 Aloha, welcome to What's On Your Mind, Hawaii. I'm your host, Tim Apachella. This week, we explore the topic of proposed state Senate bill, 2461. This bill will confront the issue of pet owners who disguise their pets as trained service animals and take them into public places such as restaurants, stores, and onto airplanes. Senate bill 2461 seeks to clarify the difference between an emotional support pet versus a well-trained service animal, which is considered a tool and not a pet. Things seem to be getting a bit out of hand when it comes to emotional support animals. On February 1st, 2018, a woman attempted to board her emotional support pet named Vanico on a United Airline flight from Newark to Los Angeles. Vanico was a full-grown peacock. I didn't have time on today's show to play the video of Vanico perched on top of the luggage carrier as it was being wheeled down and rolled down the hallway to the United Airline gate. I should note that Vanico's owner had purchased him a ticket to fly, and I assumed that was in coach. Bill 2461, if passed, will impose a $100 to $250 fine for the first offense and a $100 to $500 fine for a second offense. In Delta and United Airlines, in part thanks to Vanico, have recently stated new policies to address the increasing problem of allowing untrained pets onto planes. People wishing to take their service animals on board are now required to submit paperwork to verify the animal is a real, properly trained service animal 48 hours in advance of the flight. This issue seems to evoke a wide variety of emotions from both pet owner and non-pet owner. Where do you stand? Please feel free to comment on the show or on Think Tech Hawaii YouTube video. In this week's show, we are only able to interview three pet owners. Unfortunately, Vanico declined our interview and our request for an interview. And here are those interviews. Aloha, this is Tim Apachele with Think Tech Hawaii, and welcome to our show What's on Your Mind Hawaii. Today, I'm here with Evans, and we're going to talk about Senate Bill 2461, the service animal bill. Evans, are you familiar with this proposal that the state legislature is going to try to pass? Yes, I am. I think it's really important to address the issue. It's time. So the specifics of this bill, or one of the main specifics is for the first offense, if you try to pass your animal off as a service, a legitimate service animal, that there will be a penalty anywhere from $100 to $250 for a second offense, it could be anywhere from $100 to $500. Do you think it's time for a bill like this to be introduced into the Senate and then potentially a law of Hawaii? Sadly, yes. I think that you're just not going to get people to cooperate on their own. It's a human nature issue that people, if they can get away with it, they will. And it's just a sad state of affairs if people are willing to pass their animals off as a service animal to save money for their own convenience and at the expense of people who might really, really need to have that. It makes it more difficult for people who really do need an emotional support animal. So for people that really are using a service animal, not as a pet but as a tool, what do you think goes in their mind when they're at a restaurant or a public place, say one of the big box stores or wherever in our community and they see animals being passed off as service animals when they're clearly not? It, of course, irks me. I, myself, am disabled. I'm an amputee. I've flown many times and observed people using wheelchairs at airports to be able to get on the plane earlier. It's just breaking a rule and it's a little like people thinking it's okay to tell white lies. It's just that part of our society that makes this type of behavior be okay and it makes it more difficult for the people who really need it. Well not directly related to Senate Bill 2461, but before this interview, you had mentioned that you were an airport and that someone who clearly didn't need a wheelchair used the services of a wheelchair just so they could board early. Is that correct? Absolutely. I took care of my elder parents down in Florida for years before they passed and the airport always in Florida had a line of elders in wheelchairs and one day I was waiting for boarding to begin and I started talking to a woman who was sitting there in a wheelchair and it just came up and she said that she actually didn't need it. She just was using the system because why should she walk through the airport? Why shouldn't she get on the plane earlier if she could? This way she could put her carry on. She could stow it right above her seat because nobody else got there before her and I just thought. Well I guess that's why I bring this issue up not because it's related to Senate Bill 2461 but I bring up is there an attitude that's starting to permeate into our society that people are taking advantage of laws that are or are not on the books and trying to just, you know, I'm not going to say game the system but kind of game the system. Right. Well again I think it really is part of human nature that if somebody thinks they could get away with something they do, I mean people speed in their cars. They agreed not to speed in order to obtain a driver's license but then they know they could get away with it and the same thing with texting when you're driving and people will try to get away with something and even the best of human beings seem to think that that type of behavior is okay and it's sad that we now have to police them and somewhere along the way it costs more money because you're hiring to police people but I think we have to make certain rules to prevent people from behaving that way. I think it's a good time for Senate Bill 2461 to be enacted. Absolutely. I think that politicians or experts need to sit down and come up with a solution because if you bring this up to people they immediately say well who's going to prove my dog isn't my emotional support. Hey look I have the collar, I have the jacket, I have the paper. My best friend was a licensed therapist and she offered to write us letters to qualify our dogs as service because when we moved to Hawaii it cost us a lot of extra money to take two separate flights to we wanted them in cabin with us so on and so forth and we could have taken advantage of it very easily and I just nobody had to tell me whether it was right or wrong. I knew what the right thing to do was and I did it and it was my responsibility but my dogs are not emotional support dogs, they're pets. So the process of actually getting an animal here to Hawaii is pretty extensive and pretty cumbersome so you opted to go the right proper protocol versus getting a script that could have saved you a lot of time and money. So again we had to buy them tickets, we had to buy airline approved carriers, we wanted them in cabin they'd never flown before, we actually spent time with our vet to try out some tranquilizers in case we needed them, we had to stay in a hotel overnight because we knew we needed to land early in order for the Department of Agriculture to process them here in Hawaii once we landed, it probably cost us an extra thousand dollars or so to get our dogs here because we did it the right way. Now it seems to me that in our community here we're in Hawaii and it seems to me in the last five years I'm seeing more and more occurrences of animals and restaurants certainly at Starbucks, certainly at Costco, what's your impression, are you starting to see more incidents, you know cases of this? Well I obviously am a pet owner and a manic pet lover and I've spent time in Europe where it's very acceptable to bring a dog into a restaurant and so forth. I respect other people's wishes to not have a dog in a restaurant while they're eating so I would never want to do that. But I don't really have a problem with people bringing their dogs, you just need to be responsible. We had a dog that used to, he just was unpredictable and so I kept them on a really short leash and if somebody was approaching I always said you really need to not approach because I can't promise you how he'll behave, people just need to be responsible. I've noticed that the airlines specifically Delta and recently United have now stated that they're going to put in firm policies about what constitutes a service animal and number two is if you want to qualify for a free seat that you're going to have to submit the paperwork at least 48 hours in advance. You think other airlines are going to follow suit? I do, I think that they'll set a precedent. We were talking before the interview started about the fact that if a sightless person needs a guide dog, they don't just go buy a dog and try to train it, the dogs are raised from puppyhood to be able to carry out their duties and I feel it should be the same way for these emotional support dogs or whatever the animal might be but I think it's a way to begin to ratchet things back a little bit by telling people you can't just have your pet certified just because you already have it and it's convenient for you. I think there should be a procedure and a policy in place to make that happen, you know, a licensing or absolutely. Well, it seems that this bill is going to try to differentiate the definition of a true service animal versus an emotional comfort pet or emotional comfort dog or cat. It's not just related to dogs or cat, it's really animal is the verbiage in the bill. Do you think that's going to pit owners against owners and this issue may actually cause some conflict between those that love their pets and think they're entitled to bring their pets into a public space because they're not service animals but they're emotional comfort dogs? Right, well every time we have any kind of social change in our society we always see these types of situations, you know, rise up where suddenly people are pitted against one another. I mean, you know, I was kiddingly saying to a friend, oh, I can bring my emotional support llama on the plane. I mean, where do you draw the line? And I'm not a politician and I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I do think that it needs to be hashed out and there should be some guidelines and not everybody's going to like them, but hopefully we can, you know, come up with some sort of, again, guidelines that most people can comply with. Well, I believe United Airlines just recently had a contend with someone trying to bring on their emotional support animal, which happened to be a peacock. I have a very, very good friend and he is well known in the condominium management industry and he wanted to test out the system. He wanted to see how easy would it be to get a license for his support animal. And so he went online and he paid $39.99, I believe, and he had a questionnaire. It was a multi-page questionnaire and he filled it out and at the end he submitted the paperwork online and lo and behold, he was approved. Now the name of his animal was Donuts. He cared to guess what that animal might have been with the name of Donuts. Donuts are an octopus. No, his approved service animal was a pygmy elephant. So he has proven that people are gaming the system. They're getting these vests, they're getting the paperwork, the documentation for $39.99. And he did it just as a test to see if it could be done and certainly was. When we were researching, you know, everything that we wanted to do and again, according to what was ethically right in order to bring our dogs here, we learned that there were certain, depending on the airline, but in general, there were certain approved pet carriers for airlines and we, once we knew the airlines we were flying, we contacted them and we got the lists from them of which ones they approved. We were actually stopped in Portland by a ticketing agent who just wanted us to take one of our dogs out and to make sure that she wasn't too cramped in the carrier we had. She's very hairy. So once she saw that she was all fur, she realized she had enough hair, but I loved that more than, you know, that I could have been stopped because the animal was at risk. You know, being an animal lover, of course, I had so much respect for that. People just need to stop behaving so entitled. Do you think most people who have dogs will support this particular bill or do you think it maybe hits a little too close to home? I think the average person will probably not have a problem with it. It's always those people who, again, feel entitled. There's such a selfishness in our society that's pervasive. And I, too, had come upon a website when we were doing our research that would have allowed me to get my dog certified very easily. You know, they send you the vests or whatever it is and they send you the document that you need and, you know, a load of typing for us. We found there was about $25 per animal. It just doesn't make sense. If you had any message for those politicians and legislators that are working on this particular bill, what would it be? Again, it would be to hash it out here, all sides of the story. And perhaps try some things out before enacting it as a law. But again, I think there are ways to do things. I think that animals that are raised as emotional support animals from, you know, puppy hood or kitten hood or larva hood, egg stage, you know, should, you know, that's the way to obtain an animal that can serve that need. If you really do, you know, genuinely have that need to, you're agrophobic, you're scared to fly or, you know, whatever it be. I get it. You know, I suffered from PTSD after an accident. You know, I didn't look to my animals. They comforted me a great deal, but it was... But you've just pinpointed the crux of the argument. That is a well-trained animal, whether it be a dog or whatever, that is used as a tool and is not a pet. It's truly a service tool. And that is the crux difference between a service animal versus a comfort pet. 100%. You know, we had a dog that I totally trusted with human beings. I used to have a retail store. Customers would come in with babies and carriages. My dog would jump into the carriage with the puppies, and that same dog would attack every other dog out on the street. So, you know, my dog wasn't trained as one thing or another. People need to be responsible, and because most people need to be policed to a certain degree. And, again, I think it's part of human nature and it's a behavior that's pervasive in our society. I think that there need to be rules to protect people on both sides of the fence. One last question. Do you think this issue that you're raising about people's, you know, the nature of human beings, do you think this would have been an issue 20 years ago? We might not be talking about a service animal and we might be talking about, you know, texting while driving or, you know, cell phones. Cell phones were just becoming, you know, part of almost everybody's daily life as much as 20 years ago now. And it's the same thing. I mean, I saw one of my neighbors driving down the road the other day texting while she was driving. This woman is a professor. I, you know... So, humans will be humans and we tend to do things that aren't always above board and we kind of forget about things. Exactly. What does it say about our society? I don't know. I know that I can live with myself at night doing the right thing. I don't speed. I don't cut people off. I use my turn signals when I'm driving. I, you know, I live with aloha as we say here in Hawaii. You know, you just shouldn't have to be policed, but yeah, we do have to be policed because if people can get away with something, they will. Okay. Well, Evans, I want to thank you for sharing your opinion and your thoughts and taking the time to share them with What's on Your Mind Hawaii. You're welcome. I'm Tim Apachele with What's on Your Mind Hawaii for Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. I'm Tim Apachele with Think Tech Hawaii. This is What's on Your Mind Hawaii. I'm here at the Hawaii Kai Dog Park and I'm here speaking with Ernie. And Ernie, I mentioned the proposed Senate bill by Senator, I believe it's Ritterman. It's called 2461. And the bill basically is proposing penalties for those dog owners or any owner of a pet that tries to pass them off as a service animal, as a true service animal when they're really not a service animal. What do you think about it? What do you think about this? Well, I think that, you know, the service animals are there for a reason. I mean, you know, I can believe that people that are disabled or, you know, even some of the people in the hospital, I've seen animals that have gone to the hospital and especially older people, you know, and these people have been, you know, been disabled or even some of them have been, you know, mentally, you know, slow. But the service animals or the animals that come in there and they perk up and they recognize who they are. But the animals that really, really respect are the ones that have gone to war in Iraq or, you know, other wars and come back and survive. Now, those dogs I respect. And, you know, other people come along and say, hey, it's my service dog. I need them for this or that. And I don't think that's the right thing to do, you know. You think it's a disrespect to people with disabilities that have a legitimate disability that have spent, you know, their dogs have gone through years of training and they're truly not a pet but they're a tool? Absolutely. I mean, you know, like you said, these pets have been gone, has gone through a lot of training and then it's been intense training too because I've taken my two dogs with puppies and I know what the intense training is just to teach them how to, you know, obey elders. So for them to go through all of this, you know, rehearsals having to go and learning how to protect their owners or whatever, you know, I know it's a tremendous job. And, yeah, I do respect those people that go through the process, yeah. Well, with this particular Senate bill proposal, I think your dog's going to get caught up in my microphone here. There we go. He's a big dog. With this particular Senate bill proposal, it's going to propose fines of anywhere from one to $500. You think that's a low amount, a high amount or just about the right amount? Yeah, $100 up to $500. I can't imagine what somebody would, you know, we'd do with $500, you know, I don't know what kind of problem they would have to have that kind of fine. But $100, you know, $150, $200, that's about right, you know. Now, I've lived in Hawaii for close to, well, going on nine, 10 years now and I've noticed in the last five years a lot more people are bringing in their pets into restaurants, certainly Costco, the hardware store here. Have you noticed that? And if so, what do you think about it? I haven't really noticed it that much, but I do respect the retailers for, you know, having to put the signs up and saying, hey, look, you know, we can't have animals that are not trained to be, you know, service animals and for them to bring them to the store because, you know, they cause, and some people, you know, they're afraid that, you know, they got germs or stuff like that. I've seen this lady just, you know, practically wash her cart because a dog was in there one time over at the, I think it was Don Coyote one time, but, you know, and, you know, they do spread germs. I mean, some people are very homophobic. Let's face it. I mean, that's where it goes, but yeah, I think they shouldn't have people walk in there with the dog, you know. Have you ever been on an airplane when there's been a dog in the aisle claiming as not a service animal, but as a comfort animal? Not really, but I've heard of stories of people, you know, going through that situation and, you know, I don't think it's right either. I mean, if an animal is going to travel, you know, the way it's supposed to be, lawfully, you know, through, you know, going through the process of quarantine, stuff like that. And I'm traveling on an airplane. Naturally, you know, you have to put them in a cage, you know, to keep them from running around or, you know, you know, there's probably where to do things. And I don't think having, you know, any kind of animals on an airplane is good. You think this bill has a chance of passing the legislature this session? I believe so. I, you know, I mean, I'm an animal lover. I love dogs and cats. You know, I've got four dogs and four cats myself. And, you know, I believe what's right is right. And I think the legislature should, you know, prepare, I mean, go through the process of, you know, making this correct. So, yeah, I agree with that. All right. Well, Ernie, I appreciate your time and giving us in your opinion. And we'll see what happens in the legislature on this particular bill. So this is Tim Appichella with What's on Your Mind Hawaii for Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. It's a Hawaii Kai dog park. And I'm here with Melanie. And the topic today is bill 2460, the service animal, basically it's a service animal bill. So the question is, what do you think about people who get fake licenses and call their pet a service animal and then bring them into restaurants and bring them into food stores and things like that? Yeah, that sounds like a terrible idea, I think, for people to do that. Because it seems like it would erode the credibility of the whole program of service dogs. Now, this is a Senate bill and the proposal is penalties anywhere from one to $500, I believe, up for the first offense. So do you think that's a little stiff or do you think it should be something different? I think $500 might be a little bit much, but maybe $100 or $200, $250, something like that. Yeah, $500 seems a bit steep, especially for a first offense. Now, the airlines are getting involved in this very issue. United and Delta has recently said to passengers with quote unquote service animals that they need to submit their paperwork 48 hours in advance to prove their true service animals. What do you think about that? I don't know, I think if people have a service animal they already have that paperwork, right? So they could already have it sent to the airlines ahead of time and it wouldn't be a huge hassle for them to do that. Because I think, I mean, I feel like I've read about instances where pets and dogs have come onto planes and caused trouble. Right, so they need to be because I know like for my own dog if I would just slap the service animal harness on it and brought it in somewhere there could be all kinds of mayhem because he's not trained for that. And we're always assuming it's a dog. Now, this is a quick story and I'll get your opinion about it. A very good friend of mine wanted to test the system and he's very, very well known in the condominium industry and what he did is he went on one of the websites he obtained a license he filled out the online paperwork didn't require a doctor's statement he filled it out and I think for $39.99 he was approved and received a certificate that this animal who the name of the animal was named Donuts was a service animal. Any guess to what kind of animal Donuts was? A pygmy elephant. So, the point is it's a mockery and he's proving that it's a mockery. Have you, we live in Hawaii have you ever seen in the restaurants here or in the food stores that animals that look to be service animals probably weren't? No, in fact I don't actually see that many service animals at all. I feel like I was at Costco maybe two weeks ago and I did see one there and I had no reason to think it wasn't a service animal but I actually don't see them around that much. Well I think that's a good point they're not necessarily service animals they're just dogs on leashes in restaurants and you know Costco and Home Depot and everything else. I did have a service animal harness on it so it was marked as a service animal. So your point is that you've already made anyone who's not really having a true service animal they're kind of disrespecting those disabled that really have a service animal and it's been trained as a service animal and it's serving as a tool or a function for that individual. Yeah, right because I mean well I assume I don't know actually know that much about the program and I'm surprised to hear you tell about your friend because I would assume that there is a more vigorous program for the animals to go through that they have to be certified so that the animals know how to deal with like stressful crowd situations and other things that could come up going into public places. So if that's not happening then there seems like there's a different issue that maybe needs to be addressed which is the whole certification process. It just seems to me in the last five years maybe a little bit longer more and more dogs are showing up in public places and I know that animals are people's family I mean they are and I have pets and they're like family and I guess that's just a line of when a pet should or should not come into a public space. Well I think if it's outdoors I think it's a very different story right inside I think yeah most pets should not be allowed inside because it it just could cause all kinds of trouble but I think if you're outdoors at a public park, public spaces then I don't see a problem with it as long as they're on a leash, right? Have you ever seen animals on tables at restaurants and things like that? No, I am not. I have. It's not pretty. I guess we live in a pretty sedate area here in Hawaii, Kai. Okay, well if you had anything to say to the legislature this this go around, what would your comment be about this proposed Senate bill and levying fines against fake surface animal vests or licenses or things like that? I would say anything that can make the program stronger and more credible would be good and it sounds like this bill is going to do that, but maybe there also needs to be an emphasis on making sure that the animals are well trained and not anyone can just get a service animal certification. All right, well Melanie I want to thank you very much for your opinions and your time. Thanks for joining us on What's On Your Mind Hawaii. I'm Tim Apachele with Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Welcome back. That's our show for this week. I want to thank you for taking the time to watch What's On Your Mind Hawaii. Our next show is March the 27th and we'll see you then. Aloha.