Service Animals
rskloot | October 25, 2009
Today was a big day for non-canine service animal news, which I keep tabs on here as part of ongoing follow up to my New York Times Magazine article, Creature Comforts, about the use of non-canine service animals (which include ducks, monkeys, horses, goats, and at least one kangaroo). The biggest news is that a court in Missouri has rejected the discrimination case filed by Debby Rose, who I featured in my story. She was forbidden to bring her Macaque monkey Richard into local businesses, despite the fact that she says he's a service monkey trained to help with her agoraphobia (Richard…
rskloot | March 24, 2009
Today, in their segment called "Seeing Eye Horse Shocks Store Patrons," Good Morning America featured a woman riding her full sized "Seeing Eye horse" through the grocery store (pictured left). In doing so, it made one of the most common media mistakes: focusing on the quirk factor (woman riding horse in store!) at the expense of the issues involved. The result is a classic oversimplification of a complex story that's pretty misleading about the use of horses as service animals: Most non-canine service animal
users are not, in fact, people who ride horses through stores.
As far as I…
rskloot | February 28, 2009Okay, so Culture Dish is now back from it's short down time for mourning (and finishing my massive pre-tenure dossier, which was due yesterday and looked something like this).  Lots of posting to catch up on. Â
First, this: Â After reading my recent NYTimes Magazine story on the use of non-canine service animals and the surrounding political turmoil (plus all the follow up here), two producers contacted me about doing a documentary on the subject. I'm not formally involved in the project, but I've talked to them at length, and their idea seems like a good one. Â They're hoping to get in…