Outside of forums, I'm on a couple of social media platforms just so my family knows I'm not dead in a ditch somewhere. (I'm an introvert, I hate phone calls. Text or email...preferably email.) Anywho because I usually don't post anything other than sarcasm and things about my boys (Basse and Marlowe) I get a lot of dog related social media,
There was an account with a sizable following that made a post featuring their GSD known for its outrageous behaviour wearing a 'service' dog vest. As a service dog handler myself, (Marlowe, medical alert 2+ years of training), people passing off ESAs as 'service' dogs is something we encounter on a regular basis. It's aggregating, but you have to learn to deal with the ignorance and stupidity of the general public in a reasonable manner.
Where I really got just irritated was the fact that this account was being 'satirical', but marched out every entitled ESA Karen reply in the book. The post was bad enough, what was worse was the comment section. People honestly thought the behavior was funny. It wasn't. It was ignorance that has the potential to adversely affect service dog teams because people being people will take that post at face value and assume that by spending the $49.99 they are now entitled to call their untrained pet a 'service' dog and take it everywhere. Real service animals usually have a minimum of two years of intensive training and are conditioned to work in a variety of situations, we're talking hundreds of hours of work with these dogs. For many, their dogs are more reliable than any tech out there and are usually significantly ahead of the curve when monitoring their owners. (Marlowe does cardiac function and has autodiatically picked up on when I get low blood sugar). They alert to seizures, cardiac episodes, blood sugar shifts, help their handlers determine when something is real or a hallucination, ground someone during a panic attack, etc...The list goes on. Service dogs are a different calibre of animal than a pet. They literally save lives and prevent injury. Yet they were treated as a joke and knowing the average understanding of the general public (US) at least 15% of the people who saw that post will take it at face value.
I did something I don't generally do. I said something on a social media platform. I was polite, but good grief, why do something so tactless. It is like allowing your kid to try and pet an on duty service animal or play with someone else's mobility aid. It wasn't funny. It was just plain stupidity and no one said anything. When something can negatively impact another demographic because people don't 'get' the joke, it stops being funny. That is bullying. It is ignorance at its finest.
Put a face to it: Say someone sees the post and buys the vest for their reactive GSD, which they then take to Voldemart on a busy Saturday afternoon. A mom is out running errands with her little boy (5). The little boy has Type 1 Diabetes. He has a task trained service dog to alert when his sugars go high or drop too low. The dog is always at least fifteen to twenty minutes faster than the boy's monitoring tech and more accurate. The dog is this little boy's lifeline. They walk down the Lego aisle to look at the Star Wars sets. The person with the GSD also wants to look at the Lego sets. The GSD sees the service spaniel and lunges. GSD's owner is taken unaware and doesn't control their dog. The shepherd attacks the spaniel and there is damage. The spaniel needs a vet ASAP.
While mom is trying to get their dog help and calm her hysterical child, the incapacitated dog misses an alert and the little boy into acute ketoacidosis. Due to the 'joke' of someone with a sizable platform a child and his service dog are now in a battle to survive because someone said a vest automatically qualifies your dog to be a 'service' dog. What is really sad, is that while my example is hypothetical it has happened before and will likely happen again because of crap like this. People need to do better.
