.
Why else would they call it "badgering people for donations"?
I will stan for snakes as being great pets, BUT there is no "daily routine" needed. They only eat at most once a week, sometimes far less (they can and will happily go months without eating in the winter), and their enclosures need minimal upkeep. I guess they can very rarely escape, which can be a problem in a landlord-type situation, but other than that there's really no reason they should be banned as pets in apartments (except for the venomous ones, of course).
I feel like there are a fair amount of cases like this. I was recently diagnosed with TMJ (after months of ENTs saying I should put drops in my ears to fix my problem). I got a scan and am having an appliance made up that will correct my jaw problem, eventually. For the last 4 months I've had to wear an OTC mouthguard and take an opiate in order to be able to sleep. Otherwise the pain was too intense. The TMJ doctor said I should get Botox because it would provide immediate relief (2-3 days) and last for 3-5 months. This would include the 8 weeks it will take for me to get the appliance. Great! Except, insurance cannot cover Botox because if it did, everyone who wanted it for cosmetic reasons would get a TMJ diagnosis and have their insurance cover their Botox. So I have to pay $1K out of pocket in order to stop taking a narcotic to sleep at night. Because people want Botox (or pets with them all the time), the system deforms to either allow (pets) or not pay for something with actual medical value (Botox to treat TMJ) because doctors don't want to be hated and get paid for services.
The corresponding situation in Sweden:
People should wear motorcycle helmets. There's a law requiring it, same as seatbelts. But there are some diagnoses where it may be bad for you to wear a motorcycle helmet, like certain rare severe forms of dandruff.
Outlaw bikers don't like wearing helmets. And _weirdly_, so, so many of them turn out to have these rare severe forms of dandruff, at least according to their physicians.
Historically, refugees have oddly developed just the right psychiatric afflictions where they can't be deported, as well.
I assume medical marijuana prescriptions work(ed) the same in the U.S.?
Essentially, it's an insane idea to believe that physicians can be trusted with this. Even if some (or for teh really optimistic, most) might have integrity enough to cause annoyance and lose patients for no strong reason, you will automatically get the rubber-stampers that people will turn to for their piece of paper.
The simple solution is for the law to say, "if you're not capable of wearing a helmet due to weird medical conditions, then don't ride a motorcycle." I don't see this as being any less reasonable than the actual laws that say "if you're not capable of driving due to blindness, don't drive." Motorcycle operation is not an inalienable human right.
I agree. In any case it seems crazy to want to ride a motorcycle without a helmet and to invent a fake reason not to have to do that.
Oh yes, I’m in a state with medical marijuana… All you have to do is go to a doctor, pay a few hundred, and say you feel anxious or whatever. I don’t think you need any official psychiatric diagnosis. You can see signs advertising the service in the sides of roads sometimes.
Legally, it’s a racket. In order to benefit from these rules, you need for a psychiatrist to write you an “emotional support animal letter”, saying that your pet is actually an emotional support animal. In theory, the psychiatrist should evaluate you carefully, using their vast expertise to distinguish between an emotional support animal and a normal pet. In practice, nobody has a rubric for this evaluation that makes sense. I’m not saying there aren’t long, scholarly-sounding papers with twenty-seven authors from the psychiatry departments of top medical schools called things like A Rubric For The Emotional Support Animal Evaluation That Makes Sense. I’m saying that when you take out all the legalese, the executive summary is “think really hard about whether this animal really helps this person, then think really hard about whether it will cause trouble, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble, sign the letter”.
This applies to all sorts of human endeavors, not just emotional support animals, not just psychiatry, but all sorts of things.
To give an example, the courts have adopted a simple 13 factor balancing test for determining whether a mark described in a given trademark application is likely to be confused with an existing registered mark. Taking into account the number of registered marks and the volume of applications, as a practical matter, this test boils down to a judgment call on the part of the trademark examiner using a similar heuristic as the psychiatrist in your example.
Now imagine you could run this privately and simply rubber-stamp every trademark application, at no professional risk.
Hmm, so you are saying we need ESA oppositions and cancellations to keep the doctors in line?
I don't think I'll ever be able to read about pointless bureaucracy without thinking of sociopolitical collapse again (https://www.elidourado.com/p/collapse).
** I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever. **
This seems fairly easy. Choose one of the other options you listed. You then explain your position to the client. And (then maybe) hand them a list of places that will write the letter for $100. And say you will reimburse them $50 of the cost when they bring the letter to you office next time. The $50 is what you pay to save your soul.
Maybe a mandatory training course? Sure, runs into the problem of needing to have free time, but having a well trained service animal seems important and if Fido really is a good boy like you say, passing a course shouldn’t be hard. Although one of my friends has a pit bull who must be muzzled outdoors at all times even though he’s a sweetheart who would never hurt a human.
Scott, why not write the same article about testing accommodations?
If you're a student with anxiety or ADHD or another condition that affects your schoolwork, schools (and other testing providers like the people who run SAT, iirc) are required to accommodate your disability. In theory this could take many forms. (I once had a diabetic student whose accommodation allowed her to eat in the classroom if necessary.) In practice it almost always takes the form of extra time on tests.
The default is 1.5x time on tests, but I've heard anecdotal reports of accommodations going up to 3x time. (Berkeley is always an outlier...)
I heard from a friend who went to a fancy private school that everyone whose SAT score was too low was automatically sent to the school psychologist to be evaluated for disabilities. Meanwhile, I've done some informal polling and it seems that most people aren't even aware this option exists...
Ability and aptitude are the same thing. If you have a dis-ability it means you have a low aptitude. The idea that having a low aptitude should qualify you to get more time on your aptitude test because otherwise you might score low for aptitude is mind-blowing to me.
I disagree. Now, I do think that in a lot of cases, people are gaming the system, and this tends to benefit the wealthy and well-connected.
But some accommodations on standardized tests strike me as perfectly reasonable. I wouldn't object to a blind person getting a test in braille or some sort of auditory format. It should be fine for a kid with a broken wrist to have a scribe or typist on an AP exam.
I admit it gets murkier when you get into these extended time cases for people with ADHD or dyslexia or something like that. Let's say you have two kids taking the ACT. One has dyslexia, one doesn't. Under normal time conditions, they both get a 25. Give them both extended time, and the one without dyslexia doesn't benefit that much (maybe he goes up to a 27), since he has less trouble reading quickly. The one with dyslexia gets a 30, because the extra time is more beneficial. Wouldn't that suggest that the person with dyslexia has more "aptitude" than the person without it?
I found one study from College Board about extended time: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563027.pdf . It seems, unsurprisingly, that smarter kids (learning-disabled or not) benefit from extra time, but the not-so-smart kids don't (because even with extra time, they don't know how to figure out the answers). And it also seems that the high-ability learning-disabled students benefit more from 1.5x time than the high-ability non-learning-disabled students. So I do think there's a real benefit in the extra time for students with learning disabilities, beyond just the basic advantage of having more time.
Anecdotally, I've taught a few kids with dyslexia and it seems fair to me to adjust for that in either giving the standardized tests themselves, or in interpreting those results in the college admissions process.
I do think that there's a point where the extra time doesn't make sense due to the purposes of the test. For example, I strongly support extra time for dyslexic kids on reading standardized tests to complete middle school. However, it is pretty clear to me that the Putnam shouldn't have an extra time option. The SAT and GRE are in the middle, and I'm leaning towards no for the GRE.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who was a fellow math major in college, but who took really long with reading and with problem sets. He was evaluated for learning disabilities his senior year and was diagnosed with "slow processing speed," with corresponding extended time on the GRE. He earned a decent score (and much higher than he would've without extra time) and was admitted to one of the UCs for a math PhD. He quickly realized he was in over his head and that he was continuing to take much longer than classmates on problem sets, which was now becoming an untenable situation combined with TA and research obligations.
At a certain point, speed is part of aptitude and once you're getting to graduate admissions, that is useful information. I lean towards no extra time on the SAT either, especially with stories of how few people are actually told they don't need extra time when they get an expensive evaluation from a private psychologist.
I have some bias on this topic, because I have a fast processing speed and have never had issues with the time limit for exams, and like most people I like to think that things I am particularly good at are valuable things.
You mention blindness and broken wrists. I think that's a major red herring
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of students with accommodations have extra time on exams -- on a quick scan, it looks like about 80% of students. Only a very, very small fraction of students with accommodations have visible physical disabilities.
I think it's dangerous to take moral intuitions about wheelchair ramps and braille and apply them in this completely different situation.
I skimmed that College Board paper and it looks like a morass of bad statistics. They are trying to determine whether non-disabled students benenfit from extra time. This is the right question!
If extra time benefits all students, it seems to me very unfair to only give it to some students. If extra time benefits all students but some students (e.g. dyslexic students) more, it still strikes me as unfair. "Should tests be designed with more time built in" might be a good policy question in that case.
Your reading of the paper is that extra time does benefit non-disabled students (at least the "smart" ones). If this is true I very disagree with your conclusion on what's fair. You're just giving an advantage to some students but not others.
But... I think when you find papers showing things like "smarter kids benefit, but less-smart kids don't"... it's a sign of bad statistics. The authors here tested a huge number of hypotheses. The test was broken into four sections (two math and two verbal); they tested four testing conditions (1x time, 1.5x with sections, 1.5x without sections, 2x); they tested their hypothesis separately on many disagreegated subgroups. A part of the paper's conclusion tells us that:
-- high- and medium-aptitude students both disabled and nondisabled benefit from extra time, but
-- disabled low-aptitude students may be harmed by extra time
which sounds to me like precisely the sort of nonsense you get when you try to milk too little data for too much information.
Those conclusions don't strike me as nonsense at all. I've taught ACT/SAT prep to high schoolers and some weak students aren't going to benefit from extra time at all. They didn't do any better in a practice setup with no time pressure. If you have no idea what's going on with a particular problem, you aren't going to get the answer, except with a lucky guess. (But a better student could maybe use the extra time to backsolve from the answer choices, or eliminate at least some of the choices, etc.) I'm sure there are many people who know more about statistics than I do. I don't know all of the flaws the paper may have.
On the larger philosophical point, I don't think it's wrong to have the learning-disabled students benefit more from extra time. I think you get a better feel for a high school student's underlying "aptitude" if the time pressure is reduced somewhat, especially for someone with any sort of learning disability. Now, there may be some fields in which processing speed really is more important than depth of knowledge, but in many, many jobs that require a college degree I don't think that's the case.
A perfect standardized test would have infinitely many questions, but obviously that's not practical. So the test makers have to reduce the number of items. And I do think processing speed has its uses; ceteris paribus, someone who gets 10/10 in 10 minutes is probably smarter than someone who gets 10/10 in 15 minutes. So test makers also have to balance how much they want to use time pressure.
It is not true that airlines have to accept ESAs. They can do so, just like they can allow pets if they want to, but they are free to treat them no differently than pets (which is after all what they are) and charge you the permission.
This comment surprised me, but apparently this is a fairly recent change. Airlines (in the US) were required to accommodate ESAs starting around 1990 (when the implementing regulations for the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 were published). This lasted until 2021, when there was a rule change reverting this, apparently in response to pressure from the airlines and the public.
A similar dynamic turns up with transgender healthcare (in liberal coastal cities in the 2020s). From the '60s through to about the 2010s, the functions of gatekeeping trans healthcare were: avoid getting sued, prevent people from transitioning if they would later regret it, and prevent people from transitioning if they would creep people out with how they looked after transitioning. Another way to summarize that is "reducing risk to the provider, to the patient, and to the public."
Now, in liberal coastal American cities, I think providers have relinquished responsibility towards the public (they still ask if your spouse and family are supportive, but I don't know what they do if you say no); many providers have switched to an informed consent model regarding risks to the patient, obligating you to sit and listen while they explain what the treatment will do, then asking if you still want it, but forbidding treatment in rare cases; and risk to the provider is still a priority. Surgeries require a big stack of these form letters, which I figure is because plastic surgeons get sued more often than endocrinologists (but I do want to double-check that guess).
Emotional support animals seem to involve more potential harm to the public, like you mentioned, and Adderall seems to involve greater risk to the patient (you can get addicted, and the odds of heart trouble are greater).
If this works with animals, I don't see why it wouldn't work with objects, too. Like whose anxiety wouldn't be calmed by being able to carry a weapon all the time? Can I claim a TSA exemption at the airport for my emotional support katana? Should I start a website offering ESG (Emotional Support Glock) letters?
Donald Trump is my emotional support President.
> Can I claim a TSA exemption at the airport for my emotional support katana? Should I start a website offering ESG (Emotional Support Glock) letters?
Please, yes! It's brilliant. Do this as performance art if nothing else.
I mean, inevitably somebody is going to push it to the point of "I, a definitionally mentally ill or unstable person, NEED to carry a BSL-4 level aerosolizing plague container with me at all times to assuage my crippling social anxiety and depression / post-modern anomie."
And this is exactly as it should be. Not enough bureaucracy is tested to the breaking point.
Purely anecdotal:
We lived in a ground floor apartment for 3 years. The building has long had a "no pets" policy. We've wanted a pet for some time but love our apartment (pet-free buildings are clean and relatively quiet, after all!) and considered this an acceptable tradeoff until we're ready to buy.
We recently moved up one floor, directly over our old unit. The new tenant below us moved in with a dog. We're on good terms with our landlord who also lives on site. We inquired about this and were told the dog was a "last minute surprise" and they had to allow it because it was a support animal.
While I have little reason to believe, other than spite, that this person is taking advantage of ESA rules, the ease of obtaining ESA certification has clearly resulted in a situation where it's impossible to distinguish between good honest pet-wanting people, and bad lying pet owners. Maybe more lax housing rules about common pets like cats and dogs would be a net positive for renters in a housing shortage - but given the increased burden that would place on landlords (litigating endless complaints and property damage issues) I suspect tenants and property managers will continue to play cat and mouse.
Emotional Support Animals are no longer allowed on airplanes. The airlines got tired
of the BS snakes, goats, pot bellied pigs, etc. The only place where they are now allowed are housing situations.
I initially wrote the below as a message on the discord, which is why it appears to be responding to someone.
[person wonders why Scott Alexander approves of bringing a hairdryer to work to cope with OCD, but dislikes the ESA racket].
I share Scott's approval of bringing the hairdryer, and his distaste for the ESA racket. While I cannot speak for him, I can provide my own reasoning, and perhaps that will provide some insight.
The distinction, in my view, is one of incentives and externalities.
Most people don't want to bring their hairdryers to work with them with no intention of using it, so if there was a rule that you could be allowed to bring your hairdryer to work, iff a doctor said you had a legitimate medical need to bring it, that wouldn't incentivize specious claims of medical need.
However, loads of people want to bring their pets to restaurants and on airplanes, and into apartments that are supposed to be petfree. Many of those would *love* to get out of the cost of pet rent (300/year on the low end) for the cost of a specious ESA certification (100 dollars on the higher end. Free if you find an indulgent psychiatrist and your health insurance doesn't charge a copay for the visit).
And the externalities of bringing your hairdryer with you everywhere you go are minimal to nonexistent. If a purse is no problem, an unplugged hairdryer is no problem.
The externalities of bringing (potentially a poorly trained, incontinent, or aggressive) dog are much more severe. Even if the dog is well-trained, fully housebroken, and completely docile and silent, some people have allergies so severe they can't be in a confined space with a dog for any length of time. If you have an ESA and an allergic person on the same flight, someone has to get bumped.
The externalities of service animals for the disabled were trivial when service animals were essentially only a thing for the blind, and they were so expensive to train that your chance of meeting one was almost nil.
The externalities of ESAs, when petowners can save upwards of 200 dollars a year by being dishonest, are much greater.
I have a fairly simple, easy to implement, low-cost fix for the ESA problem, which would (mostly) put an end to the perverse incentives that created it in the first place, without ruining the lives of people who actually need ESAs.
Insurance.
Require a 100k USD liability insurance package for each ESA or support animal, and require that anyone seeking accommodations present proof of that insurance before they can require accommodations.
The cost of that insurance for a fully-trained seeing eye dog would be a rounding error in the total cost of having one in the first place.
The cost of that insurance for a completely untrained pit bull that has already drawn blood from two people would be prohibitively expensive.
The cost for a well-behaved, moderately-trained chihuahua would be somewhere in the middle, and whether or not it is worth it to the owner would depend upon how much the owner actually needs it.
The insurance model would even allow people who believe they would benefit from an ESA to cut out the middleman of a doctor.
If I had a pet snake that helped my ADHD, no doctor need assess if I 'actually' 'have' 'ADHD', or if the snake actually helps. Some actuary at state farm, or progressive, or geico can look at the risks, say 'ball pythons are docile, clean, hypoallergenic, and couldn't seriously hurt even a child even in the worst case scenario', and write me a policy that would cost less than my adderall copays.
And if the snake truly helped, I'd pay the premiums with a smile.
And any airline, restaurant, landlord, hotelier, or school from whom I request accommodations doesn't have to worry about the law forcing them to give free, high-risk services to anyone with a pet who tells them the correct unverifiable lies. They can just ask to see your insurance card, and that's the end of it.
The hair dryer thing is absolutely brilliant.
I think this neglects many downsides to pets and assumes that pet owners are more conscientious than is probably typical.
1. Many people neglect their pets, at least to the extent that they do not train them properly. Fido may seem good to you, but he spends the whole night barking keeping the neighbors up.
2. People are lazy and do not clean up after their pets. Depressed people may like having the cat around, but depressed people also find it difficult to have the energy to empty the litter box, so their apartment smells like cat pee. The sidewalk in front of my apartment building in a large city is constantly covered in dog poop, because even though 99% of people pick it up, the 1% who don't are still a lot of dogs.
3. Animal allergies are very common. Why should the airline prioritize someone's emotional support animal over a different persons dog allergy? At least the dog allergy is demonstrably true, whereas the benefit of the emotional support animal is, as you imply in this article, probably nonsense.
"Many people neglect their pets, at least to the extent that they do not train them properly. Fido may seem good to you, but he spends the whole night barking keeping the neighbors up."
Yes, this is a problem for local authorities. Going by memories of the situation over here, a dog warden can't legally enter a dwelling (which means house and garden) unless there's a court order and accompanied by a police officer.
So what happens is: neighbours ring up the council complaining about barking dogs, dogs wandering around, guy keeping lots of dogs.
Dog warden goes out to inspect but of course can't legally enter the house or back yard. So reduced to trying to see if he can spot loose dogs, or asking owner of property "do you have dogs?"
Owner can (and does) lie about "no", "only a couple", "oh those dogs? not my dogs, no idea who owns them".
Dog warden then has to leave, and in many cases it's impossible to prove that the sixteen dogs wandering around belong to this guy. So neighbours are pissed off at the council, but nothing we can do. If the guy *is* breeding and selling dogs, what he will do is move the most of them off the property for a while so if the warden comes back with legal warrant, there's only two dogs on the property and there we go, I told you so.
It's the same with restricted breeds. These change over the years and what was once regarded as an aggressive dog is now more regarded as a family pet, so people agitate for them to be taken off the lists. What tends to happen is:
(1) Big/exotic dog breed becomes trendy
(2) People get them, including the bad/irresponsible owners
(3) The dogs of the bad owners get into trouble, e.g neighbours are scared of them (because the idiot owners like the idea of being 'in charge' of a big, aggressive, animal and encourage the dog to bark and growl and snap at others)
(4) Eventually there's a case where one of the breed attacks another dog or child or person
(5) Calls for banning
(6) Breed is added to Restricted Breed list as one you can't own if you're in social housing
(7) After a couple of years, a new big/exotic dog breed becomes trendy
(8) Rinse and repeat
It happened with Alsatians, it happened with Dobermans, it happened with Rottweilers, it happened with Akitas, it's happening with Pitbulls and now the new trendy breed of American XL Bully.
And of course people owning the new trendy breed point out "but Alsatians are perfectly acceptable now, but they're still banned, even though they shouldn't be; same applies to my Bloodripper Wolfuskybantiff Cross!" You, the responsible owner, may indeed be able to control and take care of your dog which is well-controlled and not aggressive, but the unhappy fact remains that "Well do we really need these kinds of bans? Just let people be reasonable" forgets the unreasonable people, who *won't* be careful and who *do* go "Make me" so you have to draw up bye-laws and regulations and ban all instances of the breed.
The unreasonable include the types who insist their big dog is a total sweetie who wouldn't hurt a fly, right up to the moment the dog snaps and rips their face off.
https://wagwalking.com/breed/top-dog-breeds-with-the-strongest-jaws
I don't care how much you go on about the dog being loyal, cute and playful, if you're ranking them based on "psi bite force" I'm thinking they go right on that list. And you're gonna get your face ripped off, never mind all the puns in the world about "their pawrific jaws".
"they fit nicely with a human family who understands their need for play, work and consistent routines filled with affection."
Translation: they need lots of space, lots of exercise to tire them out and keep them occupied, you better stay on top of their behaviour every minute, and for God's sake keep the kids well away from them.
This would be less of an issue if clinicians were able to incorporate service animals into treatment plans in a way that led to the mitigation of symptoms rather than just their apparent amelioration. But clinicians are no longer trained to use basic behavioral principles. As a result, too few of them know how to use the reinforcing properties of the animal's relationship, much less the animal's (often superior) ability to discriminate treatment relevant stimuli, to influence the patient's behavior and actually improve their outcome. Instead, our profession is left in the position of uncertainly condoning pet-assisted avoidance repertoires, and society clearly sees this. Of course they're annoyed.
Getting a blowjob always wildly improves my mental health which is why I need to have an emotional support prostitute with me at all times in case of a mental health emergency.
Wasn't that sort of one of the background plots in "Succession"?
If you can afford it, go for it.
I guess it is a general issue that when there's a behavior society has a general (and perhaps unprincipled) opposition to, but not quite strong enough to outright ban, we compromise by "soft banning" it with exceptions that "everyone" knows can be circumvented with a little effort and arm-twisting.
Except not "everyone" really know this -- people who are connected and have resources can get the required exceptions, others may not.
And this creates a kind of inequality.
One secondary effect for scrupulous people with resources is that they may be reluctant to claim exceptions they truly are entitled to. Am I receiving this accommodation because I deserve it, or because I'm privileged and skilled at navigating beauracracies? I, for, one, don't always feel great about benefitting from the latter.
Could this be nullified on the state level by passing a law letting property owners sue doctors who write "fraudulent" ESA letters?
I laugh at your suggestion that any state would pass any law that helps (rather than harms) landlords.
I think that that ESAs are likely helpful, but certain breeds and species have vastly different distances from the Pareto frontier.
Not being an expert on animals, it seems like dogs are probably the most intelligent non-exotic pets. Followed by cats, then smaller mammals like rats, guinea pigs and the like. Intelligence seems helpful for forming bonds.
Mammals -- including humans -- are hard-wired for cuddling. It is in the very word pet. I have a hard time seeing non-mammals on the Pareto frontier of being a good ESA while also minimizing the costs imposed on the animal, the human and broader society. I don't suppose birds, reptiles, amphibians, or fish are equally cuddly.
The failure mode of ESAs seems people getting an exotic pet to signal what a uniquely special snowflake they are. This is not His Dark Materials, nor is an ESA some kind of soul animal. An emotional support alligator seems as absurd as an emotional support Kalashnikov.
That being said, I don't think what kind of quiet, non-dangerous animal you keep in your flat should be your landlords business.
Personally, I sometimes have nightmares about owning a pet and failing to provide adequately for them, so I will stick to potted plants.
> An emotional support alligator seems as absurd as an emotional support Kalashnikov.
You are underestimating humans ability to form all sorts of unusual emotional bonds.
Let me clarify. I am not saying that it is impossible for a human to become attached to an alligator. But I think that it is highly unlikely that such a human could not also have formed a bond to a more central example of a pet.
I am also sure that the origin stories of such bonds generally is not 'I was too depressed to go to the pet store, but I started feeding that stray animal and eventually adopted them, and this is how I ended up with my alligator'.
It is more likely that they went out of their way to get an exotic pet in the first place.
I am in favor of society trying its best to accommodate the needs of its people, but at some point this should be a two-way road. I am all for an employer not caring about what brand of car their employees drive to the parking lot, but that does not mean they have to accommodate an employee who made the impractical decision to drive an eight-wheeler to office.
And yet no one would argue that someone should have legal protection of their ES Kalashnikov. I would argue that should apply to most objects and creatures.
I am sure the NRA would.
I have that dream too! In mine I'm responsible for some creature, but forget to take care of them and only realize after a grotesquely long time that I have forgotten to give them food or water. Find them all limp somewhere, and try desperately to revive them. Feel horrifically guilty. Is your anything like that?
I don't remember anything specific, but yes, the guilt of some creature dying horribly because I forgot to provide for it was definitely there.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/02/how-an-alligator-became-an-emotional-support-animal-they-said-it-was-a-midlife-crisis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
"anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules"
This looks like a classic example of a transaction cost solving a knowledge problem. Say you're a landlord, and you notice that some people with pets leave terrible messes that cost a ton for you to clean up in time and money. Maybe the tenant gets a dozen cats and the cats go in the litter box until the box never gets emptied and...
So you try increasing the pet deposit, but it's not enough. You make new rules about which kinds of pets, and how large, and required vaccines, and annual flea treatments. But every time you add a new restriction, a tenant finds a new way to destroy a place with a pet. You set a maximum pet limit and they get ONE female cat that wanders the neighborhood and now they have a dozen cats tearing up the walls. Crafting Byzantine pet codes is not why you got into the landlord business. You'd like to just wash your hands of the whole thing.
Along comes a law that requires people to demonstrate a certain degree of conscientiousness before they're allowed to have a pet in your apartment. 'Normal' pets pass a normal threshold, but it's slightly harder to get a letter for a slightly weirder pet, etc. The law doesn't PROVE that the person with the letter is going to be responsible enough to clean up after their pet. All it proves is that they were willing to state that they love their pet and need it to help them be happy/normal. It is an opt-in system, though, which requires an affirmative act by the pet owner to say, "my pet makes me happy." Maybe there's enough of a correlation between "obtained a letter authorizing an ESA" and "won't leave droppings on the carpet when they leave" to weed out the irresponsible pet owners the landlord would like to exclude.
The system 'works out' for the landlord concerned about animal damage that will exceed the deposit, and it doesn't strictly bar a sufficiently-determined pet owner from getting an apartment with a pet.
I love my ESA!!!!
Yeah everyone does, that's why they want to take them into restaurants and buses
Norman is a home cat only! I would never.
I wish I could. I'm strongly considering trying out one of those transparent backpacks to carry a cat around in, I'd love to be able to get him outside more, even artificially.
This is just another illustration of the majestic equality of law as best described by Anatole France.
I think this would probably be fine if we modify/replace it to a "well behaved pet" credential or something. Shift the emphasis to the pet rather than the owner, and remove the psychiatry. Standardize a checklist of things the landlords have legitimate interest in, like
"Is potty trained"
"Doesn't make loud sounds that disturb neighbors"
"Is safe to be around even when stressed"
"Doesn't destroy furniture"
etc
Then anyone can get their pet evaluated regardless of their own mental health, And you can regulate who is allowed to do these evaluations (who would be cheaper than psychiatrists). And then landlords can submit complaints when animals violate the credentials and you can track and punish credentialers who abuse the system.
> Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets
Society is hostile to pets? News to me. To my "not a big fan of pets" eyes it seems like society is obsessed with pets. Every cafe and restaurant is "dog friendly". Every park is full of yapping animals. Every street in the rough part of town is covered in shit. Every WhatsApp chat is full of kitten GIFs. And everybody is talking about their pets All The Time.
Maybe I'm proving your point a little (by being hostile to pets) but I really feel in the minority on this. I wouldn't even admit these opinions to my irl friends and acquaintances. I'd rather tell them I have unfashionable political opinions than admit I wish I lived in a world without cats and dogs.
I'm going to jump aboard the Grump Train by saying pets are replacing children. I was reading an obituary of a local man who died recently and he had twelve kids (six boys, six girls). Now we've got people going "three kids is a big family!" and even "have a child? are you crazy, no way I can afford that!" while putting up TikTok videos of them cooking in their kitchen while the six cats jump all over the counters.
I share this observation - and honestly can't blame them. As expensive as pets are, they don't remotely compare to a child.
My hot take is previously, having kids was obligatory, and also you were allowed to indoctrinate your children into loving and worshipping you. This is no longer considered acceptable parenting, so people who want to care for a being that will worship and love them are getting puppies instead of kids. This is a good thing!
Also, you can profit by filming a cat constantly and posting it to Instagram. While doing this with a child is technically profitable, it's also kind of frowned upon and in many circles, considered abusive.
This is one of Scott's funniest posts, and "gatekeeping cargo cult" is brilliant, perfectly encapsulating the problem with this whole charade. I just flatly decline to write ESA letters, explaining briefly why I believe they are indeed largely a racket. Haven't lost a patient for doing this yet...
Huh. Seeing that phrase I had always assumed it was the animals that were emotional. Glad to have cleared that up!
Sorry to be a jerk, but just another example of how many resources are wasted on the LCDs so we can all say we’re “compassionate”. (Related, if EA people were actual utilitarians they’d far more frequently conclude things like “well, those people’s lives just aren’t worth saving.)
Alternatively, we could ditch the 5% of the population that's abnormally low on compassion.
Well, ditching the lowest 5% would most likely be ditching a bunch of extremely poor gangster types.
Empathy's not highly correlated with intelligence, so no reason to think they'd be dumb or poor. As for being a gangster -- that's just one of many roles in which somebody can steal. I don't see any reason it would attract low compassion people any more than do things like increasing your pharmaceutical company's earnings by pushing doctors to prescribe higher doses of opioids.
A lot of cafes in my part of the ultra-blue SF Bay Area (including several of my local Starbucks) seem to be fairly nonchalant about people who bring their pets in with them. And I haven't seen the clientele objecting. Of course, no one wants to get into it with someone playing the emotional support card. But I'm surprised that the pet allergy contingent hasn't been more vocal.
OTOH, our culture may be loosening up to pets in dining establishments. The first time I went to Paris thirty years ago, it shocked me that people were bringing their dogs into cafes and bakeries. But I asked my girlfriend at the time (who was Parisian) and she said it's pretty much up to the owner if they let pets in. Does anybody have any data for other countries in Europe?
https://hipparis.com/beneath-the-table-dining-with-a-dog-in-paris/
The pet allergy contingent gets literally shouted down and/or when we speak up and people let their pets jump on us and slobber on us. I was actually gasping for breath and frantically looking for my medication while airline staff and passengers (including 2 dog owners told me to stop making such a fuss). I’ve had to tell my boss, my hairdresser, and my doctor that I can’t attend in person appointments because they bring their dog to their office and let it jump up on me. I have to premedicate with SO much medication before I leave my house to be able to be safe in the world anymore.
The morass of misinformation regarding animals in service is rampant, but the ADA.gov site clarifies myth from facts: Service animals are DOGS. period. They are "trained to perform a task directly related to a person’s disability," yet NOT "required to be certified or go through a professional training program" - ?! Yep. A friend with an actual service dog trained to sense her acute asthma onsets is very aggressive about her rights, that may surprise many: By LAW, her dog does NOT have to wear any identifying vest or ID, and you as a business owner or individual can ask only TWO questions: "Is the dog a service animal because of a disability?" and "What task has the dog been trained to perform?" You can NOT ask for any documentation for the service dog, the nature of the person's disability, or demonstration of the dog's task. To confuse further, airlines "may request DOT proof of service status," but when or where isn't clear. What IS clear though, is "Emotional Support Animals" do NOT fall under the special status of true Service Dogs, the most apparent being Seeing Eye dogs, which MUST be allowed to accompany the owner, even in most places where animals are not allowed. The abuse of the privilege by far too many, along with the ambiguous criteria for differentiating legitimate from false status (i.e. pets sliding through with fewer checks) has made the whole issue of companion animal privilege a real dilemma for public areas, and transportation. As a precaution, even service dogs MUST be current on rabies vaccination, without exemption, and traveling with proof of vaccines, along with a timely Veterinary Health Certificate, is standard for airline travel, independent of Service animal status.
This site suggests that the addition of miniature horses is new, and not technically part of the ADA:
https://usserviceanimals.org/blog/miniature-horses-as-service-animals/
The ESA scam is perhaps one of the most flagrant examples of the lengths people will go to to convenience themselves and fuck anyone else who doesn’t like it.
"Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse."
Probably, yes. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.
As usual, this entire question goes back to whether society should begin with maximum accommodation of diversity and then reel it in, reluctantly, as necessary; or whether it should begin with maximum adherence to a default and then dole out exceptions, reluctantly, as necessary.
It's not a question that can be answered case by case. If YIMBYism triumphs, and the cities of America and Europe achieve a housing surplus with desperate landlords competing for wolfdogs and vipers, it'll just turn up somewhere else.
One alternative to flawed, infuriating, self-ashamed, rubber-stamp gatekeeping is the free market. In other words, the jungle. I wonder how well the class of people who currently struggle with gaming the ESA system would fare if their landlords and other leverage-wielding sorts in their lives had the final say, without even a chance for the corrupt recourse.
Another alternative is a lot of meaningfully, unselfconsciously enforced positive legal rights, including to stuff like pets, with all the high costs that would impose. But that gets us to socialist humanism pretty quickly.
"Another alternative is a lot of meaningfully, unselfconsciously enforced positive legal rights, including to stuff like pets, with all the high costs that would impose."
You insist on your legal right to a komodo dragon as pet. I insist on my legal right not to live beside a komodo dragon because this is not the Galapagos, it's the middle of Dublin/London/New York. Who gets to win? To the courts! Of public opinion, often, because Jack will cry online about the mean ableist Karens depriving him of the only pleasure and companionship in his life demanding he get rid of Binky ('would they just turn their own child over to unknown caretakers?") and Jill complains online about arrogant idiots who don't care if their killer monster rips your beloved pet Chichi to pieces ('my darling Brahma rooster who wakes me up at six every morning with his sweet serenade').
ESA letters are a fudge, but they are an attempt to steer between Scylla and Charybdis of depriving genuine sufferers by banning all animals and wrecking the lives of the other tenants because you can legally keep six owls and a hen in your one-bedroom flat.
I'm afraid I don't see this being Dublin, or Oslo, or central Moscow as sufficient grounds for there not being a komodo dragon.
But, sure, even if we sort out the dragon with Solomonic brilliance, we can always wheeze up some untenable scenario in the end. An emotional support rhinoceros, say – the kind of thing offered instantly with chortling joviality by those whose black little hearts would be best pleased by denying the hamster, too.
It still matters whether we start with allowing or denying. Courts will always be with us, but a general right to pets would shift the burden of proving that a particular case is unreasonable to the landlord or tenants' association or whatever, and let the shrinks catch a break.
And, again, it's not just about pets, is it? I suspect you realise as well as I do that the ESA kabuki routine is not there to protect hypothetical neighbours from Six Owls And A Hen Guy. It's to protect, above all, the bourgeois sensibility from the scalding feeling that some low-status person (different, soft, needy, weak, psych-issues) claimed an extra privilege for nothing without Official Approval.
"whose black little hearts would be best pleased by denying the hamster, too"
How well you know me! Yeah, I think I'd ban hamsters. I'm not entirely sure a life in a cage in an artificial environment nothing like my ancestral one is a good life.
Mostly I do think pet-keeping is a form of cruelty. If you have a back garden or other space that your dog can run around in, okay. But we're seeing people talking about "floors ruined by dog's nails" because the animal is being kept inside pretty much all day long.
The small breeds that can be kept indoors are a different problem because we've interfered with the animal to produce the small yappy lap dog, but that's a different question.
Ditto with indoor cats - "oh I can't let my cat out because it would kill wildlife" - well yeah, it's a predator animal, this is its nature. Keeping cats inside all day is like prison, and if Mommy (it's generally women, but some men as well) is out at work then it's solitary confinement for the poor dumb beast.
No wonder they pick up all kinds of neurotic behaviors that the owners then stick up videos of on social media, chortling about "my cat is so dumb, look what he does here" or "my cat will constantly come looking for pets and cuddles". Because the animal is emotionally and psychologically disturbed by the unnatural life you're forcing it to live as 100% dependent on you and to be your source of unconditional love.
Fish are probably okay because they're fish, there isn't a 'there' there in the organism. I'm inclined to agree with Lewis' view when it comes to those who demand that they have a "right" to a pet and this over-rides anyone else's rights or objections.
From "The Four Loves", 'Affection':
"But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain - you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.
Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs", those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship, will be well advised to examine their real reasons."
How much all this unnaturality matters depends, I guess, on how strongly one believes in the animals' (or indeed humans') received telos. I expect I'd make a very poor Thomist.
There are better and worse ways of keeping pets. Cruelties definitely abound. I think declawing cats is a genuine cruelty, as is the perpetuation of brachycephalic dog breeds. I'm not keen on lop rabbits, either. And further down the line there is plenty of outright abuse and neglect. But then, that is true of almost anything humans do. Not least all that family stuff people keep raving about. They fuck you up, after all, your mum and dad. Sometimes it even spills over to social media, just like the silly cats.
A cat raised from birth in the home becomes a synthesis of evolved instincts (themselves dented by the millennia of life with and alongside humans) and its own upbringing. There's nothing morally superior about that same cat being raised in the wild, and most of the rationale for 'indoor cats' is their own safety rather than the fate of songbirds. And the kind of Cat Mummy mocked for her songbird concern probably also goes out of her way to provide the creature (already solitary by nature) with an IKEA-ful of 'enrichment'.
A dog is outright, purposefully, bred to be a human tool and companion, in varying proportions of the two. It has no business being anything else, even if we believe in the business of being specific things.
On the hamster-gripping hand, I don't know whether a cage with a hamster wheel, a sand bath, and the reliable provision of food and water lacks some essential hamster pleasure – proper burrowing, perhaps? – that makes it a bad tradeoff for the security and longevity on offer. They're near-sighted, territorial, solitary little buggers. What else do they want?
Lewis was right, being needed – the need to be needed – is a powerful psychological undercurrent of the whole enterprise, but he's over-egged the narcissism at play. That need is not a bad thing. I realise this kind of story is often seen as the punchline to a joke about snowflakes – because of course it is: different, soft, needy, weak, psych-issues – but I've known people who probably failed to kill themselves on some days because they asked themselves what would happen to the pet. (And if you don't believe that, recall Orwell's prisoner who stepped around the puddle on the way to the gallows...) The simplified fulfilment of that need, along with the simple companionship of something alive, probably accounts for a big chunk of the therapeutic effect. Maybe the pet is kept too dependent, maybe if it could read Atlas Shrugged it would weep, but in a world where pork chops remain a thing, I don't think the relative imposition is too great.
Of course, if you pushed back against somebody's demand for a 10 foot Komodo Dragon emotional support animal and they agreed with your view that, yes, they are just being a dick, then you are just hurting your more reasonable patients than your crazier patients who insist they really need a predatory carnivore monster to feel happy.
Better to live in a society with ‘racket’ overheads than one with not.
Not difficult to find racket equivalents.
Isn't this partly a failure of law to define what exactly a "service animal" is? Or to write the term "emotional support animal" into law without carefully defining that? In some jurisdictions, a candidate service dog has to go through an approved training process with a certified organsiation, which lasts long enough that they can be really really sure Fido is a good boy. The result is that service animals are the animal equivalent of having a PhD from an Ivy, they're really expensive (though often covered by charities/insurance) but absolutely no-one got bitten by a service dog ever. Many dogs who narrowly fail the service dog training school still make excellent pets.
There *is* a definition of "service animal", at least by the 2020 HUD guidelines. Where it gets blurry is "assistance animal" or emotional support animal, which are not supposed to be "my pet dog/cat/bird":
https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/PA/documents/HUDAsstAnimalNC1-28-2020.pdf
"The Fair Housing Act (FHA) makes it unlawful for a housing provider to refuse to make a reasonable accommodation that a person with a disability may need in order to have equal opportunity to enjoy and use a dwelling.
One common request housing providers receive is for a reasonable accommodation to providers’ pet or no animal policies so that individuals with disabilities are permitted to use assistance animals in housing, including public and common use areas.
Assistance animals are not pets. They are animals that do work, perform tasks, assist, and/or provide therapeutic emotional support for individuals with disabilities
There are two types of assistance animals: (1) service animals, and (2) other animals that do work, perform tasks, provide assistance, and/or provide therapeutic emotional support for individuals with disabilities (referred to in this guidance as a “support animal”).
An animal that does not qualify as a service animal or other type of assistance animal is a pet for purposes of the FHA and may be treated as a pet for purposes of the lease and the housing provider’s rules and policies. A housing provider may exclude or charge a fee or deposit for pets in its discretion and subject to local law but not for service animals or other assistance animals.
What is a service animal?
Under the ADA, “service animal means any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including a physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other mental disability. Other species of animals, whether wild or domestic, trained or untrained, are not service animals for the purposes of this definition. The work or tasks performed by a service animal must be directly related to the individual's disability.
Performing “work or tasks” means that the dog is trained to take a specific action when needed to assist the person with a disability.
• If the individual identifies at least one action the dog is trained to take which is helpful to the disability other than emotional support, the dog should be considered a service animal and permitted in housing, including public and common use areas. Housing providers should not make further inquiries.
• If no specific work or task is identified, the dog should not be considered a service animal but may be another type of animal for which a reasonable accommodation may be required. Emotional support, comfort, well-being, and companionship are not a specific work or task for purposes of analysis under the ADA."
That's where it gets blurry. You're a landlord, you say "no pets allowed". Tenant comes back with a letter from their mental health professional saying "this is an emotional support animal". Maybe it's a genuine case, maybe they got a sympathetic doctor like Scott to back up that they really do depend on their pet, maybe they paid a hundred bucks to get one from an online website. You could tie yourself up in a court case over this, or you could just let them have the damn dog and CYA by "they gave me the letter".
https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/assistance_animals
"What Is an Assistance Animal?
An assistance animal is an animal that works, provides assistance, or performs tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability, or that provides emotional support that alleviates one or more identified effects of a person’s disability. An assistance animal is not a pet.
Obligations of Housing Providers
Individuals with a disability may request to keep an assistance animal as a reasonable accommodation to a housing provider’s pet restrictions.
Housing providers cannot refuse to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services when such accommodations may be necessary to afford a person with a disability the equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling.
The Fair Housing Act requires a housing provider to allow a reasonable accommodation involving an assistance animal in situations that meet all the following conditions:
A request was made to the housing provider by or for a person with a disability
The request was supported by reliable disability-related information, if the disability and the disability-related need for the animal were not apparent and the housing provider requested such information, and
The housing provider has not demonstrated that:
Granting the request would impose an undue financial and administrative burden on the housing provider
The request would fundamentally alter the essential nature of the housing provider’s operations
The specific assistance animal in question would pose a direct threat to the health or safety of others despite any other reasonable accommodations that could eliminate or reduce the threat
The request would result in significant physical damage to the property of others despite any other reasonable accommodations that could eliminate or reduce the physical damage.
Examples
A reasonable accommodation request for an assistance animal may include, for example:
A request to live with an assistance animal at a property where a housing provider has a no-pets policy or
A request to waive a pet deposit, fee, or other rule as to an assistance animal.
Filing a Complaint
If you believe you have been unlawfully denied a reasonable accommodation for an assistance animal or have otherwise experienced discrimination in housing, you can file a complaint with FHEO."
By the plethora of sites offering "we'll give you an ESA letter for $$$", there are clearly enough people willing to game the system that, in combination with the people who genuinely need assistance/support animals, somebody takes a case and gets it laid down in stone that you have to comply with the request for Susie to have her fur baby in the property without paying rent for it. Also, basically you will be asking the courts to define "what is a pet?" and see the commenters on this thread who are standing up for snakes, reptiles, spiders, etc. as cute fun cuddly friends. It'll end up that someone will protest that they have a pet elephant and it's discrimination if Jim's python is considered a pet but their Hanno is not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_(elephant)
"Hanno (Italian: Annone; c. 1510 – 8 June 1516) was the pet white elephant given by King Manuel I of Portugal to Pope Leo X (born Giovanni de' Medici) at his coronation. Hanno, an Asian elephant, came to Rome in 1514 with the Portuguese ambassador Tristão da Cunha and quickly became the Pope's favorite animal. Hanno died two years later from complications of a treatment for constipation with gold-enriched laxative."
I feel like if someone is emotionally supported by a snake, that's better for landlords than a cat or a dog, right? What would be any downside at all for writing an ADHD snake ESA letter? Wouldn't the existence of the possibility of losing a beloved pet cause enough emotional distress that keeping the pet makes it qualify as an emotional support animal?
"What would be any downside at all for writing an ADHD snake ESA letter?What would be any downside at all for writing an ADHD snake ESA letter?"
Because under the existing regulations, snakes don't count as "assistance animals". You would need a *very* good reason as to why it had to be a snake and not another animal, and if the client is only trying to get around the "no pets allowed" rule rather than having a genuine need, you the certifying person issuing the letter might (it's unsure) be in trouble:
https://fairhousinginstitute.com/assistance-animals-hud-notice/
"How do we differentiate whether it is a service animal or emotional support animal (ESA), based on the new guidance?
That takes us back to this concept of the ADA. Under the ADA, operators of public accommodations are permitted to ask if someone brings in an animal into, let’s say, a Target store. They are walking around the aisles with their dog in their arms or in the basket or wherever. And the manager of the store or an employee can walk up to that person and say,
“Is that a trained service animal?”
And if the person says, “Yes,” they are permitted to say, “And what work or task has this animal been trained to perform for you?”
And the customer is supposed to answer that question.
However, there’s no written verification, there’s no confirmation, there’s no verification of any of that information. If the animal is not a dog, then it’s clear, it’s not a service animal, because only dogs and in rare cases, miniature horses, are recognized as service animals. So, in housing, if someone says, “I don’t have to provide you verification of my service animal.” The answer is, that applies under the American Disabilities Act, but the ADA does not pertain to housing. The Fair Housing Act permits verification when the disability and the need for the animal are not observable.
If you can see that the animal is a guide dog, then you shouldn’t be asking for verification. But if it’s a dog that is a service animal for disabilities such as hearing problems or alert someone that they’re about to have a seizure, you can’t see that when you talk to the resident. In that case you can ask for verification. And if they say to you that’s not permitted, then you have to clarify, “I’m asking you this not under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but under the Fair Housing Act.”
HUD Assistance Animal Notice Key Takeaways
The notice also makes it clear the difference between domesticated animals kept in the home (traditional) and non-traditional unique animals such, goats, pigs, chickens, snakes, etc. The notice says the resident has a substantial burden to be able to show that they need a unique animal, as an assistance animal. Now, it is not impossible to justify a unique animal, but they’re going to have to explain in more detail than with a usual animal, why they need their snake as an emotional support animal.
We haven’t had this distinction in the past. This may mean that you need to revise your forms, to include questions about unique animals.. The other thing that the notice says is if you require the resident or verifier to notarize their information, you need to stop doing that."
With all due respect, I understand this was a serious article, but I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the human experience. We're a profound yet strange bunch us humans. Thanks for the insightful and interesting work.
Yet, every once in a while you see a story of someone who had no such letter but still insisted that they must be able to bring their emotional support tarantula onto a plane or into a restaurant or someplace where people have a perfectly reasonable reluctance to have them around. And you wonder what's wrong with these people?
Autism Iguana would be a good band name.
When I rented a room in an old adobe structure back in the 1980s, some geckos had set up housekeeping in the room due to a leaky toilet. I couldn't claim them as emotional support animals, but I was always pleased to watch them on the walls, snacking on surprised insects. They made great roommates and kept the critters under control.
"Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge."
It's that last bit that makes me unsure. Let's take the assumption seriously that the cat really is an ESA. Sure, if your cat's carrier fits under the seat instead of you bringing a backpack, that's fair, it shouldn't need to cost more to bring them. But otherwise, why is it the airline's job to pay for healthcare for some subset of passengers? Especially when this might impose health care costs on other passengers (highly allergic to cats, deathly afraid of dogs).
"Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge."
It's that last bit that makes me unsure. Let's take the assumption seriously that the cat really is an ESA. Sure, if your cat's carrier fits under the seat instead of you bringing a backpack, that's fair, it shouldn't need to cost more to bring them. But otherwise, why is it the airline's job to pay for healthcare for some subset of passengers? Especially when this might impose health care costs on other passengers (highly allergic to cats, deathly afraid of dogs).
I had a somewhat heated conversation about this topic with my SO the other day actually. He was really mad that some woman had a dog that growled with a muzzle on it in Firestone. I was like "was it on a lease?" "Yes, but it was clearly aggressive." "But, you said it had a muzzle on and it's on a leash so what's it going to do?" "It might get loose." "Did the woman have control of it?" "Yes, she kept it close by." The most he could finally say I couldn't argue with was that the dog was clearly stressed out to be there, but that's not why he was mad about it. I don't get the dog hostility thing. Unless 1) the dog is loose 2) barking incessantly 3) literally in a kitchen where food is being prepared 4) someone is deathly allergic to dogs 5) peeing/pooping on the floor, why does anyone care if there is a random dog around?
Often because it might start meeting one of those criteria at any moment.
I also notice that your list doesn't include biting people... So there's your example of the pitfalls of trying to cover all cases.
It had a muzzle on and I said as much...
And then you can ask people to take the dog outside. You can ask even service animals causing chaos to be taken outside even now legally.
It has a muzzle, sure, but that can change at any moment and I said as much. But fine, substitute tackling and clawing.
It's no good to wait until the dog has a problem. That won't un-bite or un-claw anyone.
It's an obnoxious problem, if for no other reason than it does have the feel that if someone is whiny enough and entitled enough they can get their way (bring their dog into a restaurant), and everyone else just has to put up with it.
What about the other rackets? Disability placards for parking? Extra time to take the SATs and other exams?
Isn't it a no-brainer partial solution that as a society we should just collectively award people the right/privilege to keep a dog or cat in their domicile? I don't know if this would work with snakes but we have enough dog and cat lovers in this country that I could see this happening.
Anonymity sure brings the dog haters out of the woodwork, huh?
IDK if the intended consequence of this post was to create more ESAs, but thanks to it a friend just advised one of her students that, if she really misses her cats back home so much, it's probably not hard to get an ESA letter so the school will let her have a cat in her dorm. thanks Scott :)