This is a somewhat more considered crosspost from Bluesky, with a day to reflect on it.
It’s telling, I think, that a Washington Post article about people having difficulty flying with service animals following new regulations implemented in 2021 opens thusly:
The regulations were an effort to crack down on a rise in passengers passing off untrained pets as service or emotional support animals. Some travelers tried to take peacocks, pigs, ducks and even miniature horses onboard aircraft. Some animals defecated on the planes or attacked crew members, passengers and legitimate service dogs.
Apparently this was something that needed “cracking down” on, which naturally leads one to ask: how many is “some”? The Washington Post does not say. Obviously, the problem was large enough to warrant new directives to the airlines about what qualifies as a service animal, though. So how many was it? Ten thousand? A thousand? Five hundred?
In 2019, Fortune says, 1.1M passengers flew with some kind of support animal. This would represent .1% of the 1.1 billion domestic passengers that year. That year, the FAA received 1,161 reports of “unruly passengers,”—perhaps some of the incidents are reflected there? If so, it’s not broken out any further. Delta changed their policy in 2018, citing an “84%” increase in “incidents”, again not providing any actual numbers.
(For example, reported incidents going from 19 to 35 might be an 84% increase, or it might be statistical noise)
One would imagine that if a “legitimate service dog” was attacked, this might be reflected in the data which airlines are required to report about animal injuries or deaths on their planes. In 2019, the DOT recorded 2 complaints, a cockapoo that died of cancer in January and a schnauzer that was discovered dead on arrival in April—both of these clearly cases of pets dying while traveling. There were 2 incidents in 2018. In 2017, there was one. So either “attacks” on “legitimate” service dogs don’t warrant reporting, or… ...or, well, I don’t know. The numbers must be elsewhere.
(over that span of time 2504 “civil rights complaints by air travelers with disabilities” were received, as it happens)
The final ruling by the Department of Transportation, which is reflected in the Washington Post article, also doesn’t cite any figures. Well. More specifically, it doesn’t cite any figures about how many incidents have occurred. It sure as heck does cite figures about the estimated cost savings to airlines. It estimates that the rule could cost passengers with service animals $1.3M a year, while saving airlines up to $21.6M. Guess we know who wins out there.
The thing is, maybe misbehaving ESAs were a big problem on planes. Maybe they weren’t. I don’t know. But the Department of Transportation should. The FAA should. If they do, they haven’t seen fit to say. If they don’t, then they made a change impacting millions of passengers—both those traveling with animals and those passengers inconvenienced by them—based solely on a vibes check from Delta and the write-in complaints of a few concerned citizens who didn’t like the cut of some support animal’s jib.
Similar to what I said about the myth of coyotes “luring” domestic dogs, a news article about somebody flying with an emotional support python is not evidence. It means literally fuck-all. It is the journalistic equivalent of a standup comic joking about stupid warning labels. And, of course, it has the same goal, which is to frame empathy as a signifier of social decline for comic purposes.
Or: at best it is meant as comedy. At worst, it’s the same tired argument about people cheating welfare, collecting disability because they’re too lazy to work, buying steak and lobster on food stamps, with a light coat of fur on it. It’s the same insistence that American society can’t afford to help people in any way because grifters will “take advantage” of it.
You’d really think that, if there was an epidemic of “fake” ESAs causing problems—if the airlines were genuinely concerned about passenger and crew safety in the face of an actual issue instead of a folk devil—we’d know about it from more than anecdotes. One dog attack, one op-ed about how disgusted the columnist is about the selfishness of other passengers, one person with a sugar glider. They’d really be front and center with the facts.
- “Last year, 56 flight attendants were injured by animals aboard planes, 54 of them by animals brought aboard as support animals.”
- “On average, 1 out of every 17 flights is disrupted by a misbehaving animal.”
- “We spend 82,000 man-hours per quarter cleaning animal-related contamination of our passenger cabins.”
- “The final NTSB report makes it clear that the crash of Delta 12345 was directly related to an escaped emotional support badger that infiltrated the cockpit during a critical phase of flight.”
Or something. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you expect that? I would.
And that makes it really interesting that, while the DOT’s statement does not estimate the reduction in attacks or disruptive incidents that will occur as a result of their rule change, they do spend a liberal amount of time on their much larger concerns, which are people “unfairly” taking advantage of service animal exemptions, and of course the profits of the airlines (who are not allowed to charge pet fees for service animals).
Going to go out on a limb here and say this was always what “lol, emotional support peacock” was about. 1.1 million emotional support animals is a significant revenue opportunity—the DOT estimates between $54 and $59.6 million in their document justifying the rules change—Delta and Friends were being denied. Socially, it is yet another opportunity to reinforce the idea that disabilities have to be visible, tolerable, and acceptable to those around you to be worth taking seriously.
And, of course, that inconveniencing—in terms of money, time, and emotional energy—people with those disabilities is totally worth it if it prevents people who “shouldn’t” benefit from “scamming” the system. It is another dimension of the obsessive American paranoia that someone might be getting something they don’t “deserve,” which is used to justify every desire to limit public services and gut social safety nets.
By extension, that you (or your friend, or your coworker, or someone you know in con ops) saw a dog in a support-animal vest be unruly or misbehave or make a mess on the floor… well, it doesn’t mean nothing, but pretty close to it. Obviously, from a statistical point of view it doesn’t mean much as data, since the biases are clear—you notice things that are unusual.
But I think it’s worth pausing on for a moment, the way I think it’s also worth pausing on the idea that your animals are well-trained and it’s all those people who are giving ESAs a bad name. On the one hand, I think it’s obviously true, to some extent. On the other hand, I think we should always be wary of framing the discussion about what accommodations are reasonable in terms of “the good ones” and “the bad ones.”
Particularly given that, as the Washington Post hints, it’s not just that the DOT decided their most important objective was punishing freeloaders, it’s also that the regime, as implemented, puts the cost of that punishment on people with disabilities. They’re the ones who have to fill out the forms, and pay the fees, and spend the time to finance the bitching of other people upset that somebody might not really be, uh…
How did the Washington Post put it? “Legitimate”?
I mean, suppose there was a nationwide registry of ESAs, queryable for a nominal fee. The op-ed journalists so upset about the “great con” being pulled—do you suppose they’d be willing to fork over $15 to check the paperwork on the questionable dog seated next to them and have it removed for not meeting spec?
Of course not. It’s not their responsibility, is it? Accommodating people isn’t something a functioning society just does for its members in the interest of a more fair, equitable, and accessible world. It’s “special treatment” that benevolent citizens give to the sufficiently pitiable and, after all, it’s only fair to expect that they earn those acts of charity.
To reiterate: I don’t know how many incidents ESAs caused for airlines. I don’t know how many of them were caused by peacocks, or guinea pigs, or rabbits. I don’t know how many fewer incidents were reported as a result of the new policies. For some reason, those figures seem very hard to come by.
We do have data on something else, though. As the Post notes, complaints from people with disabilities about flying with service animals increased from 172 in 2019 to 451 in 2022. According to the DOT, civil rights complaints by passengers with disabilities increased over that same time period from 905 to 2095. I’ll let you figure the size of that increase yourself.
But it’s a lot more than 84%.
