It is incorrect to say that hotels must suspend their usual pet policies under this Act. The PETS Act is about FEMA,not hotels or businesses.
(Service animals as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act are already legally permitted in hotels and businesses, regardless of emergency status).
What does the PETS Act do?
According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the PETS Act amends an existing act
“…to ensure that State and local emergency preparedness operational plans address the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals… The PETS Act authorizes FEMA to provide rescue, care, shelter, and essential needs for individuals with household pets and service animals, and to the household pets and animals themselves following a major disaster or emergency.”
The PETS Act is only triggered when a federal disaster declaration is made. Thesummary and thestatute itselfmake no mention of businesses and hotels.
What resources ARE available to pet owners?
Many states and locales have made plans for pets and families with pets, in addition to the federal PETS Act. You check for those plans and laws at the Animal Law page on disasters by Michigan State University.
In California you can check out Governor’s Office of Emergency Services’ page on animals.You can also visit the California Animal Response Emergency System (CARES) page.You can find resources and check if your city/county has made plans involving pets.
Resources for families with pets are on the CARES site here.They include PDF brochures on multiple animal types. These brochures are useful beyond California.
dorian hid that painting but I bet y’all if he’d just hung it in his living room and been like “oh yeah I get someone to come in and paint it to be slightly more gruesome every night” and everybody woulda been like “I believe you you dramatic bitch”
dorian, completely serious over a glass of wine, hand trembling: this painting is the literal decay of my soul. this painting is all my sinful anguish and moral depravity
literally anyone who knew him longer than 5 minutes:
Marvin is a wonderful, sweet gentleman who lives in a tiny boarding house in Atlanta. We met him this summer and we started working to get him an ID. But Marvin was born in a Jim Crow town that didn’t give birth certificates to black babies. It’s tough enough to get a birth certificate REPLACED, but when you never had one in the first place… that’s a challenge.
So, we had to FOIA the Social Security Administration for something called a Numident Record.
It costs $27.
….It’s basically a history of your Social Security life and in some states, for some forms of ID, if you are a certain age you can use it in place of a birth certificate.
As you can imagine, the SSA is not the fastest agency in the world. It took almost four months to get Marvin’s ID. Our amazing volunteer Karen was on the phone with them every week trying to find out when they would mail the record. And Marvin was calling me every week because this ID means everything to him.
You see, Marvin is trapped in his home because in order to take wheelchair-accessible public transportation you need an ID to sign up. Seriously.
Not only that, but he is spending most of his income on rent for his very small room in the boarding house. He has an opportunity for better, less expensive housing but, you guessed it, he needs ID…
[T]his morning, Karen took Marvin to the DMV and he got his ID!
It cost us $189.
When we went to Marvin’s house this summer and told him that we were getting him an ID, he asked how much it would cost. We told him we would pay for everything and he started to cry. Because, like every single person we work with, he knew that he would never be able to afford an ID on his own.
This was one of the toughest cases we have had so far and it is exactly why I started Spread The Vote. Because voter ID is voter suppression. Because IDs are about a lot more than voting. Because we are changing lives every single day.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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