You wouldn’t bee-lieve what one man’s emotional support animal is.
According to Arizona resident David Keller, registering for an emotional support animal is too easy — so he decided to make a point of showing just how easy it is.
He took to a website called USA Service Dog Registration and registered a hive of bees as his support animal. Lo and behold, his application was accepted.
“A lot of people thought it was hilarious and a lot of people were getting upset,” Keller told CBS-affiliate WTRF-TV.
In a photo of his application, Dog #1 is listed as “bee hive” and is listed as a support for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Also included is a photo of an active beehive.
The idea was born from something Keller saw a month ago: a suspiciously untrained service dog.
“I could very easily tell that it was not a service animal because it was pulling the owner to the parking lot,” he said. “I was thinking that it’s just too easy to get these animals to be service animals.”
According to U.S. federal law, only dogs are recognized as service animals. A service dog, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) states, must be “individually trained to do work or perform tasks for a person with a disability.”
Ontario has a similar law, as outlined in the Ontario Service Dogs Act, which says that a “service dog” refers to a dog that is trained as a guide for a person with a disability or is receiving training to become a guide.
Service dogs can be helpful for people with autism or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and can also be used as companion pets or in intervention services, according to National Service Dogs.
Laws around what constitutes an emotional support animal vary by province, and are widely unrepresented in Canadian law.
READ MORE: Guide dog owners call for national standard to regulate service animal training, ownership
So, of course, in both the U.S. and Canada bees aren’t allowed as official service animals, but the aim of Keller’s trick was to prove that websites offering paid service dog registration services are “silly” and demean the importance of the service.
“They’re very silly. They don’t mean anything,” Jaymie Cardin, a service dog trainer, told WTRF-TV. “You can go pay for a registry on one of those websites and basically you’re just paying for a piece of paper and to put a name on a list.”
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