Could’ve Been Worse? Nags Head Nor’easter

Before last week's Nor'easter, there were steps from Katherine and Larry's deck to the beach.

Growing up in the Midwest, I’d never ever heard the word “Nor’easter” before. But then in 1997 we moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and I found out firsthand how destructive a November storm like that can be.

We lived at the ocean for two years, and every morning I’d take my Seeing Eye dog Dora out for a short walk on the beach while Mike got Gus off to the school bus. We’d meet in the kitchen then, grab a cup of coffee and bring it outside to enjoy at the top of the steps to the beach.

One particularly stormy morning, though, I knew we wouldn’t be meeting for coffee. There’d been no news of a hurricane, not even a tropical storm, but the rain seemed to be pelting down sideways. In buckets. “Hup up, Dora! C’mon, Dora!” I hurried Dora down the wooden walkway to the beach. “Hup up! Let’s go!” She did rush, but still remembered to stop at the top of the stairway. And I remembered to praise her. “Good girl,” I said, tapping the top stair with my foot to reinforce the notion that a step down is worth stopping for. Even when the rain is pelting down, and the winds seem to be rushing at 60 mph, she has to stop. “Good girl, Dora,” I repeated, then gave her the “forward” command. She didn’t budge.

“Dora, forward!” I commanded again. She wouldn’t go. I started getting mad. The rain was cold, and though we’d only been out for a minute or two, I was already soaked. the wind rushed at us, determined to knock us over. “DORA!” I yelled at her. “Forward!” I was so mad, I took a step forward myself just to show her what I meant.

It felt like Dora and I were suspended mid-air for a long time. I learned later from Mike that it was at least a six-foot drop. I had no idea how we’d ended up free-falling that way, but I was glad Dora had come along for the ride. After we hit ground, I turned my head right and left, trying to assess what had happened. I couldn’t see, of course, but looking around like that is just old habit. It took a few seconds, but I did work it out. There were no stairs. They were gone. And so was Dora. I’d lost her leash in the fall.

”Dora, come!” I screamed into the wind, hoping that somehow she’d hear me. She did. She came and stood. Right by my side. I crouched down to feel her, clutching the leash now so that we couldn’t be separated again, asking her over and over if she was okay. “I’m so sorry, Dora,” I repeated, shouting to be heard over the wind. “You were right.” I told her she was a good girl, trying to reassure her we’d be alright.

But would we? The Nor’easter had washed the stairs completely away; we’d have to climb the dune to get back to the house. Waves were creeping in at our feet, which should have been scary, I guess. I found them reassuring, though. They gave me a clue of which direction to go next. Turning my back to the sound and feel of the water, I picked up the harness and commanded, “Dora, forward!” She led me as far as she could on foot. Eventually I had to get on all fours, like her. We crawled up the dune together, side by side.

Once up the dune, Dora helped me find what was left of the walkway and we headed back to the house. I might have felt heroic, if I hadn’t been so ashamed. You see, when I stepped off that top step ahead of Dora, I’d broken one of the Seeing Eye’s cardinal rules: never get ahead of your dog. I’d put Dora and me in real danger, and I didn’t want to admit my mistake to Mike.

And so, I walked in, took Dora’s harness off, and hung it on its hook, just like normal. I might have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for the long hooded coat I was wearing. The coat was made of wool and was covered, head to foot, in sand.

Who woulda’ thought something that doesn’t even qualify as a tropical storm could cause so much havoc? Tropical storms, hurricanes and nor’easters all produce buckets of horizontal rain and high winds, but tropical storms and hurricanes usually come and go quickly. Nor’easters can hang around for days.

*******

Two of our best friends from our Outer Banks days visited us here last weekend. Katherine had visited us in Chicago before, but it was Larry’s first time here. We caught up over cocktails, enjoyed a delicious meal together and even took a long walk along Lake Michigan, the weather was so unusually beautiful in Chicago that weekend.

That's Larry and Katherine, our dear friends who live on the Outer Banks, during their visit to Chicago the first week of November. We're trying to persuade them to move here for the weather.:)

Unfortunately that was not the case when Katherine and Larry returned home. They got back to their oceanfront house in Kill Devil Hills just days before a Nor’easter hit the coast. This from a blog called Seaside Vacations:

The November Nor’easter is sticking around on the Outer Banks. The storm (really two systems; a high and a low pressure system, the low being the real “Nor’easter” and the remnants of Ida) set in late Wednesday and is very reluctant to release its grip on the OBX.

The wind and rough surf have been relentless. Due to the large waves and higher tides than normal, the beach no longer serves as a boundary for the ocean; water and debris have flowed onto the streets in many areas.

Katherine wrote to assure us they were alright, and in that Outer Banks spirit, the subject line in her email was, “Could’ve Been Worse.” You can see for yourself from the photos – they lost their steps, just like Mike and I did a decade ago. I’m afraid it may be a while before Katherine and I enjoy a glass of wine on her deck like we did last September.

Wanna be a Seeing Eye Instructor?

Last Thursday Hanni and I gave a guest lecture for an animal sciences class, and some students came up afterwards to thank me for explaining how Seeing Eye dogs are trained. “I love dogs,” one of them said. “Now I’m thinking maybe I could be a Seeing Eye dog instructor.” You know what? Maybe she could!

From the Seeing Eye Web site:

Staff instructors are full-time employees who hold college degrees from various fields of study and have successfully completed three years of specialized on-the-job training. They relate well to dogs and people and are physically fit, since their jobs are physically demanding and involve working outdoors in all weather. Some of our current instructors came from teaching, business consulting and rehabilitation fields. Some were in the military and worked with dogs before, and many started out as kennel assistants here at The Seeing Eye.

A Seeing Eye trainer demonstrates how dogs learn to negotiate obstacles.

When people ask me about training guide dogs, I always remind them that they won’t just be working with dogs. They’ll be working with people, too. We blind folks are all different ages, and we have all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences behind us. Some of us are newly blind and still adjusting, others have been blind our entire lives. Although some of us might be easy to work with, a lot of us are brats. We test our teacher’s patience.

The Puppy Place (a Web site created by a group of volunteers who raise puppies for guide dog schools) says it well:

Guide Dog trainers must work with a variety of dogs within a given size range. A great deal of walking and upper body strength is required to mold hyper young dogs into responsible workers. In the beginning, when working with dogs alone, this may not seem bad, but soon the apprentice must team dog training with people training. You can’t leash correct your blind student, or give him/her a dirty look and expect the undesired behavior or wrong actions to stop. You must verbally communicate while physically managing to keep up with the dog. Coming out of yourself to work with both dogs and people is a special skill and not one to be taken lightly.

Schools receive literally hundreds of applications a year from people who want to train guide dogs, so even opportunities to become an apprentice are rare. Most guide dog schools do require instructors to do an apprenticeship, and some apprenticeships last as long as four years. From my observation, apprentices work very hard. And from what I hear, salaries are quite low. I have no idea what people are paid once they pass the apprenticeship and become full-fledged instructors. Considering that guide dog schools are non-profit organizations, I would guess the pay is far below what a lot of today’s college educated people expect to earn.

If you’re looking for job satisfaction, though, this kind of work must be pretty dang rewarding! For general information about working for The Seeing Eye, contact:

Human Resources
The Seeing Eye
P.O. Box 375
Morristown, NJ 07963
or email jobs@seeingeye.org.

What Happens When Seeing Eye Dogs Retire?

“How much does Hanni weigh?”

That was the first question asked after our presentation at Jackson Middle School in Orlando Friday. Not a bad question, really. Just one I hadn’t heard after any of the talks I’d given before.

Seems every time we visit a school, one of the kids in the audience comes up with a new question. If I think it through later, I can usually figure out why that particular subject matter came up.

Take the time I went to Hendricks School on the south side of Chicago, for example. The kids there came from families with low incomes, but they had the same curiosity, and they asked similar questions, as the kids I visit in well-to-do suburbs. You know, things like “How do you know if it’s time to wake up?” and “Is it scary being blind?”

Beth and Hanni both enjoy watching the White Sox. Illustration from “Hanni and
Beth, Safe & Sound.”

Hendricks is located near White Sox park, and since Safe & Sound has an illustration of Hanni and me watching a ballgame, the kids had all sorts of questions about that. “What if you got hit by a ball?” I told them we try to sit under netting. “What if there’s a hole in the net?” I told them Mike usually comes with us to ballgames, so he warns me if a ball is coming. “What if he is going to get hot dogs so he isn’t there and the ball comes?” The ballgame questions went on and on. And it was really, really fun.

Jackson Middle School in Orlando was not that different from Hendricks. I found out from teachers there that a significant number of kids who attend Jackson are homeless. With that in mind, I emphasized how important it is to find someone you can trust, I talked about the trust Hanni and I have in each other, how we work as a team. “We’ve worked together eight years,” I Said. “We have a strong bond. We know each other very, very, well.” Hanni is nine, I told them, and most Seeing Eye dogs retire at around ten years old.

The teacher broke in then. “What happens after they retire?” she asked. I explained my three options:

• I could bring Hanni back too the Seeing Eye, and they’ll find someone to adopt her, or
• we could find a friend who wants to adopt her, or
• we could keep her as a pet, and when I bring my new Seeing Eye dog home we’d have two dogs.

Later on LouisLuis, the boy who had asked how much Hanni weighed, had another question. I answered, then asked if he’d mind answering one for me. “How come you wanted to know how much she weighed?”

The answer was simple. He lived in an apartment where they only let you have dogs who weigh less than 45 pounds. “I was hoping I could adopt Hanni when she retires, but I guess not.” he said, the disappointment obvious in his voice.

LouisLuis is just one of many, many people who admired Hanni during our trip to Florida. She wowed the audience at our Playing by Ear session at the Early Childhood Association of Florida conference Saturday morning, and then again during our book signing at UrbanThink Bookstore that afternoon.

I had a lot of support from family and friends in Orlando. Among them Brian, Jennifer Amodt (Jen's my niece, Brian is her squeeze), and my nephew Robbie Amodt.

I’m composing this message using my laptop on our flight back to Chicago, still marveling at the wonders of technology: my computer is calling out the letters into my headphones as I type, even way up here thousands of miles in the sky.

Pilot just came on telling us to shut down electronic devices, gotta go. Oh, but in case you were wondering: Hanni weighs 63 pounds.

Gillian’s Isle

Ask any guide dog user. They’ll tell you. When a guide dog encounters a fellow worker, the two dogs seem to act…well…respectful of each other.

We had a chance to experience this phenomenon at the Outer Banks of North Carolina last week. I did a book signing at Manteo Booksellers there, and a friend piloted his plane in for the event.

Yes, fans, you read that right. Someone actually flew in for the chance to purchase a copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound. Our friend Brand is a physics professor at North Carolina State. He has his pilot’s license and owns a share of a small plane.

That's Bridgette, off-harness on the ground, and Gillian on the wing of Brand's plane as they arrived in Manteo.

Brand’s wife Sue came along for the ride, and they invited a friend to fly with them, too. Their friend, Gillian Lindt, was the first woman to serve as dean of faculty for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. Gillian is in her 70s now, and she has macular degeneration. She found a white cane frustrating, so she decided to train with a guide dog instead. From The Guideway, a publication of the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind:

Lindt partnered with Bridgette, a Labrador/Poodle cross in 2005. “Bridgette is a perfect match for my lifestyle and personality,” she says.

Bridgette was also a perfect match for Hanni. Mike, Hanni and I stayed with our friends Katherine and Larry Bray during our four-night stay at the Outer banks. The Brays live right on the ocean, and they generously invited Brand and his brood to come over and share the ocean deck with us once the book signing was finished.

Katherine and Larry are dog lovers, and they marveled at the way Bridgette and Hanni lay motionless at our feet, eyeing each other up as we humans chatted away overhead. One couldn’t help but wonder what the two dogs thought of each other. I pictured them in one of those New Yorker cartoons, you know, the ones where readers are invited to write in with suggested captions.

That's Katherine Bray and I enjoying a glass of wine on Katherine and Larry's splendid oceanfront deck.

Needless to say, the Brays were tickled to provide a little R&R for not just one, but two working dogs. They spoiled us humans, too, supplying us with a tasty crushed lemonade/mint drink to enjoy. As Katherine pressed the chilled glasses into our hands, she said, “If y’all want vodka in there, too, just let me know!” Gillian was happy to take Katherine up on the offer. “I’m not driving home,” she laughed. And after all, it was yappy hour.

Hanni and Bobbie: Two Award-Winning Guide Dogs

Last Friday Bark Magazine sent me the link to a story in the Daily Telegraph about a blind Border Collie who has his own guide dog.

Black and white hound Clyde is totally blind and relies on his partner and fellow collie Bonnie to guide him everywhere.

She stays inches from Clyde’s side while guiding him on walks or to food or water, and lets him rest his head on her haunches whenever he becomes disorientated.

The blog editor at Bark wondered if I had anything interesting to say about the story. “If so,” she wrote, “would you be willing to write a guest blog for us about it?”

I was tempted to write something about training Hanni to let me rest my head on her haunches when I become “disorientated,” but I resisted. The post I ended up writing is titled Guide Dogs for Cats and Dogs? and was published on their web site this morning. A few paragraphs from the Bark blog post :

I’ve heard a number of stories about dogs acting as guides for blind animals. One news story—about a dog who guided a blind cat to safety after Hurricane Katrina—was even made into a children’s book.

I learned about Two Bobbies: A True Story of Hurricane Katrina, Friendship, and Survival at the ASPCA Henry Bergh Childrens Book Award ceremony last month. Named in honor of ASPCA founder Henry Bergh, the award honors books that “promote the humane ethic of compassion and respect for all living things.”

Unable to resist an opportunity for shameless self-promotion, at this point in the Bark blog I point out that my own children’s book won a Henry Bergh children’s Book award in 2008.

As difficult as it was to give up our crown, Hanni and I were thrilled to learn we’d be handing it over to the likes of Two Bobbies.

The post goes on to describe the newest Henry Bergh book award winner:

During Hurricane Katrina, evacuating New Orleans residents were forced to leave their pets behind. Bobbi the dog was initially chained to keep her safe, but after her owners failed to return, she had to break free. For months, Bobbi wandered the city’s ravaged streets, dragging her chain behind her, followed by her feline companion, Bob Cat. After months of hunger and struggle, the two Bobbies were finally rescued by a construction worker helping to rebuild the city. When he brought them to a shelter, volunteers made an amazing discovery about the devoted friends—Bob Cat was actually blind! He had survived the aftermath of the storm by following the sound Bobbi’s chain made as she dragged it along the ground.

You can read the Guide Dogs for Cats and Dogs? post in its entirety
at Bark’s Dogblog. Enjoy!

Bomb-Sniffer Dogs

A story on All Things Considered last Monday reported that U.S. soldiers are teaching Iraqi security forces how to use bomb-sniffer dogs. The NPR reporter interviewed Army Staff Sgt. Aaron Meier, an American adviser to the Iraqi National Canine Program.

“The greatest tool you have in your inventory when working with dogs is love. A lot of dogs, that’s what they work for, just your affection,” Meier says.

When I heard the story on the radio, I knew exactly what Sgt. Meier meant. I’ve seen – okay, felt—how affection motivates dogs to do a good job. Just like bomb-sniffer dogs, Seeing Eye dogs work for love, too.

Realizing this connection, I contacted Lisa, the blog moderator at The Bark to see if she’d be interested in having me write a guest post about the NPR story. She was!

Lisa is familiar with my writing — The Bark has published a few of my stories in their magazine. It’s a thrill to be connected with a magazine that also publishes stories by the likes of Ann Patchett and Augusten Burroughs. If you’ve never heard of The Bark, here’s a description of the four-color glossy magazine from their web site:

Taking the magazine’s slogan to heart—Dog Is My Co-Pilot—Bark became the first magazine to tap into the exploding phenomena of dog culture and lifestyle, focusing on the growing bond between individuals and their pet companions.

You can read my latest guest blog at The Bark’s site and link to other Bark stories there, too—if you like dogs, trust me, you’ll like The Bark.

Bloggin’ at The Bark

Hanni is my co-pilot. (Photo by Kaitlyn Cashman)

A story in the San Francisco Weekly last week described Tita, a Chihuahua service dog who works with a man suffering from bipolar disorder. A happy, feel-good story, except for one thing.

Tita bites people.

“She’s vicious,” Esler says with a smile, cradling the dog, which licks his face with abandon.

Once the story hit the newsstands, I was contacted by the blog moderator at The Bark. She wanted to know if I’d be willing to write a guest post about the service dog who bites.

What? You call yourself a dog lover, and you’ve never heard of The Bark?! Here’s a description of the four-color glossy magazine from their web site:

Taking the magazine’s slogan to heart—Dog Is My Co-Pilot—Bark became the first magazine to tap into the exploding phenomena of dog culture and lifestyle, focusing on the growing bond between individuals and their pet companions. Over the past ten years, Bark has chronicled the America’s love affair with dogs, the evolving status of canine pets and their role in society, as well as the incredible rise in services and products. Bark has become the recognized expert on the social/cultural world of dogs in America, and what they mean to us.

Bark’s impeccable pedigree includes publishing many of today’s most acclaimed authors including Ann Patchett, Augusten Burroughs, Rick Bass, Amy Hempel, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver.

Hmm. Must be a proofreading error there. Somehow they left award-winning Children’s book author Beth Finke off that list. Because, of course, I’ve published a few articles in The Bark, too. It’s always a thrill to be contacted by their staff — it gives me the opportunity to brag that I write for the same magazine Ann Patchett writes for! You can read my guest blog at The Bark’s site and link to other Bark stories there, too—if you like dogs, trust me, you’ll like The Bark.

Click and Clack Clicked Here

The Tappet Brothers knew they had to link to my blog after seeing this groovy picture of my sisters and me in front of Cheryl’s lime green 1967 Mustang.

You’ve heard of an NPR show called Car Talk, right? Tom and Ray Magliozzi? Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers? Well, then you can imagine what fun it was to hear my talking computer sing out Doug Mayer’s name from my in box the other day.

Doug Mayer is the head writer of Car Talk and the producer of the radio show’s website. And as all Car Talk fans know, Doug Mayer is not a slave to fashion. Doug Mayer had emailed me to let me know he liked the post I’d written about driving the 2010 Mustang. He liked that post so much, in fact, that he added it to the “Links We Like” Section of the Car Talk website! This is no small thing – cartalk.com receives more than 400,000 unique visitors per week. You read that right: more than 400,000 unique visitors a week.

Hanni didn’t seem at all excited about the attention we might get from this great news. She did, however, take notice when my talking computer started barking out a bio of Doug Mayer’s dog Chloe from the Car Talk website:

Chloe Mayer is Car Talk’s Assistant Staff Canine.

Chloe commutes to Car Talk Plaza with Doug Mayer, her human companion. At Car Talk, her primary responsibility is to greet visitors, shake her tail so violently that her butt knocks over boxes, and bark menacingly when a visit from weird Bob next door is impending.

When not on duty at Car Talk Plaza, Chloe is responsible for keeping a number of beds at Mayer’s home office warm and fur covered, and staying on guard against the constant threat posed by possible Fed Ex, UPS-guy or Jehovah’s Witness visits.

In her 22 hours of free time each day, Chloe enjoys sleeping, running alongside skiers, sleeping, hiking, trail running, compost-pile excavation and cataloging, mindless retrieving of objects of all kinds and sleeping.

Now, that’s one job any working dog would love. I’m afraid Hanni is envious.

Obama’s Book Club

An NPR story called Obama: A New Force in Publishing describes how our president is helping authors sell books.

When he’s seen reading a book on a plane or carrying one in his hand during his travels, it can create a stir. When Obama was photographed holding Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, the book’s sales bumped immediately, and requests for media interviews with the author surged.

Now, that’s the sort of surge I’d love to experience! So here’s my plan: I’m going to send a copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to the schools the Obama kids go to. Both Obama daughters attend Sidwell Friends School, but Sidwell’s lower school is in Bethesda, Maryland — that’s where Sasha attends second grade. Malia is in fifth grade, and that’s part of the middle school, located on the same campus as the high school in Northwest Washington.

I’ll send a letter along with each book, explaining the visits Hanni and I make to schools. I’ll tell them about our dear friends in Alexandria, Virginia. “We visit Pick and Hank a lot,” I’ll write.” Next time we’re in town, Hanni and I would love to come visit your students.” I suppose the Sidwell Friends School gets barraged with offers like this, but am hoping my letter might stand out:

• I live in Chicago, and that’s where the Obama girls are from.
• it’s rumored Melee and Sasha will be getting their new dog as an Easter present tomorrow, so dogs will be all the rage at the school.
• Because I can’t see, I won’t know which of the kids in the school are the Obamas. This means I won’t gawk.

I came up with this great idea (to send a book to Sidwell) months ago, when the Obamas first announced that the girls would be attending that school. But as Thomas Edison liked to say, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” So far I haven’t worked up one bead of sweat composing the letter, much less addressing the envelopes or asking Hanni to guide me to the post office to slide the packets into the mail. Now that I’ve put this idea out to the public in this blog post, though, I have to do it, right?

My fantasy, of course, is that Sidwell asks Hanni & me to come. Malia and Sasha love our presentation so much that they take Safe & Sound home from the school library. Their dad greets them on the White House lawn when they return from school, and they hand the book over to him before receiving their hugs. Snap! Snap! Snap! The cameras start clicking, and next thing you know President Obama is pictured hugging his girls with one arm, the other arm hugging a copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound. This could be bigger than…well…bigger than Oprah.

From the NPR story:

Perhaps, Seroy (Jeff Seroy, a publicist for the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux} likes to say — only half in jest — Obama will have the kind of influence on book sales that his supporter Oprah Winfrey has had.

“I think there’s room for two Oprahs, and I think if there is a new Oprah, Oprah will be happy that Obama is the new Oprah,”

Helper Parrots & Guide Horses: Where to Draw the Line?

Yesterday’s Day to Day programon National Public Radio (NPR) aired a story called Helper Parrots, Guide Horses Face Legal Challenges.

Day to Day, January 2, 2009 • Chances are you’ve seen a blind person accompanied by a guide dog.  But what about a guide horse, a service parrot or a monkey trained to help an agoraphobic?

These are just a few of the nontraditional service animals that are used across the country to help people with disabilities and psychological disorders.

As their uses are expanding, however, the government is considering a proposal that would limit the definition of “service animal” to “a dog or other common domestic animal.”

Day to Day host Alex Cohen interviewed Rebecca Skloot, the author of an article in the New York Times Magazine called Creature Comforts – Assistance Animals Now Come in All Shapes and Sizes.

Rebecca Skloot outlines why many people are upset about the pending law. Sometimes less familiar animals make better helpers, she tells Alex Cohen.The NPR story described how Sadie, a parrot, helps a man who suffers from bipolar disorder.  The parrot can sense when he is on the verge of a psychotic episode and talk him down. Richard, a bonnet macaque monkey, helps a woman get through the day without debilitating panic attacks.  And Panda, a miniature guide horse, guides a woman who is blind.

Skloot spent many hours observing how a miniature horse named Panda helped a blind woman named Ann Edie.  Even after all her preparatory research, Skloot was blown away.

“I could sort of envision how a horse could guide a person. But the level at which Panda guides her is amazing. In just a few blocks, I saw her maneuver around things that I, as a person that’s sighted, wouldn’t have thought of.”

When it comes to getting into airports, restaurants and other public places with a service animal, the ADA allows employees to ask a person if the animal is a service animal, and if the animal is required because of a disability. Documentation of the person’s disability or the animal’s training can NOT be required as a condition for providing service to an individual accompanied by a service animal.

In other words, people don’t have to prove they are disabled or that their pets are service animals in order to have those animals accompany them into a public place. All a person has to do is claim a disability and say their pet has been trained to provide assistance. No questions asked.

This is just one of many reasons the government is considering revising the definition of “service animal” in the American’s with Disabilities Act – it’s not simply because bigoted dog lovers want to keep other animals off the list.

A piece I wrote for The Bark about a teenager who sat next to me on a plane helps explain:

“I’m an only child. Rusty’s like a brother to me.”
Unwilling to have their German Shepherd fly as cargo on family vacations, her dad came up with a solution. “My dad wears sunglasses,” she said with a laugh. “He acts like he’s blind, and pretends our German Shepherd is a Seeing Eye dog.  He even, like, had somebody at the leather shop make one of those harness things for Rusty.”  She was really laughing now. Can you believe that?”

I could. In fact, this was the second time I’d been given a firsthand account of someone faking blindness to get a dog into an airport. I’ve heard stories, too, about people faking or exaggerating other maladies in order to get their animals on board with them.

“We are getting more and more complaints about service dogs,” a specialist on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) information line told me. She said that most complaints come from business owners. People with guard dogs, attack dogs, therapy dogs, companion dogs, and even security dogs are calling their dogs “service” animals to get them special privileges. “We just tell businesses to let the dogs in,” she said. “Otherwise they’re asking for a lawsuit.”

I guess “reasonable accommodation” is just a one-way street, then? Doesn’t seem fair to me.

Those of us with legitimate service animals suffer when others fake or exaggerate a disability so they can bring their pets wherever they go. Last year I was stopped while trying to get into a Cubs game at Wrigley Field with Hanni. The man taking tickets said he didn’t know if the dog was allowed. I pointed to Hanni’s harness, told him she was a Seeing Eye dog. He was skeptical.

Turns out that a week earlier someone had brought their puppy to Wrigley, claiming the dog was a service dog. The dog misbehaved, and fans sitting nearby complained. After that, the people working the gates were told to scrutinize anyone coming in with a service dog.

In addition to being despicable, faking a disability to gain privilege is fraud. It also results in increased scrutiny of people with legitimate disabilities. I’ve had this happen at Crate and Barrel on Michigan Avenue. And at Andy’s Jazz Club on Hubbard. At Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop on State Street.

I was stopped at the door at each place. At the first two, the doorman checked with a supervisor before letting me through. At Jimmy John’s, they just kicked Hanni and me out. We haven’t been back.

The Seeing Eye is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. As the very first school in the US to train guide dogs for the blind, Seeing Eye pioneers worked long and hard to open the doors and give our dogs public access. I can tell you stories and stories of people who have faked blindness or other disabilities to get their pet dogs into public places. I have no problem allowing qualified service animals of any type – horses, monkeys, parrots — into public places with their disabled human companions. I just worry that opening ADA legislation to even more animals who may not truly be qualified could possibly ruin the good name our Seeing Eye pioneers have worked so hard to build over the years.

You can read more about the proposed legislation in Skloot’s article in The New York Times Magazine and see photos of her blog.