You’re sitting at a cafe with your friend when suddenly a woman walks in with a toy poodle in her purse. The manager at the counter informs her “I’m sorry, but we do not allow dogs”. She replies with a heavy sigh and a “She’s a service dog. She can come with me”. Not knowing much about service dog law, and worrying about getting sued for asking further questions, he sits this woman down at a booth. There, she promptly unzips her purse and places the dog on the booth seat next to her. When the woman’s food comes out, the little dog begs and she feeds her bits off her plate. This dog is not public access trained, and proceeds to bark at those who walk by. This dog is a nuisance and causes many in the restaurant to complain. The manager cannot do anything but inform the unhappy customers that this is a service dog, so he can’t ask her to leave. In the end, it’s the customers who end up leaving.
Now I walk in with my highly trained service dog pressed against my leg in a perfect heel position, and I’m quickly bombarded by the manager telling me “No dogs! No dogs! We ALL know what happened last time”. Confused, I tell him “This is my medical alert and medical response service dog. Her right to accompany me is protected under federal law.” With a sigh, he seats me at a table far away from others where my dog promptly tucks under my feet, out of sight. When my food arrives my dog is still tucked tightly under the table because she knows she’s not supposed to eat when she’s on duty. She stays there ignoring those who walk past for the remainder of my meal. When we leave, a woman by the door exclaims “Woah, I didn’t know there was a dog here!”
See the difference?
Scenario number two occurs at a local grocery store when a man decides to bring his certified emotional support animal into the store with him. Upon entering he flashes a fancy ID card and certification papers. This dog is not as unruly as the first, but he still forges ahead of his handler, sniffs the food on display, and may seek attention from those who walk past. You find this dog adorable, and when he and his owner walk past you ask to pet him. The owner says yes and explains how all he had to do was go online, register his dog, and a few weeks later they sent him a vest, ID card, and certification papers.
Now I pull into the same grocery store. I’m in a rush to get an ingredient for a dish I’m making so I hurry into the store with my service dog next to me. I’m quickly stopped by a manager who demands to see my service dog’s certification card. Remember, this is NOT required by law, and most real service dog teams don’t have them. After 15 minutes of trying to educate, pulling up the ADA website on my phone, back and forth bickering, and drawing more of a crowd than I want to describe… I’m finally allowed in. I grab my ingredient, stand in line (where my service dog obediently moves between my legs to make space for those around me), and I get bombarded by people asking to pet my dog. I explain that she’s working, she has a very important job to do, and she’s not allowed to be pet while on duty. People walk away grumbling and complaining about how rude I was when other handlers like the man they met earlier allow their dog to be pet.
Moral of the story? Fake service dogs create real problems. The ones who are impacted the most are the true service dog handlers who rely on their dogs every day to help mitigate their disability. How would you feel if everywhere you went, you couldn’t make it 10 feet in the door because people were asking you questions? Imagine how much time that would take out of your already hectic day. Businesses lose customers because word gets out that there are unruly dogs in their store, customers become misinformed and start thinking some of these behaviors are okay, some people even start to believe the lies that anyone can just register their dog online and make him a service dog. The result? MORE fake service dogs. MORE real problems.
I will reblob this until I die because it’s one of the few things that constantly genuinely infuriates me
People who believe that small children are proof that gender roles are natural are really on a whole other level.
A young child, using words she learned purely
by mimicking
the way others speak: I want to be a mommy when I grow up.
Y’all absolute Mensa candidates: Wow. This child is a blank slate. Completely unaffected by society. Guess lady-brains truly are the only explanation here, science deniers.
Babies cry with an accent within a day of being born, and can even observe sounds while they’re still in the womb. There’s no stage of life where people aren’t already affected by socialisation, everyone who believes that nature can truly be separated from nurture is naive as fuck.
I absolutely love this post just because of the “y’all absolute mensa candidates” at the top.
So there’s this part of the mammalian brain called the neocortex. It’s the part of the mammalian brain which is basically a blank slate that just process input, figures out and predicts patterns from that input, and suborns autonomic processes to higher-level abstract patterns it works out from all that data. (On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, excellent neuroscience book, I highly recommend it). And humanity’s whole Thing is that our neocortex has become massively oversized and completely taken over our brain, to the point where it directs the action of the rest of the brain rather than the other way around like in other mammals. That’s basically our whole schtick as a species, being run by this massive blank-slate pattern matching machine rather than preprogrammed instincts.
Other mammals are instincts with some learning thrown on top, but humans are basically only learning, with some residual instincts to make sure we don’t fuck up too bad. That’s one of the reasons why humans take so much longer to develop motor skills than other species, because our brain has usurped the typical mammalian in-born neural motor programming with a blank slate that has to just like … figure that shit out on it’s own. Human babies can’t even see properly when they’re first born, even though they have perfectly functioning eyes, because our brain replaced all that silly mammalian visual recognition software with the neurological equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, a pencil, a shrug, and “you’ll figure it out, go get ‘em tiger”.
And that’s a huge advantage! Evolution can only adapt a species really, really slowly, to changing conditions over millions of years. Typical mammalian neocortices are a fantastic patch on that which allow adaptation over the course of a creature’s lifetime, but they don’t allow for that adaptation to be passed on, and it’s still just a patch on the greater impetus of evolved instincts. But humans. Ohohohoh. Humans are nothing but adaptation. Our ability to mimic and pass on behavior means that we don’t need a lot of those built up evolutionary behaviors which change so slowly, because we just can figure that shit out by mimicry and raw learning anyway. So we just ditched most of it and a lot of what’s left now comes with a “you can learn to override this if you need to” feature. It’s a way, way more flexible and adaptable system than that old clunky “being a bunch of preprogrammed mental software” thing other mammals use.
So the idea that you can assume anything about humans’ intrinsic instincts by looking at their behavior when young is just ridiculous. From the moment we’re born we are tiny pattern matching machines, intaking and copying everything around us, because we literally do not have enough instinct left as a species to exist without pattern matching other’s behavior. We can’t even fucking see without having to learn it from scratch. But yeah, I’m sure intrinsic gendered social skills and housecare aptitude made the evolutionary cut when fucking sight and walking got the axe.
Undertale fans who never read homestuck: Oh man, Toby mixed chess and playing card aesthetics in Deltarune, that’s so neat!
Homestuck fans:
Hey do y’all know that playing card and chess motifs existed for several hundred years before homestuck. I want to make sure that you know this because it’s very important to me that you know this.
I think you’ll find the first recorded work of English language literature is Homestuck, thanks though
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