Purse dogs are people, too. Or at least that seems to be the attitude of a number of dining establishments that misconstrue the laws that define which furry friends are allowed.
Service dogs are highly trained animals who assist those with a physical impairment or condition (I've recently learned about a canine that can tell when his diabetic person's blood sugar dips to dangerous levels) and welcome everywhere -- on BART, in concert halls, everywhere.
Emotional support animals (usually dogs) come in all shapes and sizes and help their people cope with conditions and life issues. Despite their sweet nature or cuteness, ESAs do not have service skills and they are not allowed inside restaurants. The only special treatment the law affords ESAs is in housing, where landlords whose buildings have "no-pet" policies can't turn them away.
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| We're all living in Patricia Marx's world now, in which it's OK to bring an alpaca to the corner store. |
But somehow, no one seems to know that. It's not just a San Francisco thing; see Patricia Marx's brilliant New Yorker piece "Pets Allowed," in which she brings increasingly outlandish animals into ever more inappropriate places to test the limits of support-animal tolerance.
I've had cafe managers tell me that they can't ask people about their support pets because of the ADA (not true). And I've had a guy who brought his German shepherd to a crowded brunch spot tell me that the dog helps with his PTSD (even as it licks the feet and faces of every diner within tongue-shot). By and large, these instances come with some measure of contrition, though there was the one purse-dog lady who moved her pooch from a bar stool (not legal) to an outside table (totally legal!) who expressed a desire for my death. (I suggested that she get a real diagnosis. Not my finest hour, but as a trauma survivor and longtime depression battler, I felt I was in my wheelhouse.)
As annoying and uncomfortable as these episodes are, and as much as I worry that the scofflaws make life harder for folks who actually rely service dogs, I always took comfort in the notion that if push came to shove, restaurants would favor paying customers over casual canines. After all, they could get shut down for having dogs on the premises. Couldn't they?
Last night, I was disabused of this notion when a friend and I decided to try Hollow Cow on Union Street, the newish place in the place that used to be Lightning, that used to be Pasta Pomodoro. After a few minutes perusing the menu at a tall two-top in the front of the house, we saw a woman enter with some kind of bulldog on a leash and take her place at a table nearby. While we took a few deep breaths (This again? Really?) the dog made its way into the loving arms and hands of a patron at the table next to ours. We tried to ignore the heavy petting -- some people are cool putting food in their mouths with the same hand that just rubbed all over a strange animals -- and continued with our chit-chat.
Then, the dog's owner returned and lifted it up onto a stool so its face was basically on the table. Just then, the waiter approached and asked what he could get us. As we jumped down from our stools and gathered our bags, I said, "You know, we were going to give you guys a try, but I can't stay at a place that lets dogs on the chairs and tables."
"Oh, that's a service dog," the waiter shot back, despite the fact that this pooch didn't even have a faux-official-looking store-bought ESA vest, let alone the service garb of a Guide Dog for the Blind.
"No, it's not," I replied, adding "You can get shut down by the health department for having dogs in a restaurant, you know."
As we walked out the door and toward one of our old standbys that's made it nearly 50 years on Union by being extremely welcoming to humans, I heard words to the effect that they were looking out for their regular customers. Good luck with that, Hollow Cow. If you treat customers like dogs and dogs like they're not going to affect your health score, you're going to need it.
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