An Explosion of ‘Comfort Pets’ on Planes

It’s been quite a while since I’ve received a lot of hate mail. (Who can forget the historic Bagpipes Debacle of 2018?) So, I thought it might be time to write about a topic that is sure to anger many people. This topic was suggested to me by a reader, after I wrote two columns last month about my vacation trip to Florida. I focused mainly on the trials and tribulations of traveling nowadays on commercial airlines, and when those essays appeared in the newspaper, the email note said, “You didn’t mention the most annoying aspect of air travel — the explosion of comfort pets on airplanes.”

Well, if comfort pets are indeed exploding on airplanes, that would be very annoying, not to mention a real challenge for the cleaning crew once the plane landed. But I think the reader was using the word “explosion” to mean the “proliferation” of comfort pets on airliners. (Unless I just missed the news story about dog, cat, and cockatiel bits being splattered all over the cabin.)

During my recent trip to Florida, I observed a few comfort pets, mostly small dogs inside nylon bags, out of which they occasionally popped their furry little heads to startle people like me, who assumed the bags were filled with non-living items, like underwear. I suppose these dogs provided comfort for the humans carrying them, but I don’t know if anyone asked the dogs if their travel ordeal was all that comfortable.

If you do a Google search for the phrase “comfort pets on airplanes,” you’ll get many links to news stories with titles such as, “Following peacock fiasco, United Airlines tightens policy for comfort animals,” and, “Is that dog (or pig) on your flight really a service animal?” and, “Comfort pets do not belong in an aircraft cabin, regulators say.”

Here is a quote from one news story, published in Forbes Magazine: “Many passengers traveling with ESAs (Emotional Support Animals) are not ‘disabled’ at all….The passengers’ motivations are obvious: they want their animal to travel in cabin rather than in the cargo hold. They also want to avoid paying the airline a pet fee.”

And a few paragraphs later we read this: “In June 2017, a window-seat passenger was trapped and mauled by a 40- to 50-pound pit bull traveling as an ESA. The passenger required 28 stitches to suture facial injuries. Recently, an ESA bit a child on the forehead before the plane even left the gate.”

I don’t want to come across as an unsympathetic ogre (are ogres allow onboard as ESAs?), because I suppose there are some people who need to travel with a comfort pet to avoid an anxiety attack. But it sure seems to me, and let me see if I can phrase this gently, that a lot of selfish bozos are scamming the system. And in the process, I bet they’re making it more difficult for those who really need an ESA.

I admit I don’t have a lot of knowledge about this topic, other than reading a handful of online news stories. Of course, offering my opinion without a lot of knowledge is kind of my thing — just ask the bagpipes folks.

So, I would appreciate some feedback from my loyal readers (all seven of you). Do people really need to bring emotional service animals on airplanes, or is it just a big scam to save money when someone wants to bring a pet on vacation?

Personally, if I had to choose between sitting on a plane next to someone holding either a dog or a set of bagpipes, I would choose the bagpipes. I could not find a single news story online about bagpipes biting people.