Service Dog ‘Advocates’ Could Take a Lesson From Emily Litella

Posted on | August 17, 2009 | No Comments

Remember Emily Litella?

In case you don’t, she was a fantastic Gilda Radner character on Saturday Night Live some 30 years ago now (a show which, BTW, in all the years since has never come remotely close to the level of talent and associated comedy back then) whose trademark was to always get confused about a story, start going off with the classic moral indignation, then find out she had it all wrong, and look at the camera and slowly say “Oh…never mind!” If you have a minute, this video is a classic example:

We could definitely use a lot more of that Emily approach in the world in general, and in the service dog world in particular. Unfortunately, all we normally get is the initial righteous indignation without the “Oh…never mind” followup when things turn out to be not what they appeared at first.

Never fails that every time a story breaks where there’s apparent discrimination against someone with a service dog, the Twitterverse and Blogosphere erupt. Post after post, tweet after retweet, day and night, all full of moral outrage about the evil school district, or clueless zoo, or whatever. (Matter of fact, there’s another one of these cases and associated eruptions going on right this minute – sheesh, when ISN’T there one going on?)

But where are those same people when things turn out to not have been what they seemed at first? Nowhere to be found, that’s where.

Recent case in point…

You may remember the story about Stephen Bottila, a guy with what he says is a seizure alert dog in Madison, Wisconsin who was Tasered, pepper sprayed, and arrested when he refused to leave a McDonald’s. I wrote about it here: “Do You Really Think The ADA Is Working When It Comes To Service Dogs?”

As I said there, that story got a lot of attention – I can’t even count how many tweets and posts I saw, mostly moaning about how awful the cops and city were and how they were depriving this guy of his lawful rights.

Well, Mr. Bottila already had filed a complaint with the Madison Equal Opportunity Commission and a lawsuit in federal court over previous incidents, and the results are in.

On Wed, Aug 5th, the Madison Equal Opportunity Commission dismissed the complaint:

“City panel dismisses man’s service-dog complaint; federal lawsuit still on”

Five days later, on Mon, Aug 10th, the federal lawsuit was also dismissed, and after only one day in court:

“Judge dismisses man’s service dog lawsuit against Madison police”

Now for all I know this could be reversed on appeal, and maybe the fact that they have ruled the dog is not a service dog won’t affect the later case. And, no question, the law is definitely not working when things deteriorate to this level. But, regardless of how things end up or what someone’s personal opinion of this situation is, the really obvious thing to me is that I didn’t see 10% of the noise about those decisions that I did when his most recent incident came up.

Gee, I wonder why?

I’m not for a second asking people to not be upset about someone with a service dog being unfairly treated, but I am asking two things.

First, take a deep breath when you see something like that, realize you may not know all the facts or the law as well as you think you do, and don’t mindlessly repeat the story all over the planet with all the “How dare they!” attitude that’s rampant.

Second, when the situation is resolved, regardless of the outcome, spread it around just as much as, if not more than, you did when it first happened.

Doing anything else is just… Oh…never mind.