Service dogs can perform an extraordinary range of tasks for people with disabilities, from guiding someone with vision loss to alerting a person to a medical emergency or helping someone with PTSD manage a psychiatric episode. But as the ways service dogs assist people have expanded, public understanding of their role has not always kept pace. In fact, there’s often confusion on the part of the public, store owners, and even on occasion law enforcement, about service dogs, how they are identified and where they are allowed to go.
That’s understandable, as there’s actually no legal requirement for a service dog to wear a special identification, tag, or vest. Nothing has to visibly distinguish a service dog from a therapy dog, emotional support dog, or even a family pet.
And not every dog in a vest is a service dog. Anyone can go online to purchase a “service dog in action” vest for their animal. This has caused confusion in cases where owners use vests or “certificates” to misrepresent their dogs as service animals. But a vest or certificate does not establish that a dog is a service animal.
What does define a service dog is the work or tasks the dog has been trained to perform for a person with a disability. The ADA does not require professional training, certification, or a set number of training hours, and people with disabilities may train their own dogs. Still, professionally trained service dogs usually undergo extensive preparation in task work, public behavior, and working with their handlers.
Where are Service Dogs Allowed?
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), service dogs are generally allowed at almost all areas open to the public including businesses and state and local government facilities. There are only a few exceptions. A service animal may be excluded from places if its presence would change the nature of a service or program, or if it would create a real safety problem. For example, a hospital may keep service dogs out of a sterile area. A zoo may keep them away from exhibits with animals that dogs might hunt, or that might hunt dogs. Otherwise, a handler can be asked to remove a service dog from an ADA-covered premises if the dog is not housebroken or if the dog is out of control and the handler is unable to control it.
In a business or other area covered by the ADA, if it is not apparent that a dog is a service animal, staff may ask only two questions: “Is the dog required because of a disability?” and “What work or task has the dog been trained to perform?” They may not ask about the person’s disability, request documentation, or require the dog to demonstrate its work.
Service Dogs Help With Disabilities You Can’t Always See
Many of the disabilities that service dogs help with aren’t always apparent. In addition to people with sight or mobility limitations, individuals with hearing loss or medical conditions like epilepsy may rely on a service dog. Service dogs can also provide vital support for people with PTSD, severe anxiety, depression, and other disabling mental health conditions.
What matters under the ADA is training. A psychiatric service dog may be trained to take a specific action when its handler needs it. Depending on a person’s needs, that might mean interrupting an anxiety episode, providing grounding, performing safety checks, retrieving medication, or helping its handler move to a safer environment. That assistance can enable some people to participate more fully in daily life.
What Are Therapy and Emotional Support Dogs?
Two other types of dogs provide valuable support services, but their roles differ from ADA-covered service dogs. Therapy dogs are generally trained to visit and provide comfort or companionship to multiple people in settings such as hospitals, schools, nursing homes, and other facilities. Emotional support animals provide comfort or emotional support to one person, but they are not trained to perform a disability-related task. These dogs have a valuable role to play, but they are not considered covered service animals under the ADA.
Service Dogs Change Lives
Service dogs can provide greater independence, but partnering with one also comes with significant responsibilities for daily care. They can also add complexity (and sometimes stress) to something as simple as a trip to the store, if their presence invites unwelcome comments or interactions from members of the public.
Service dogs change lives by allowing individuals access to spaces they might not otherwise be able to access. Today, thousands of service dogs provide mobility, guidance, medical alert, autism, and mental health support to people worldwide. But the hundreds of hours of training in task work, public behavior, and handler partnership to train a dog can translate into a financial investment of thousands of dollars.
At Montlick, we’ve seen the way service dogs can positively impact the lives of veterans, which is why we are helping to fund the training of these animals. But there are many more veterans who could benefit from a service dog, and we hope that others will be inspired to join us on this mission.
This Veterans Day, please consider supporting Top Dogg K9 Foundation which rescues, trains, and pairs service dogs with disabled U.S. military veterans at no cost to them. You can also tune in to this year’s telethon on 11Alive on Veterans Day, November 11, to hear from veterans and see these dogs at work.
