I'm trying to find the scientific evidence that we need airplanes at all. From the Cambrian explosion up until 1910 there was no such thing as a plane and we managed to get by just fine. Now everybody's all like ' I need my Mexican resort vacation, how can I do it with my precious airplanes?'. I'll need to see some evidence for that.
While people obviously abuse this and I don't need to bring my dog on the plane:
My dog gives me reason to keep living and not kill myself on my darkest days.
When I wake up sweating and shaking and panicing from anxiety, my dog gives me something soft and comforting to hold and pet. A dog reacts and loves you and distracts you by licking and being playful and in your face.
Having been alone and suffering from this for a decade prior, I can say for sure my dog helps me.
What croc of a psychiatrist can't see this.
Edit:
As for being a crutch, anxiety is not logical. Sometimes there isn't something to confront. Just a fear of impending doom from some unknown source..no matter what you tell yourself, and how much you know there is nothing, you still shake, heart pounding, sweating, physical pain from anxiety.
I could take medicine and be dependent on that, or I could hug my dog
I am not a dog person but I know plenty of people who feel the same way. We should be doing more to support emotional support animals in general to help those afflicted. Mental health is something we as a society in America should be trying a lot of things to improve.
More dogs (especially French Bulldogs doing cute/funny things) is a good step forward.
> We should be doing more to support emotional support animals in general to help those afflicted.
Did either you or the parent commenter read the entire article or the interview at the end? Nobody is saying support animals don't help in any way.
The whole discussion is about the lack of any serious studies or evidence that animals objectively help those with mental health issues, and how exactly they help. How can you say "we should be doing more to support" something without knowing if that thing is actually helping? This is the point of the article.
Yeah, the article addresses this question pretty clearly.
Even things that "feel" obvious to us should be studied. We shouldn't just take it for fact that an emotional support animal is a valid method of coping with depression or anxiety.
Especially when there are alternatives which have gone through and continue to be subjected to rigorous scientific study.
If an animal helps you cope with these things, yes by all means go for it. But you can't state that it is a valid alternative to things like medication or therapy if you've never tried them. This person may well be depriving him/herself of an even healthier life which, incidentally makes their pet's life healthier and happier as a result.
As somebody on anxiety meds...they help, man. At least they help me.
You wouldn't begrudge somebody for being dependent on cancer medicine, would you? Or heart medicine? I would rather be dependent on meds than suffer the quality of life issues I used to have. Not sure why your opposition to treating anxiety pharmacologically, but I would encourage you to at least talk to a doctor and explore what medication could do for you.
Was not bashing taking medication. Sorry that was not my intent.
SSRIs and such can be helpful, but I would like to stay away from xanax and things like that. I have known many people who became dependent and had their life ruined. I know it depends on the person and their background, but I'd like to avoid it all together personally.
I'd prefer to hug a dog than take potentially addictive medications.
My girlfriend gives me reason to keep living and not kill myself on my darkest days.
When I wake up sweating and shaking and panicing from anxiety, my girlfriend gives me something soft and comforting to hold and pet. A girlfriend reacts and loves you and distracts you by licking and being playful and in your face.
Having been alone and suffering from this for a decade prior, I can say for sure my girlfriend helps me.
What croc of a psychiatrist calls me "codependent"
They had a support/stress dog at several of the bases I spent time at in Iraq, which I thought was pretty cool. They were part of the combat stress medical units if I recall.
I don't know the true efficacy, but a close friend of mine who was in pretty bad shape said the dog helped cheer him up. If nothing else just having the opportunity to pet a dog and forget about things for a bit must have been nice.
Do they train emotional support animals to be used to unusual environments? I suppose it must be roughly the same sort of training given to sight assistance dogs. I'm pretty sure if I took either of my dogs on an aircraft, for example, any emotional benefit I derived would be countered by their extreme anxiety and fright.
My family had a licensed therapy dog. For about 3-4 years, he did weekly dog therapy at a nearby foster facility for adolescent boys. The particular benefit to those kids was that they had a chance to love a creature, when of course their own family was not present to extend love to them. This was a big deal for some of those kids. They had a rough life - the facility was OK, but there's no avoiding the circumstances: you have no parents.
The licensing that we got (as of ~15 years ago) was nowhere near the level that is given to sight assistance dogs. However, other license authorities (I think it was TDI) were more strenuous, and my dog would not have passed them. For instance, therapy dogs had to be calm if a rabbit or cat was nearby. I'm not sure what regulations are in place now, I assume it must have tightened up since then.
In pre-9/11 days, my dog rode in the airplane cabin twice. He was chill, even calmed another passenger down on the outbound 3-hour flight by sitting in their lap.
If you're in the US, any license you got was snake oil. There is no licensure for service or emotional support/therapy animals.
There are no legal requirements or standards for either in terms of training either, the only standard is that if the animal is being disruptive they can ask you to remove it, but must then provide reasonable accommodation to the disabled person in the animal's absence.
No, they didn't get "snake oil." The particular foster care facility (or government) required a dog visiting their children to be licensed by ${company} before it was allowed into the facility. The GP had their dog go through the requirements ${company} specified and ${company} gave the dog their seal of approval.
It's exactly like if a company requires you to get a professional certification from, say, Oracle.
It's also pretty reasonable. if they are going to let dogs around their residents that they'd want a third party making sure the dog has a temperament suitable for that and certain amount of training - the facility doesn't know how to tell if a dog would be fit for that purpose.
It's like saying getting your video game rated by the ESRB is "snake oil" because "there's no legal requirements or standards for rating video games." Yet if you want to sell your video game at Walmart or Toys R Us you're going to have to get it rated by the ESRB.
You're also confused about where the "reasonable accommodations" comes in.
The difference is that the ADA has standards which do not require licensure. You cannot legally require someone show you a service dog license. Where emotional support animals are protected by law (namely, housing and air transport) you also cannot require a license (though in those cases you can require a letter from a health professional stating the need).
Requiring or claiming to provide licensure for animals outside of what the laws state and require is scummy and just confuses the issue as to what is and isn't allowed by law.
This is phrased rudely, but has an element of truth.
The facility (it's a county facility) wanted the therapy dog to be "licensed," and we went through the process to do some training, and got a vest, a patch, and a certificate (http://www.tdi-dog.org - I forget what the more rigorous one was). I doubt that we paid anything to TDI beyond a nominal fee, so that association of "snake oil" is off base.
But like I said, and as you note, the "therapy dog" process was highly variable, and it's not like there was some kind of national standard. And I would add that we did take unfair advantage of the airline exception for therapy dogs - this was in 2000 or so, before they really came into vogue - and I was uncomfortable with doing that, although I was overruled. ;-)
No. Emotional support animals are not required to have, nor do they typically have, any training. There is no statutory licensing process. There are ad hoc groups who offer various certifications which other private parties may require, e.g. in a care home. But it’s up to them.
Services animals on the other hand are extensively trained at a cost upwards of $30,000 dollars. It’s really not easy to get a dog to behave like that.
No, and that's the problem. There's no "they," the idea of emotional support animals is that a person with a disability (including mild depression) gets a health care provider to write a note saying in their opinion having a pet will be beneficial to the patient and improve at least one symptom of the disability.
Then the patient can get any pet from any source, including a backyard puppy mill, without any training whatsoever. Then certain people/organizations are required to make "reasonable accommodations," including airlines.
Even worse, there's services online that you can pay a small fee for a doctor's note. Or you can just buy an ID or vest from Amazon,that looks official, or have a friend write you a letter, it's not like the airline is realistically going to check the medical credentials of the "doctor."
You can see where this is going...This of course ends up creating a loophole used solely for avoiding pet fees airline charge and having pets in a "no pets" apartment.
It's a shame because the few bad apples ruin the bunch. People who have maladapted pets and/or no consideration for others around them cause trouble.
That being said, places required to "make reasonable accommodations" for ESAs can deny boarding to unruly pets because that's not "reasonable." But for staff it's difficult to tell how the animal would react until they actually are in the air.
Landlords, for one, who have to deal with tenants that argue their E.S. animal should be excepted from the "no pets" policy. Also H.R. departments (what if an employee brings a bird to work?), hospitals, and places where food is served ("Waiter! That guy's dog licked my plate!").
It's one of those situations in which the potential for abuse is pretty big, and so there's an actual interest in differentiating "this dog helps me cope with life" from "you have to allow this untrained animal here thanks to poorly defined laws and paperwork with no clear meaning".
If it's legal to own a pet, then in my opinion, it cannot be made illegal for a pet to live anywhere. The fact that hotels, businesses, landlords, or whatever can deny entry to a pet is simply ridiculous.
The same rules for humans should apply. If the pet is a nuisance, or destructive, or loud or whatever, then that pet can be removed just like a human would be removed in the same circumstances.
Policies should take also into account individual preferences and freedom. Individual freedoms should only be taken away if there is evidence good evidence that they are causing significant harm to others at a group level or individual level.
Mild inconvenience to others is not a significant enough problem to take away emotional support animals, because owners clearly value them highly.
>So if you want to say that “my pet makes me feel good and it’s fun,” that’s great. You don’t really need lots of evidence for that.
>But with these emotional support animals, we’re talking about what is essentially a prescription from doctors to people with clinically significant symptoms. When we talk about that, there are very specific standards of evidence for psychiatric and psychological treatment, and these have not met that standard.
To dismiss something because there is a lack of scientific research about it is just as irrational as believing in something despite strong evidence against it.
You are correct, there is nothing wrong with what the people in the article are saying. But I think we'd be lying to ourselves if we deny the fact that the reason this article is in discussion here on HN is in large part not because we're up in arms about the lack of scientific rigour about this niche area of knowledge, but because there is a tendency in our community (sometimes denied when explicitly pointed out) to tag things we suspect or would like to be invalid as false (rather than simply inconclusive) when there is no evidence to support it one way or another.
"What exactly is it about our society that makes mental issues so widespread that emotional support animals are so needed?" is a question I would like to see answered with more coverage.
The problem is that the alternative to bringing your pet in the cabin is terrible. In cargo they can be lost like luggage, temperature and pressure controls are not as strictly maintained, the animal is subject to extreme noises and gyrations - it is a scary and traumatic experience. Pets are much closer to children than objects for most people - it is like putting your child down there.
The reason for the abuse of the ESA system is that there are no alternatives provided. Your only options are to torture your pet, or abuse the system. There is no amount of money you can pay to avoid it - you can't book an entire row if you wanted.
I think this issue needs to be addressed, and a process formally institutionalized to allow pets to travel with their humans. It is very rare for anyone to be bothered when a pet is on board - most of the time it brings other passengers joy - in the cases where there is a problem, easy arrangements are made that satisfy everyone.
This is a huge issue I agree with. I'd never fly with my dog in cargo. However, one thing that I think gets overlooked is that in accommodating people's pet, are we being unaccommodating to others? What about those who have pet allergies? They would expect to be able to fly in peace as well. Or people with life experience that makes them afraid of dogs. You'd think the airline would be easy to work with but is that really on the person with allergies to make themselves comfortable when the argument for ESAs is that we should all be accommodating to these people and their animals/issues? Do we need to have pet friendly/no pet flight options? Or do we need the airlines to be pro-active in accommodating for people with their pets when they could just as easily say "No. Deal with it"? Good luck convincing the airlines that they need to accommodate for society. They won't even make planes someone over 6'5" can sit in comfortably.
Outside of Cats/Dogs, if somebody sits down next to me with their Emotional Support Snake there's gonna be some loud WTFs and GTFOs and just a problem overall. Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near them on their flight beforehand? Sure. Are they going to? Nope. Better to just say there will be no gosh darn snakes on this gosh darn plane.
> What about those who have pet allergies?
> Or people with life experience that makes them afraid of dogs
These are quite rare, but they happen, and the solution has always been easy and amicable: move some people around, with the dog owner making the most compromise.
> Do we need to have pet friendly/no pet flight options?
This would be great. Right now even with ESA's there is a limit on the number of pets that can be on a flight, so you would have to find a different flight if the one you wanted already had some. By no means am I suggesting there should be a free-for-all. Only to have some limited arrangement where everyone can be happy.
> Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near them on their flight beforehand?
This kind of messaging is relatively easy nowadays, ranging from a little doggy icon on the website marking a specific flight as being pet-friendly, all the way to personalized sms/emails (which are already in place).
Humans live densely, there are very few actions you can take that affect no-one in no way. We are dealing with this overly brutely in my opinion, there exists a configuration that increases net world happiness that we are not taking advantage of.
I agree completely. Dogs by their very nature need to be with their humans most of the time. For those who travel often, it is not really an option to leave the dog at home alone all the time.
If we are going to allow people to have dogs, then our society needs to allow dogs to move through it... This seems obvious. Dogs should be allowed to go everywhere that humans go (with certain extreme exceptions).
We already have rules in place for unruly or destructive behavior, and the same should apply to dogs.
If I'm traveling and I need to stay in a hotel, I don't want anyone to fuck with me because I have my dog. He is small, and silent. No one will even know he is there, and yet, it is always a huge pain in the ass to bring him places.
There are essentially two issues with ESAs - poor behavior and lying to avoid fees.
For the first there should be a framework of cerification. If you want to bring an ESA it should pass third party certification with different standards for housing and flights.
For the second we should look at alternatives. If you want to fly with pet you have to pay hundreds, often well excess of your own ticket, for them to fly cargo (unless they can fly under your seat in which case it's $125). Why so high fees / bad experience? If a pet owner labels their pet ESA the pet gets to fly with them for free. Why can't pets fly free in cabin like infants under 2? If the pet is over a certain size, then person has to buy another seat (just like an older child).
I think the certification standards and equalizing experience for pets would dramatically lower potential for abuse.
These are shorter term fixes. In the long term we should keep building evidence on the question of effectiveness.
There's actually four issues, add in concerns about animal welfare and concerns about the people who don't want to share a plane with animals due to allergies and phobias. (or personal preference)
51 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My dog gives me reason to keep living and not kill myself on my darkest days.
When I wake up sweating and shaking and panicing from anxiety, my dog gives me something soft and comforting to hold and pet. A dog reacts and loves you and distracts you by licking and being playful and in your face.
Having been alone and suffering from this for a decade prior, I can say for sure my dog helps me.
What croc of a psychiatrist can't see this.
Edit:
As for being a crutch, anxiety is not logical. Sometimes there isn't something to confront. Just a fear of impending doom from some unknown source..no matter what you tell yourself, and how much you know there is nothing, you still shake, heart pounding, sweating, physical pain from anxiety.
I could take medicine and be dependent on that, or I could hug my dog
More dogs (especially French Bulldogs doing cute/funny things) is a good step forward.
Did either you or the parent commenter read the entire article or the interview at the end? Nobody is saying support animals don't help in any way.
The whole discussion is about the lack of any serious studies or evidence that animals objectively help those with mental health issues, and how exactly they help. How can you say "we should be doing more to support" something without knowing if that thing is actually helping? This is the point of the article.
Only says we don't know so they could be doing harm!
>What croc of a psychiatrist can't see this.
Did you read the article? Your comment is basically the very first question the author asks the psychiatrist.
Even things that "feel" obvious to us should be studied. We shouldn't just take it for fact that an emotional support animal is a valid method of coping with depression or anxiety.
Especially when there are alternatives which have gone through and continue to be subjected to rigorous scientific study.
If an animal helps you cope with these things, yes by all means go for it. But you can't state that it is a valid alternative to things like medication or therapy if you've never tried them. This person may well be depriving him/herself of an even healthier life which, incidentally makes their pet's life healthier and happier as a result.
You wouldn't begrudge somebody for being dependent on cancer medicine, would you? Or heart medicine? I would rather be dependent on meds than suffer the quality of life issues I used to have. Not sure why your opposition to treating anxiety pharmacologically, but I would encourage you to at least talk to a doctor and explore what medication could do for you.
SSRIs and such can be helpful, but I would like to stay away from xanax and things like that. I have known many people who became dependent and had their life ruined. I know it depends on the person and their background, but I'd like to avoid it all together personally.
I'd prefer to hug a dog than take potentially addictive medications.
When I wake up sweating and shaking and panicing from anxiety, my girlfriend gives me something soft and comforting to hold and pet. A girlfriend reacts and loves you and distracts you by licking and being playful and in your face.
Having been alone and suffering from this for a decade prior, I can say for sure my girlfriend helps me.
What croc of a psychiatrist calls me "codependent"
Codependent implies enabling bad behavior. My dog doesn't enable my anxiety. My meds don't enable my anxiety, they treat it.
I don't know the true efficacy, but a close friend of mine who was in pretty bad shape said the dog helped cheer him up. If nothing else just having the opportunity to pet a dog and forget about things for a bit must have been nice.
The licensing that we got (as of ~15 years ago) was nowhere near the level that is given to sight assistance dogs. However, other license authorities (I think it was TDI) were more strenuous, and my dog would not have passed them. For instance, therapy dogs had to be calm if a rabbit or cat was nearby. I'm not sure what regulations are in place now, I assume it must have tightened up since then.
In pre-9/11 days, my dog rode in the airplane cabin twice. He was chill, even calmed another passenger down on the outbound 3-hour flight by sitting in their lap.
There are no legal requirements or standards for either in terms of training either, the only standard is that if the animal is being disruptive they can ask you to remove it, but must then provide reasonable accommodation to the disabled person in the animal's absence.
It's exactly like if a company requires you to get a professional certification from, say, Oracle.
It's also pretty reasonable. if they are going to let dogs around their residents that they'd want a third party making sure the dog has a temperament suitable for that and certain amount of training - the facility doesn't know how to tell if a dog would be fit for that purpose.
It's like saying getting your video game rated by the ESRB is "snake oil" because "there's no legal requirements or standards for rating video games." Yet if you want to sell your video game at Walmart or Toys R Us you're going to have to get it rated by the ESRB.
You're also confused about where the "reasonable accommodations" comes in.
Requiring or claiming to provide licensure for animals outside of what the laws state and require is scummy and just confuses the issue as to what is and isn't allowed by law.
[In Los Angeles County, USA]
This is phrased rudely, but has an element of truth.
The facility (it's a county facility) wanted the therapy dog to be "licensed," and we went through the process to do some training, and got a vest, a patch, and a certificate (http://www.tdi-dog.org - I forget what the more rigorous one was). I doubt that we paid anything to TDI beyond a nominal fee, so that association of "snake oil" is off base.
But like I said, and as you note, the "therapy dog" process was highly variable, and it's not like there was some kind of national standard. And I would add that we did take unfair advantage of the airline exception for therapy dogs - this was in 2000 or so, before they really came into vogue - and I was uncomfortable with doing that, although I was overruled. ;-)
Services animals on the other hand are extensively trained at a cost upwards of $30,000 dollars. It’s really not easy to get a dog to behave like that.
Then the patient can get any pet from any source, including a backyard puppy mill, without any training whatsoever. Then certain people/organizations are required to make "reasonable accommodations," including airlines.
Even worse, there's services online that you can pay a small fee for a doctor's note. Or you can just buy an ID or vest from Amazon,that looks official, or have a friend write you a letter, it's not like the airline is realistically going to check the medical credentials of the "doctor."
You can see where this is going...This of course ends up creating a loophole used solely for avoiding pet fees airline charge and having pets in a "no pets" apartment.
It's a shame because the few bad apples ruin the bunch. People who have maladapted pets and/or no consideration for others around them cause trouble.
That being said, places required to "make reasonable accommodations" for ESAs can deny boarding to unruly pets because that's not "reasonable." But for staff it's difficult to tell how the animal would react until they actually are in the air.
In other words who cares?
If you are lacking in emotional support, and then start receiving it, you don't need science to validate your experience.
You just know.
Landlords, for one, who have to deal with tenants that argue their E.S. animal should be excepted from the "no pets" policy. Also H.R. departments (what if an employee brings a bird to work?), hospitals, and places where food is served ("Waiter! That guy's dog licked my plate!").
It's one of those situations in which the potential for abuse is pretty big, and so there's an actual interest in differentiating "this dog helps me cope with life" from "you have to allow this untrained animal here thanks to poorly defined laws and paperwork with no clear meaning".
The same rules for humans should apply. If the pet is a nuisance, or destructive, or loud or whatever, then that pet can be removed just like a human would be removed in the same circumstances.
(Not that this always happens)
>So if you want to say that “my pet makes me feel good and it’s fun,” that’s great. You don’t really need lots of evidence for that.
>But with these emotional support animals, we’re talking about what is essentially a prescription from doctors to people with clinically significant symptoms. When we talk about that, there are very specific standards of evidence for psychiatric and psychological treatment, and these have not met that standard.
The reason for the abuse of the ESA system is that there are no alternatives provided. Your only options are to torture your pet, or abuse the system. There is no amount of money you can pay to avoid it - you can't book an entire row if you wanted.
I think this issue needs to be addressed, and a process formally institutionalized to allow pets to travel with their humans. It is very rare for anyone to be bothered when a pet is on board - most of the time it brings other passengers joy - in the cases where there is a problem, easy arrangements are made that satisfy everyone.
I suppose a private flight is an option for some folks.
Outside of Cats/Dogs, if somebody sits down next to me with their Emotional Support Snake there's gonna be some loud WTFs and GTFOs and just a problem overall. Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near them on their flight beforehand? Sure. Are they going to? Nope. Better to just say there will be no gosh darn snakes on this gosh darn plane.
These are quite rare, but they happen, and the solution has always been easy and amicable: move some people around, with the dog owner making the most compromise.
> Do we need to have pet friendly/no pet flight options?
This would be great. Right now even with ESA's there is a limit on the number of pets that can be on a flight, so you would have to find a different flight if the one you wanted already had some. By no means am I suggesting there should be a free-for-all. Only to have some limited arrangement where everyone can be happy.
> Could the airline talk to individual passengers about this snake being near them on their flight beforehand?
This kind of messaging is relatively easy nowadays, ranging from a little doggy icon on the website marking a specific flight as being pet-friendly, all the way to personalized sms/emails (which are already in place).
Humans live densely, there are very few actions you can take that affect no-one in no way. We are dealing with this overly brutely in my opinion, there exists a configuration that increases net world happiness that we are not taking advantage of.
If we are going to allow people to have dogs, then our society needs to allow dogs to move through it... This seems obvious. Dogs should be allowed to go everywhere that humans go (with certain extreme exceptions).
We already have rules in place for unruly or destructive behavior, and the same should apply to dogs.
If I'm traveling and I need to stay in a hotel, I don't want anyone to fuck with me because I have my dog. He is small, and silent. No one will even know he is there, and yet, it is always a huge pain in the ass to bring him places.
For the first there should be a framework of cerification. If you want to bring an ESA it should pass third party certification with different standards for housing and flights.
For the second we should look at alternatives. If you want to fly with pet you have to pay hundreds, often well excess of your own ticket, for them to fly cargo (unless they can fly under your seat in which case it's $125). Why so high fees / bad experience? If a pet owner labels their pet ESA the pet gets to fly with them for free. Why can't pets fly free in cabin like infants under 2? If the pet is over a certain size, then person has to buy another seat (just like an older child).
I think the certification standards and equalizing experience for pets would dramatically lower potential for abuse.
These are shorter term fixes. In the long term we should keep building evidence on the question of effectiveness.