It was spring quarter at the University of Denver in 2008. I was giving a final exam in a freshman-level law and ethics class at the Daniels College of Business. I was taken aback when two women entered the classroom with small dogs. In over twenty years of teaching, I had not seen dogs in class, much less at an exam; the distraction to other students could well be grade altering. Both women explained that that their dogs helped to keep them calm, were well trained, and both promised that their dogs would not be “a problem.”
Coincidentally, I had just read in the Wall Street Journal that some students were bringing pocket-sized gerbils to classes for “emotional support,” but. . . dogs? I wasn’t sure what to do. Was there even a chance that I could say no, deny these women the opportunity to take the exam at the scheduled time, or offer to dog-sit in the hallway while students compared answers to the exam? No! More or less on the fly, I agreed the dogs could stay––with the proviso that if they were any sort of problem at all, I’d have to end their exam and give them a different exam later. Happily, the women were right: the dogs were completely quiet and presented “no problem.”
Yet emotional support animals (ESAs) are no longer a “no problem” situation for U.S. airlines. Early in 2018, a woman tried to bring a peacock onboard a recent United Airlines flight at Newark Liberty International Airport. She did offer to pay for a second seat for this oversized bird, but claimed she had a right to bring it onboard as her emotional support animal. United, which has had more than its share of problems with animals on flights, denied her a boarding pass for the peacock. As one blogger familiar with peacocks posted,
“The thing with peacocks is that they are MEAN birds. There is an arboretum not too far from my house that has beautiful gardens…and peacocks running wild. They’ve been known to chase after visitors…and bite. And that horrible screech they make. . .”
With some ESAs, passengers can experience the stink of dogs pooping in the aisle, cats urinating on nearby seats, or passengers insisting that their boa constrictor is key to their emotional well-being. In 2014, a U.S. airways flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia had to make an “emergency landing” in Kansas City after an ESA dog pooped three times. “Those passengers took to Twitter to document the smelly ordeal.” In June of 2017,a 70-pound dog flying on Delta as a support animal bit a passenger in the face severely enough that the man required hospital care. Several other biting incidents have been reported.
Patricia Marx, in a remarkably funny yet sobering New Yorker article in 2014, acquired licenses for a number of un-cuddly ESAs, including a turtle, a pig, a Mexican milk snake, a turkey, and an alpaca. She even gained entry with her chosen ESA to Fifth Avenue shops, the Frick museum, and upscale restaurants. She found that licenses were granted fairly easily, and that many doctors were willing to write the necessary letter without a great deal of inquiry as to the patient’s need for an ESA. Marx makes clear how service animals are quite different from the rising numbers of ESAs:
“In contrast to an emotional-support animal (E.S.A.), a service dog is trained to perform specific tasks, such as pulling a wheelchair and responding to seizures. The I.R.S. classifies these dogs as a deductible medical expense, whereas an emotional-support animal is more like a blankie.”
By contrast ESA letters from doctors or mental health practitioners are far more flexible. The letter must say that the patient/passenger:
- Has a mental or emotional disability recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
- Needs the emotional support or psychiatric service animal as an accommodation for air travel and/or for activity at the passenger’s destination
The letter must also assert that the writer is a properly licensed mental health professional or medical doctor, and include other information about the license and the state where the licensing occurred.
In contrast to service animals, which must be certified and trained, there are no training and certification requirements for ESAs. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), provides for service animals as trained dogs or miniature horses, though airlines are bound by the more “liberal” Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 allows free travel for “any animal” ––trained or not ––that assists a person with a disability or provides emotional support. Airlines can require passengers who want ESAs rather than service animals to produce a letter from a physician or mental health professional, but the documents are easily forged or obtained from websites that provide cursory, questionnaire-style “exams.” The definition of “emotionally impaired persons” in the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 is intentionally broad, leaving the airlines space to define their own policies. And define they must increasingly do.
Airlines have seen a marked increase in the number of passengers with ESAs. Delta Airlines reported in early 2018 that it had flown 250,000 ESAs in 2017, up 150 percent from 2015, while “incidents” such as biting or defecating had nearly doubled since 2016. Less traumatic events include dogs blocking beverage carts, cats urinating on seats, and ducks wandering the aisles.
Delta and United, early in 2018, added to ESA passenger procedures by requiring certification that their ESA is properly trained to behave in public, along with forms that detail their animal’s health and vaccination records. This documentation must be given to the airline 48 hours before the flight; otherwise the animal will be put in a container provided by the airline. This is a key motivator, as many passengers with ESAs are trying to avoid putting their dog or other ESA into that kind of chilly cargo trauma.
Delta’s policy also requires proof not only that the passenger has a mental health instability, but a “disability” that is recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 4th edition, and that the passenger is currently “in the care of” the mental health professional. To be effective, letters must be dated within a year of the flight to be taken with an ESA.
Tellingly, Delta felt it necessary in early 2018 to update its list of proscribed ESAs to include “farm poultry,” hedgehogs and “anything with tusks.” And, breaking news as this blog goes to post: Emirates Airlines has just announced that peacocks and falcons will be allowed as ESAs, but that camels cannot be.
If you even started to believe that bit of “fake news,” you’re on the right track: the trend toward more and more ESAs being allowed on airplanes is a challenge to corporate policy, and one of those ethical issues that confounds the top management of U.S. airlines. The legal lines are not carefully drawn, leaving airline management a difficult balancing act of being ethical by respecting the legitimate needs of passengers who cannot fly without ESAs, yet also respecting the needs of other passengers for non-disruptive flights that aren’t “peopled” with peacocks and pooping dogs.
The issue is not confined to airlines. More and more employers are providing pet-friendly workplaces, and sometimes, the non-pet-oriented employees are not all that enthusiastic.[1]
Perhaps more than anything else, the airlines are confronted with passengers who may or may not have emotional support needs, wish to avoid putting their beloved pets in the cargo compartment, and who assume that everyone will love their pet because they do.
As Garrett Hardin observed in the Tragedy of the Commons, adequately governing the fuselage “commons” will need mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. Yet the uptick in ESAs on board U.S. airlines seems to confirm that plenty of passengers with ESAs may not wish to be part of mutual coercion; some evidently have an entitlement mentality, the well-known self-serving bias, and an insistence on their “rights” as opposed to the common good of all passengers, some of whom have “pet dander issues” and physically become sick from exposure to certain animals. Governing all of this has become a complex ethical dilemma for airlines wanting to make reasonable accommodations to genuine emotional support needs of passengers, and doing so without accommodating fraud and offending other passengers.
[1] Anne Kadet, More Employers Treat Pets Like Part of the Family, Wall St. Journal, Dec. 22, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-employers-treat-pets-like-part-of-the-family-1514304263