Why call them service *animals* if they must be dogs?

I'm lucky that I live in my childhood home my family owns, and that I don't need to rely on my cats as service animals (I did have a pair that showed a strange ability to detect & mitigate/halt meltdowns before I did, though).  I just read and responded to a sentence in a blog post on a pet site hosted by our paper:

"In simpler language, dogs who provide emotional support are no longer considered service animals."

No, that isn't what it means... A lot of disabled people rely on trained miniature horses (for blind guides), cats (detect/warn for seizure, blood sugar, limited fetch/retrieval, etc.), and other animals for a variety of reasons.  Common reasons include dog allergies and a home/life that isn't good for dogs (tiny non-ground-floor apartment that the person rarely leaves), or phobias/aversions.

The change means that everyone that relies on those other species will either lose their service animal (even if they've worked together for years) or their home.  [Edit: miniature horses will be allowed in a few rare cases.]

There's little reason to restrict disabled people this way if another meeting the same standards is more appropriate; they aren't infringing on any other citizens' rights (at least not in any way that a service dog wouldn't).  From what I've read, it's a matter of our government being pressured by corporate interests to restrict American rights (as any of us could become disabled and need assistance) to make things run more smoothly for their businesses.

According to ABC7-KGO, California is considering adding protection for other service animals as they regard the federal law a "floor rather than a ceiling".  (On TV they also said that public comment will be taken, just didn't say where. I'm still trying to find it...)

The San Francisco Mayor's Office on Disability is having a meeting on the topic in May where they want to hear comments from disabled people with service animals, particularly emotional support animals. Anyone interested can contact the Mayor's Office on Disability at 415.554.6789 voice, 415.554.6799 TTY or via email at mod@sfgov.org

Autism Buzz...kill

Just spent way too long writing a long reply to an irritatingly wrong article on autism on a site that styles itself as "intelligent" (HA HA HA), so I might as well share the results here...  What sucked the most was that until I submitted the damn comment, I couldn't see that responses aren't visible from the article, so I basically stayed up until almost 8am for nothing! 

Autistic acceptance infinity ribbon images

Original "Autistic Pride" symbol/ribbon

I've looked many times in the last few years for a new image of an autistic advocacy/pride/acceptance ribbon... The official design for the movement is a rainbow spectrum chasing around an infinity symbol, but the lone accurate graphic I keep finding just doesn't feel right, and specifies "autistic pride" which tends to be a big turn-off for newbie parents.


The alternatives all boil down to taking an infinity symbol, then having a linear rainbow gradient run across it... That's nothing at all like how a ribbon or even how the infinity symbol works (it's not flat!), and I'm kind of picky about things like that, so it wasn't quite enough.

Last night, while writing a comment at Slate's Dear Prudence column, where a woman had written for advice on ensuring her newly-identified-AS daughter gets to enjoy Thanksgiving, I felt frustrated at the inability to find an appropriate avatar. I liked the spectrum Moebius Strip one that Oddizm made many years ago, but few people would realize it wasn't just a pretty picture

Just blurring it didn't look quite right even with the edges sharp. I tried using it as a guide for the Path Tool (which I'd then Stroke with a rainbow), but I never did master Paths and soon gave up.  I ran through all of the available filters that looked remotely applicable, but didn't get results I liked.  Eventually, I tried Gaussian Blur + the hand-controlled Smudge tool to mix colors.

A while of working later, I had an acceptable (not gorgeous, I'm not an artist!) ribbon in both original proportions & a more condensed version that fits in a square, plus had one square version with text (shown).  I'm picturing the basic image here, and clicking on it will bring you to a gallery of the other variants/sizes. Feel free to use it as an avatar online, to edit it, or whatever you want.

Ignorance isn't curable by living naturally

I just ran across this comment by a bozo at SFGate:

Medicine? LOL.
What, like Pry-zagothon-D, for mind worms?

Or "the little purple pill for little purple... problems?"

Eff all that JUNK.

Live naturally, live well. Aspirin is white willow tree bark, in nature.

TV is for selling things. Remember that.

Yeah, you know me, I couldn't just sit back and keep quiet in response to that... Thankfully, it was one of those moments where I've written many similar comments in the past, so I was able to easily rehash the idea with this:

Wow, so if I just 'live naturally' I'll stop needing hormones for my lost ovaries, asthma preventative & treatment, pain control & meds for birth defects? So all of those war veterans with PTSD, depression, pain from injuries, etc. would be just fine with no meds needed if they 'lived naturally'?

Because of attitudes like yours, I spent a YEAR trying every natural treatment for depression I could get info on, thinking I'd be 'weak' or 'drugged' if I took a single pill, and slowly getting worse the whole time. I finally asked for help when the pain was unbearable as suicide would put my pets in the pound.

Check out this NYT article - when an author did intense research to write a book on overmedicating kids, she found the ones on meds needed it as nothing else was helping: We've Got Issues by Judith Warner

I don't have TV & I block web ads; I read, write, and learn. Maybe you should do the same: living naturally sure isn't fixing your ignorance!

Quote borrowed from Estee Klar

Catching up with parent-ally Estee Klar's recent blog posts, I got to see this great quote:

“An individual having unusual difficulties in coping with his environment struggles and kicks up the dust, as it were. I have used the figure of a fish caught on a hook; his gyrations must look peculiar to other fish that don’t understand his circumstances: but his splashes are not his affliction, they are an effort to get rid of his affliction and as every fisherman knows, these effects may succeed.”
– Karl Mennenger

I view my depression & anxiety as afflictions, but they're the symptomatic reaction to how our society & its people handle people like myself or my mother. They're a response to knowing that no matter how sick I am, my non-disabled brother can't be bothered to drive Mom to the doctor, and that Mom's oldschool sexism makes her believe that it's totally normal for young men since "normal" men aren't nurturing.

The depression and anxiety, to veer more towards Estee's commentary, are from the nightmare of trying to seem "normal" throughout my first relationship, being mistreated without understanding what I was doing wrong. Dating a fellow autistic seemed like the perfect antidote -- but the emotional problems were only deepened tenfold, beacuse the autie had been trained harshly to fit in, and felt it was his job to 'helpfully' point out all of the tiny ways I didn't, to tell me what a freak his friends thought I was, and impress upon me how he didn't want to be unemployed as that would mean he's a worthless, useless "eater" undeserving of love.

Being autistic and having my physical disabilities aren't afflictions that I struggle to break free from... No, I was a very happy girl as I was, proud of being myself rather than trying to fit in, dedicated to honing the talents that I was also proud of. It wasn't until people I looked up to (or at least thought were worth listening to) started communicating their bigoted, hateful thoughts that I was afflicted with anything or started feeling like I was flailing ineffectually against an invisible monster determined to eat me alive. Hopefully we can find some way to keep future generations from being threatened similarly -- perhaps with some targeted "early intervention" of non-disabled kids & their parents, to make sure they don't become some other innocent's nightmare affliction.