Content area
Full Text
The term 'service animals' describes animals who render assistance of some sort to people with disabilities. This essay examines the boundaries of this concept of service animals, and also the blurriness around the edges, a blurriness which surfaces when we consider service animals in relation to companion animals, working animals, military animals, pack animals, harness animals, prison animals, and comfort animals. In some sense, all people have disabilities: none of us is perfect. There are a range of 'animal powers' that people do not have as keenly as other animals do. This sense of the animal strengths that humans lack combined with a sense of entitlement means that in our perennial disability we are inclined to harvest, or coopt, or borrow, or steal some aspect of those abilities, that able-ness, from other creatures.
The term 'service animals' describes animals who render assistance of some sort to people with disabilities. I am interested in the boundaries of this concept of service animals, and also the blurriness around the edges; this blurriness surfaces when we consider service animals in relation to companion animals (the animals formerly known as 'pets'), working animals, military animals, pack animals, harness animals, prison animals, comfort animals.
'Comfort animals' evokes the term 'comfort women', who were forced into sexual slavery, raped and horribly abused by the Japanese military during World War II. Comfort animals are in fact not at all like comfort women - they may provide comfort, as we snuggle with them, to people who are for some reason uncomfortable, somehow afflicted. But the commonality is the idea of 'comfort', that is, of course, our comfort - the human's comfort in relation to comfort animals, the man's comfort in relation to comfort women. The World War II term, with its insidiously exploitative, Orwellian connotations wrapped around the simple, pleasant word 'comfort', fuels my anthrozoological1 cynicism; the idea of 'service', too, carries a polyvalence that begs investigation.
Though my definition seems concisely focused - 'service animals render assistance to people with disabilities' - consider the proposition that, in some sense, all people have disabilities: none of us is perfect. Everyone could be more able, more enabled, more fully capable, of doing something. Every person lacks, for example, a dog's keen senses of...