This past month, millions of Americans traveled for the holidays, and as one of those Americans, I noticed a staggering amount of dogs in service vests at the airport. They were in line waiting to check in. They were at security checkpoints. They were at gates waiting for departure. The sheer number of them raised two questions. How are there so many service dogs? And, a more skeptical one: Are all these dogs really trained service dogs?
What I found out is that while flying with service dogs is a necessity for people living with disabilities, there are also people who see service dog designation as a loophole that allows them to fly with their pooch for free. Traveling with a dog in cabin is difficult, and people have figured out a way to do it.
But the problem at hand is that these faux service dogs aren’t trained to be on a plane and create a frustrating experience for the people around them. People living with disabilities and service dog trainers also told me that they can be seriously detrimental to actual, medically necessary service dogs and distract them from doing their tasks, especially in an emergency. That probably isn’t something someone taking advantage of the rule is thinking about, but it certainly should be.
On the one hand, airlines and officials want to be accommodating, but at the same time people abusing this privilege are implicitly (and perhaps unintentionally) making life tougher for those people that really rely on service dogs. Figuring out a way to close the loophole without doing harm is like putting the genie back in the bottle. Or, I suppose, much tougher than getting a French bulldog into a service dog vest.
—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent
