Americans With Disabilities Act rules for Service Animals changed in March 2011 at the Federal level. Only dogs or horses count as service animals-- for people with PHYSICAL disabilities. This doesn't affect San Francisco (yet) because the city and county benefits from California state rules.
How long until the Feds challenge the CA law? Bill Clinton had a service dog! Being the President is both the cushiest and gnarliest job imaginable. Times change...
I'm on this because I saw the driver of the last MUNI #49 bus (of the night several months ago) to my 'hood (Van Ness Avenue and Eddy Street) refuse to allow a young woman with a service dog to ride his bus--he wanted to see papers stating the dog was really a service animal. Another MUNI driver told me the other guy was wrong because nobody has to "show papers".
After that experience I had a conversation with one of the desk clerks at my SRO hotel, a very politically conservative guy, who told me about the change in the law. He loved it. The San Francisco Examiner recently wrote about the change. They quoted someone who uses Seeing Eye dogs who also liked the change, because it makes life "simpler" for many people. The Examiner, being a very kkkonservative paper, liked it too.
Why is this important (other than for the fact that quite a few people having trouble coping with fast-paced harder-than-ever-edged life in any big city you care to name--not just San Francisco--deal with their challenges far better with an animal that both depends on them for food, shelter, etc {plus giving up some mostly unconditional love})? Ever see a houseless man or woman with a dog, a cat, or a bird? Know any housed poor people with a pet?
Those animals are companions, sharing the challenges of houseless or poorlife. Guards of property and psychological well-being, they are incredibly important. Many people who aren't poor deal with animals better than other humans too, so the injustice bleeds over quite a bit of territory here.
There is a hugely profitable Animal Industrial Complex (not just the Agricultural Industrial Complex, which raises a lot of our meat-flesh food in conditions none of would want to live in) devoted to breeding, raising, feeding, pampering, selling and doing other things for and to animals considered pets. Murdering the ones that become surplus, unwanted, is just as big an industry, or side-effect. Disposable animals, disposable material goods, disposable people.
Service Animals must be kicking the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex in the balls pretty hard, or they just don't wanna give up any itty bitty potential profit to be squeezed out of any nook and cranny of the world. Or both. No profit to be made when cats, dogs, and birds heal souls better than psych drugs do.
At my SRO hotel, there's a guy who lives at the other end of my floor who was pretty much a lost soul when he moved in. He said a few things to me that might have set off a bar brawl-style fight if I hadn't been instantly aware that he is/was one of those people we use euphemisms for to dance around the "lack of a full happy meal or a deck of cards" when we want to be semi-polite about talking about mental illness.
Soon after that he got what I call an "ankle-biter" dog. A very small dog. He said he was holding onto it for a friend, but I have a different opinion about that. He slowly changed into someone who can talk to other people without making them want to be somewhere else. We were just talking about a "Homer Simpson Lookalike Contest" (I said I'd look it up on-line, which hasn't happened yet...) in the line for our Wednesday afternoon SRO-tenants food pantry.
I know what I know. I have all the proof I need that some folks in the Federal Government have lost what's left of their tiny little minds; they need a dog themselves, at least, so they can chill out and stop making life difficult for the rest of us.