The Emotional Support Animal Racket talks about emotional support animals and eloquently but succinctly critiques the entire dysfunctional situation. I found this particularly interesting because it provides a very clear example of how processes and systems can fail while their individual components appear to make sense when considered separately.
As far as I know, there is no such thing as emotional support animals in Europe, so here is how they work:
Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment.
So far, so good.
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.
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 […], 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”.
Uh oh. So, it is legally required that somebody (your therapist) determines whether your pet qualifies as an emotional support animal, but without any actual guidelines or rules given for what this means. Which sort of makes sense, in that this is the kind of stuff that would be really really hard, if not outright impossible, to properly specify. I mean, if you think about it, any pet should by all rights be an “emotional support animal” if you just look at it naively. But then… what’s the point in requiring this whole qualification thing to begin with…?
[…] But the process […] 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.
Right. Of course, it’s important to note the context that gave rise to the whole problem to begin with:
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.
Thinking a bit further, I expect the biggest issue is that a very small minority of bad owners and/or bad pets cause a disproportionate amount of damage and disruption. Chances are, under normal circumstances your landlord would never notice that you had a cat or a dog, and so they would have no reason to care about that; but there’s a nonzero chance that a pet will do something really bad like rip the curtains and the pet’s owner refuses to take responsibility for it… so you might as well just ban all pets altogether and not deal with the risk, right? Indeed, a few rotten apples ruining the whole batch is an age-old story of how we don’t get to have nice things.