Dining with Dogs In the past few years, it appears that more people have dogs as pets and don’t want to leave them at home when they dine out . This is starting to create a problem for restaurants as customers want to bring their dogs inside of restaurants and eat with them at the table . This creates a conflict for the owner of the establish- ment as only service dogs are allowed into restaurants . So, what exactly is a service dog ? According to the Americans in Disabilities Act (ADA) a service dog is defined as Service animals are defined as dogs that are indi- vidually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities.
Examples of such work or tasks include guiding people who are blind, alerting people who are deaf, pulling a wheelchair, alerting and protecting a person who is having a seizure, reminding a person with mental illness to take prescribed medications, calming a person with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) during an anxiety attack, or performing other duties. Service animals are working animals, not pets. The work or task a dog has been trained to provide must be directly related to the person’s disability. Dogs whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support do not qualify as service animals under the ADA. As you can see from the above definition emotional support and comfort dogs do notqualify as service animals. A restaurant owner is not allowed to ask the dogs owner what his disability is , but instead can ask , what service does the dog provide ? The acceptable answer is one of those listed in the definition . There is no national tag or certificate that identifies a service dog and you are not allowed to ask for anything like that . If a person presents a doctors note stating that it is an emotional support or comfort dog this does not qualify the dog as a service animal, as a matter of fact they are specifically excluded under thelaw. ( Check with your local jurisdiction in regards to this) A service dog must be under the owner’s control at all times and cannot walk around the establishment. There are only two reasons that you can remove a service dog from the establishment. 1) it is not housebroken 2) the owner is not controlling the service dog or is not attempting to control it. Dogs that are trained as service dogs are usually well controlled and should not cause a problem. So, what do you as an owner do when someone has a dog in your establishment and it is identified as “ an emo- tional support dog“ ? That is up to do . Most health departments will cite a violation if it is not a service dog as identified in the ADA . The choice is to explain the regulation to the customer, show them a copy of the law and hope that they under- stand , you can explain the regulation and make a one-time exception or you can ask them to leave, it is depen- dent on how you want to handle it . Unfortunately, in today’s world a dissatisfied customer will write one or more awful yelp review or something along those lines . There are many foods safety hazards that are associated with a dog in a restaurant . The most observed issue is staff petting and playing with the dog and then serving food without washing their
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