Scary SD hate going on in airline subs. Consider flagging.

I was just in r/Delta and asked the mods to lock some of the SD hate posts that are abounding over there in response to holiday travel. I encourage others to do the same. The more requests, the more seriously they’ll take it.

It’s kind of traumatic to see how much hate people have for dogs in air travel, how entitled they feel to do shame policing, and how ignorant they are of the actual requirements.

In today’s post about a black standard poodle, someone commented that they knew the specific trainer and that it was a probably a young dog in training. Still everyone was piling on.

It’s all the familiar ignorant stuff. People should have to have certifications for SDs. Poodles can’t be SDs. SDs can’t have fancy haircuts. If you can’t see the disability it’s not a SD. If it doesn’t have a vest it’s not a SD. If it doesn’t act like a marine, and paws or does anything that looks like an alert, or is not obviously on task (to them), it’s not a SD.

This totally stresses me out about taking my SD on a plane. I feel like the whole airport is just waiting for you and your dog to fail as a team, so they can jeer and throw airline pretzels at you.

When I travel I see a lot of stuff that looks odd to me, or frankly scares me (like dogs out of bags that chase other dogs), but I mind my own business.

Yesterday at the airport, I saw a yellow lab with great comportment apparently wearing an ecollar. I thought “that’s unusual, but some people are training with ecollars now and maybe the dog has hearing problems or it’s for stim in a loud environment. Maybe the owner can’t speak. I DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING.” Self trained dogs exist, bad days exist, invisible disabilities exist.

I don’t want pets running around attacking SDs and pooping and making a bad name for us, but I also think this should really be between the airline and the passenger and legislation. If the dog causes problems, it gets ejected. Otherwise we live occasionally with possible pets in our midst as the price of not having more burden of proof placed on disabled teams.

But I also don’t like non disabled people who are ignorant of the rules, variety of disabilities, and dogs supposedly policing on my behalf, stirring up gross hostility towards all dogs in airports.