Emotional Support Animals: Part One

Is an Emotional Support Animal an option for you?

Many of you may already be aware of the mental health initiative that is emotional support animals. This is a wide topic with a lot of information to grasp, so I will be presenting it in two parts.

This post will be defining and clarifying terms:

• Emotional Support Animal
• Service Animal
• The Fair Housing Act (1968)
• Americans with Disabilities Act (1990)

Part Two will be going over some of the key court cases that have lead to students being able to live with their emotional support animals on campus.

Untrained emotional support animals have been around for quite some time, but only recently have they entered the mainstream in something that can greatly improve life for people with mental illness. There’s a lot of information out there, so here are some basics to get started.

What is an Emotional Support Animal?

It can be hard to tell the difference between an emotional support animal and a regular pet. Though there are ways on the internet to get around this distinction, the real difference is that the owner of the animal has some sort of verifiable mental illness or disability that is improved by owning and living with the animal. The American Kennel Club defines it as this:

…to legally be considered an emotional support dog, the pet needs to be prescribed by a licensed mental health professional to a person with a disabling mental illness. A therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, for example, must decide that the presence of the animal is needed for the mental health of the patient.

American Kennel Club

Emotional Support Animals are also different from service animals. Service animals are defined very clearly in the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990.

What is a Service Animal?

A big part of what makes a service animal is the fact that they are trained. Most of the time they are dogs that have been highly trained for whatever service they are going to provide. Service animals can go with their assigned person and have vests on that label them as trained service dogs. They can do such things as lead people who are blind, let others know when their person is going to have a seizure, help take care of an elderly person, and more. The Americans with Disabilities Act’s website specifies that only dogs can be service animals, saying:

A service animal is any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including a physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other mental disability. Other species of animals, whether wild or domestic, trained or untrained, are not considered service animals.

ADA

This is an important distinction between what makes an animal a service animal and what makes them an emotional support animal. Dogs can be emotional support animals, but cats can’t be service animals.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968

This Act has been around for quite some time, and according to the Department of Justice website, to discriminate against someone with a disability is in direct violation to this act. They define disability as:

The Act defines persons with a disability to mean those individuals with mental or physical impairments that substantially limit one or more major life activities. The term mental or physical impairment may include conditions such as blindness, hearing impairment, mobility impairment, HIV infection, mental retardation, alcoholism, drug addiction, chronic fatigue, learning disability, head injury, and mental illness. The term major life activity may include seeing, hearing, walking, breathing, performing manual tasks, caring for one’s self, learning, speaking, or working.

Fair Housing Act

This is essential in being allowed to have an emotional support animal and not have to worry about any restrictions on animals regarded as pets. If you have an emotional support animal, legitimate with proper certification, this means any place that wouldn’t allow pets, would allow your animal because he/she technically isn’t a pet.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

The Americans with Disabilities Act was able to make the possibility of going out to public places with a service animal possible. Because of this, it is against the law to turn people away because of someone with a disability-and in turn-someone with a service animal with them. In titles I and II of the Act it talks about service animals, but it does specify when it comes to emotional support animals that:

Even though some states have laws defining therapy animals, these animals are not limited to working with people with disabilities and therefore are not covered by federal laws protecting the use of service animals.

Jacquie Brennan, Service Animals and Emotional Support Animals

So, there are a lot of things out there that reference the ADA when they talk about emotional support animals, they aren’t actually under protection by law through this act. However, there are some key court cases that pushed the matter further on a legal level, and many states have put in place their own laws protecting people with emotional support animals.

Stay tuned for my next post where I will go into more detail about these court cases, and how college students can go about getting an emotional support animal, or getting it approved.