Over the past year, I have devoted a substantial amount of time talking about service animals. I have discussed how dogs, miniature horses, and monkeys can be trained to become service animals. I have also discussed badly behaved ‘service animals’ — people who claim to have legitimate disabilities and pawn their untrained companion pets as service animals. This blog post marks the 15th article on the subject in the past year.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice revised the ADA regulations. Prior to the revisions, the ADA regulations had not limited “service animals” to any specific type of animal. Now, there is an extremely narrow limitation: only dogs meet the definition of service animals.
The newly issued regulations provides in part:
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 new definition of service animal will sorely disappoint individuals with disabilities who have and rely on parrots, monkeys, snakes, and miniature horses, as their service animals. As Martin Matheny points out, “dogs are great, but there are some things that they cannot do.”
But wait a moment.



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