By Aleksandra Craine
In early 2020 The United States Department of Transportation announced a revision to its Air Carrier Access Act. Previously, the ACAA required airlines to allow service animals on board, including the ambiguous emotional support animals (ESAs) category. This lack of clarity in the law, as well as lack of regulation and accountability, was a common target of criticism from legal scholarship and public comment alike. The revision, among other things, defines service animal narrowly as a trained dog, states that ESAs are not service animals, and allows airlines to require forms that establish training and certification of service animals. The revision was driven in large part by public misunderstanding of ESAs, including stories of “unconventional” ESAs, such as llamas and alligators, which have proliferated in the media in the last decade. Despite such stories, the overwhelming majority of support animals are still dogs.
To many, the DOT revision may seem like a good sense policy. After all, commentators across the media spectrum, including Washington Post and the New York Times, have derided those traveling with ESAs. They are called selfish, fragile, and snowflakes. They are accused of cheating the system. The politics of suspicion took hold, placing a burden of explanation on people with assistance animals. This was a call for drawing a clear line between health and debility, and between appropriate and inappropriate animal travel companions. The revision, according to the WP article, would prevent many people with ESAs from flying entirely.
As a doctoral student researching ways to improve animal-human relationships, I couldn’t help but think: instead of tightening the restrictions by drawing these exclusionary lines, why not instead relax them to make it easier to travel with all kinds of animals? Could we reframe ESAs not as furry (or scaly) entitlements, but as guides to a different way of being, an ethic of care that celebrates our interdependent relationships with animals and each other?
By excluding ESAs from air travel, we are essentially making a distinction between debility and health, and framing mental and emotional impairment in terms of an individual’s personal responsibility for their health. As debility scholar Alison Kafer (Kafer 2013) is a function of time and place; it does not exist without social meaning. By considering the anxiety of flying (for example) an issue of personal responsibility for one’s health we obscure the objective causes of this anxiety; we don’t question why airplanes and airports are such debilitating spaces.
The articles and the comments mocking and condemning ESAs are steeped in ableism, and highlight the prevalent dismissal of mental and emotional health conditions. There was a widespread belief in the rampant abuse of the system by “selfish” individuals who place their interests above public considerations. The frequent accusation of selfishness at a first glance suggests concern for public good. However, the accusation was leveled towards those with perceived impairments, as well as those perceived of simply gaming the system. A significant number of comments proposed that people who have difficulty coping with anxieties of air travel should find alternative methods of transportation, or stay home. Although these remarks do not explicitly challenge the validity of emotional conditions, there is a clear dismissive quality that once again hinges on personal responsibility for one’s health and behavior. It would be difficult to imagine an individual with visible physical disability, for instance, being told to “stay home”.
People with disabilities in general are often perceived as selfish and absorbed with their suffering, as well as a drain on the medical and welfare systems (as the cruel triage of Covid treatment perfectly illustrated). But as scholar-activist Fiona Kumari Campbell (Campbell 2012) points out, it is our ableist society that is inherently narcissistic with its relentless preoccupation with self-improvement and self-enhancement, to which I’d also add the neoliberal obsession with the pursuit of happiness.
The moral panic, and the subsequent ACAA revision also creates a sharp distinction in what kind of relationships we can have with animals in particular places. A licensed service dog is not a “pet”, it is a professional worker (obtained for a cost of up to $50,000). Pets, unlike service dogs that engage in “work” outside the home, belong to the domestic sphere of family, care, love and pleasure. “Comfort” is distinctly outlawed from the definition of a service animal. But why should these things be confined to the home? Why can’t an airplane be also made a place of care and love, as much as it is made one of misery?
And what about cats, llamas, ducks, alligators and the rest? These animals are not considered trainable, therefore they are unable to perform a real service, under the legal regulation. However, studies of veterans and therapy animals have shown that a simple touch by an animal provides significant benefit (Wlodarczyk 2019). While licensed dogs and miniature horses certainly provide invaluable services, we downplay emotional and affective labor by animals (and humans) as domestic, unproductive, or even indulgent.
Can “emotional support animal” be more than “code for the entitled excesses of a pet-obsessed society”, as the one Washington Post article put it? Could ESAs, through their connection with debility signify a relationship that not only accepts the amorphousness of illness, but actively embraces it as a fundamental part of life? Can they help create a coexistence based on the ethics of care that recognize the intersectionality of oppression, and stand against the violence inherent to social and cultural practices? That are based in relation but not reciprocity? Vulnerability but not burden?
The outrage over ESAs may seem petty and insignificant, but I see it as an opportunity to push back against the tropes of speciesism and ableism, and the relentless questioning, othering and demonizing of “unconventional” ways of being, living and thinking. A crucial aspect of the ethics of care is the radical acceptance and embrace of different knowledges and ways of life.
Sunaura Taylor, an artist, writer and activist who lives with a disability, proposed this kind of ethic in her book “Beasts of Burden” (Taylor 2017). In it she recounts a time when her grandmother told her she would never survive alone in nature. She would “die in the woods” without the care of others. “Yet my grandmother missed the fact that my able-bodied siblings would also eventually die in the woods if left alone with no human support or tools”, Taylor continues. “[…] the truth is that all of us are dependent”. We are dependent on other people, on animals, plants, microbes, minerals, chemicals, sunlight. Thus, the ethics of care must be rooted in the acknowledgment of our real, material interdependency. Instead of asserting that people who are “too fragile” to fly without an ESA should stay home, we must question our own fragility.