this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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I think deaf people should be allowed a “hearing ear dog” that can listen for traffic etc for you. And you can bring it anywhere.
She had her hearing ear dog with her but just ignored its signal barks! That's why the dog wasn't kicked off the plane because those involved saw it was trying to do its job and didn't deserve to miss its flight.
There are no cars on airplanes don't be silly
Bet you feel pretty dumb.
Long before you showed up, buddy!
gg.
How do we know that car isn't being removed by the TSA?
I like the cut of your jib, head on over to the fuckcars lemmy page and I'll make you mod.
I was totally being silly 🤪 but it kinda sounds like something someone would try lol
Service dogs should be limited to people who really need them because they conflict with people who have dog allergies.
That's easy to solve. We just give them an allergy service dog that warns about potential allergens and chases them away if needed.
Training program involves treats attached to the dogs' tails.
The access needs of one group of people shouldn't override the needs of another group. Especially not as a blanket policy.
If a person who needs an assistance dog needs to interact with someone who is allergic to dogs (even if that interaction is indirect, such as sharing the same space), this is what disabled folk call "competing access needs".
There is no simple solution on what to do when this problem arises, because actually building an accessible society requires conversations that go beyond universal guides or protocols. There are often ways to find compromises to make a situation work. Sometimes there aren't. But the most important first step is for the people who are affected to be able to have a productive conversation about things, because without that, we would be undermining disabled people's agency and bodily autonomy.
It's not your place to decide who "really needs" a service dog or not. People who try to gatekeep accessibility resources or reasonable adjustments to people who "really need" them often mean well, because they think that the people who "don't really need" them undermine access to resources for the "real disabled people". Unfortunately, that rhetoric ends up shutting out a heckton more "real disabled people" than the people who genuinely don't really need support.
I think your last paragraph is really the crux of it. Technically, I'd agree with the statement "service [vs 'support'?] animals should be reserved for those who need them", except that I don't think anyone can really define what "need" and "service" mean (or even "animal" and "reserved" really); I don't think I'd agree with anyone who is actually using that statement in their line of arguments either. Competing needs can be a hard, or even impossible, problem to practically solve, but trying to find a global answer or rule for who gets precedence isn't gonna be much help, which also makes it hard to regulate/legislate fairly.
Given your knowledge of disability rights, do you think any deaf people need hearing ear dogs?
Well, I'm not deaf, and I don't personally know anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing, so I can't answer from my own experience.
That's no problem though, because a quick Google showed that there are loads of deaf people who benefit from having a service dog to support them to hear. I have no reason to doubt all of these people who find that this helps them, so I feel confident in answering your question with a "yes"
You might feel that basing my answer on a quick skim over some search results is a cop-out answer, but that's the result of quite a few years being active in disability activism and reading disability theory. A slogan that's common in disability rights activism is "nothing about us without us". That's the crux of things — I don't know what people find helpful, and it's not my place to tell people what is helpful to them or not.
For me to question whether someone who has a hearing ear dog "really needs [one]" would be like asking a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis whether they really need that wheelchair. Even if I had multiple sclerosis myself, that would be highly inappropriate to ask, because disabilities affect people differently, and people develop coping strategies that work for them .
I've been on the receiving end of questions like that, and it's not pleasant to have to justify yourself to a person who has little to no relevant expertise on your disabilities like this.
Living with disabilities often means trying to put together a wide variety of accessibility adjustments that may help, but all come with a tradeoff. Using myself as an example, I'm an ambulatory wheelchair user — I use a manual wheelchair sometimes, due to pain and frequent falls, but I can walk (albeit riskily). If I take my wheelchair out with me, then it makes it a bitch to get around if the venue or the city isn't particularly accessible. If I have recently fallen and sprained my hand, I can't push myself, so that's awkward. Sometimes, the path of least harm means taking a risk and trying to walk (usually using a different mobility aid, such as a walking stick or frame). Walking where possible is also good to prevent muscle atrophy.
Do I need a wheelchair? Well, I guess not, given that there was a period of almost 2 years where mine was broken and it was a nightmare to chase up wheelchair services to get them to repair or replace my wheelchair. I survived that period, so in a sense, I don't need it. However, my quality of life was significantly decreased, because on the bad days where I was too unsteady to safely walk at all, I was housebound at best. I fell over far more frequently, and I ended up making at least 20 trips to the minor injuries unit for X-rays following falls in that period. It sucked, big time. And for those reasons, I was eventually given a replacement wheelchair, because the specialist services agreed that I did need one.
When you see a disabled person, you don't get to see their behind-the-scenes. If you're seeing them out and about, there's a decent likelihood you're seeing them on a good day anyway, so there's a sample bias there. You don't get to see what their struggles look like without their accessibility adjustments, nor the struggles that remain even after they have all their support in place. You don't get to see the costs or the tradeoffs of their accessibility adjustments, nor which strategies they tried, and then decided against using because it wasn't helpful for them.
Understanding this, in broad strokes, is why I'm inclined to give someone the benefit of the doubt. I'd rather let some "fakers" get away with claiming accessibility adjustments that they don't need if it means supporting disabled people to figure out what works best for them — not least of all because there are far more disabled people struggling needlessly due to not being able to access things that would help them, than there are "fakers".
TL;DR: Yes. Absolutely, without a doubt. I don't have lived experience of being deaf, so if I want to be a good ally and advocate, then the first step is to listen to what people say helps them, and believe them.
Interesting, thank you for answering. Anecdotally I've got both hearing loss and a dog allergy, but I've never met anyone with a hearing ear dog. The deaf people I know don't consider it much of a disability at all, besides the social expectations thrust on them by hearing people. Most hearing people want to make the disability 100% our problem and 0% their problem.
I'm frequently frustrated by quick simple solutions like "just get a dog", "just learn to read lips", etc. And then the expectation becomes "well, it's your fault because you don't have a dog."
(heads up: this comment is likely to be less articulate than my previous ones, because I'm having a bit of a cathartic rant)
This eloquently captures a lot of my own feelings about disability; There are other aspects of my identity (such as my queerness) which feels like an identity that I choose for myself (which is quite empowering), but with disability, it very much feels like something thrust upon me.
Here's the way I think about it: let's imagine I'm having a really good day in terms of my walking ability, and I am taking a stroll around a scenic lake. Even though it's a good day for me, there inevitably will be times when I need to take a break, and so I'll likely take advantage of many of the benches along the walking route. But there have been plenty of times when I've been walking with an able bodied companion and they were the one who tripped and needed to re-evaluate their ability to complete the route; or they get tired sooner than they expect and need to take frequent breaks in order to make it all the way round. What's the difference between that person and me?
Well, obviously the difference is in the severity and frequency of those issues, but my general point is that there is natural variety between different people's capability, and there's also a heckton of variation within each individual. Disability and capability are inherently relative. As you highlight, there are many people who would likely fit the legal definition of being disabled (e.g. for the purpose of discrimination laws) who don't actively identify as being disabled — and there're so many reasons why this might be the case. For instance, some people may feel that their impairment is sufficiently low (or well managed) that in most scenarios, they are not functionally disabled. And on the flip side, able bodied people have the capacity to be functionally disabled, depending on the context (breaking a bone is one example of that, but also ageing, or also chronic exhaustion causing them to be fatigued and achy).
My overall point is that I wish we lived in a world where disability didn't exist. I don't mean this in a eugenicsy "let's fix all the broken people" kind of way, but rather I wish that society would just chill the hell out and stop being so weird about stuff. It's the able bodied majority who are the ones making disability, as a conceptual label, be a thing. Labels can be super useful, but only if we use them as dynamic tools to help us interface with the world. In practice, labels thrust upon people are treated like rigid, natural categories, which leads to people being squashed into boxes that aren't right for them
Sometimes I can walk up and down stairs with no problem. Sometimes my able bodied friend might struggle with that same task. To me, those are functionally same — I might struggle more often, but it's always a context dependant and variable thing. "Disability" as a category often gatekeeps people in the "able bodied " box from accessing support that they need (which is especially a problem if they have a health condition that is causing them to become more disabled over time — people end up feeling like they don't deserve the support). On the flip side, people like me are pressured to stay within the disabled box, because if we appear to be more capable than the simplistic labels applied to us suggests, then that throws all of our experiences and needs into question.
Deconstructing the category of "disabled" is easier said than done. We'd need a world much more accessible than this one to even begin that work.
I have no idea how coherent this comment is, but thanks for engaging in this conversation with me. I confess that I came into this in a slightly defensive headspace, because there were aspects of your earlier comments that rubbed me the wrong way, but I really appreciate the thoughtful replies you left me (especially the one I'm replying to right now — the solidarity I felt with you was part of the fuel for this cathartic rant). The internet is full of needless hostility and wasted time in messy threads, so when a nice interaction like this happens, it really brightens my day
Did you read the comment you're replying to? They already said it's not your place to decide who does and doesn't need a service dog. They didn't say that to mean that it's actually their place to do so.
Yes. I'm asking if anyone needs a service dog for being deaf. This incident was because hearing people refused to accommodate, not because deaf people need dogs. It is 100% the people with hearing who need to do something differently, not the deaf.
Some breeds are hypoallergenic.
Hypo is does not mean they don't trigger allergies. Just less.
Do you think those should be required?
Many of them already are used as service animals.
Very few
Do you think people who don't need them should be allowed hyperallergenic dogs in an airplane?
That's disablist doggism!