actuallyservicedogs:

No, we don’t.

I’ll give you an example situation:

When I was 20, I needed a service dog, but couldn’t drive. All the public transportation in my city ran on stupid hours, was wildly inconsistent on when the bus would show up vs what the schedule said, and didn’t run on Sundays and only had a half schedule on Saturdays. My parents were unwilling to take time out of their day to drive me to the doctor. Uber and Lyft weren’t big in my general area- in fact, Uber only started being big in my general area after I moved to Maryland because I was near DC and Baltimore and wasn’t in some little farming town in south-central PA. I worked a full-time minimum wage job at Radioshack and had no money for a taxi… or practically anything. I didn’t have IRL friends, so I had no one to take me somewhere, and the rest of my family lived at minimum 2.5hrs away.

How, exactly, do you propose I get an ID in that condition? In order to even get to the doctor- a 15 minute drive- I would have to take a minimum of 3 hours out of my day to account for transportation alone. I’d have to call off work because I didn’t work weekends, which means I’d cut into my already slim pickings paycheck. To get to the DMV, which issues state IDs, it’s actually a 5 hour commute when accounting for the stupid bus scheduling and regular DMV wait times. Trying to do both in one day (since one would assume a doctor would have to prescribe the dog first and then you get the ID) would be frankly ridiculous, as I’d have to do a lot of bus transfers and pay a lot of transfer fees- which were anywhere between $1-2.50.

How much would I have to pay for an ID? State IDs and driver’s licenses aren’t free. Do I need to have a picture taken of my dog? Do I need to have my dog there- because if so how would I get my dog on the bus that clearly states service animals only? Additionally, unless your disability threatens other people around you, the government is legally not allowed to make decisions on what you can and can’t do based on your health. How do you propose we find a situation that doesn’t violate HIPAA and doesn’t discriminate against people with disabilities that are social stigmas, such as mental illnesses? How do we get around government workers trying to prove people with invisible illnesses aren’t “actually disabled”- something that already happens?

A lot of disabled people are stuck in this type of situation. It wouldn’t be fair to them, and so the government does not require ID cards, and there is very little support in the community for them for this reason.

–Jazi