As a community of disabled people, we are well aware that assistance dog refusal happens frequently and is deeply distressing and damaging for disabled people who rely on the support of an animal. There is no excuse for refusing an assistance animal and it is of course illegal to do so. We are aware that disabled people with assistance dogs are often verbally and sometimes even physically abused when they try to exercise their legal right to take their dogs with them, and we unreservedly condemn any rudeness or abuse. Anyone who abuses a disabled person in Buckinghamshire for any reason can expect to hear from us!
As a charity, we have worked for over a decade to stop assistance animals being refused in Buckinghamshire. Our pre-pandemic project Fair4All Taxis successfully ended most assistance dog refusals by taxi drivers and our rapidly-growing Fair4All Card helps disabled people who use an assistance animal to assert their legal rights.
Stopping refusals of guide and assistance dogs means that we need to understand why refusals happen. To the best of our knowledge, there is no solid national evidence about this, and we would support any move to gather better evidence. Our own experience in Bucks over the last 12 years suggests that the main reasons put forward by refusers are:
- Concerns about allowing assistance dogs into places where they are normally not allowed on cleanliness and hygiene grounds, such as food shops and restaurants
- Concern that allowing assistance dogs will create a situation or precedent where non-assistance dogs will be brought into places where dogs are not normally allowed, especially pet animals falsely represented as assistance dogs
- Religious bias against dogs in particular.
These reasons often overlap.
We rarely find that shop or service staff are deliberately or ideologically opposed to disabled people or unwilling to support them: ableism definitely exists in society, but we have not often found it in frontline staff. We feel the reasons for assistance dog refusals are more complex than often presented.
We are aware that there is a small minority of antisocial people who routinely abuse other facilities for disabled people such as toilets and parking places, or who break other social regulations such as behaviour codes and smoking bans. However, although this is a small group of people, they have a disproportionate affect on the attitudes of retailers and service-providers. They tend to create very upsetting confrontational situations for staff and customers when their antisocial behaviour is checked. This makes many frontline staff tense and suspicious, hypervigilant, and prone to try to enforce rigid compliance to rules and codes of conduct to discourage potential exploitation, such as ‘blanket bans’ on all animals.
In our experience, it is usually this same group of antisocial people that falsely represent their pets as assistance dogs to gain access to places normally closed to dogs. BuDS’ Fair4All Events project has provided facilities for disabled visitors to large public events in Bucks for over a decade. At every event, there will always be a few people who try to abuse blue badge parking, to falsely claim a disability to gain access to a viewing platform, or who falsely represent their pets as assistance dogs. When politely checked, they are angry, confrontational and usually abusive or violent. We have to put special measures into place at events to ensure the safety of our volunteers for this reason.
Sadly, we feel disabled people with assistance dogs are often indirect victims of these antisocial people. Their persistent attempts to abuse the reasonable adjustments made for disabled people, such as the right to be accompanied by a dog, creates an environment where frontline staff are mistrustful and apprehensive. This in turn creates a volatile environment where staff can overreact or react inappropriately to genuine disabled people. This ought not to happen and there is never any excuse for being rude to disabled people or refusing their legal rights, but there are reasons why these situations arise. Stopping the refusal of assistance dogs means understanding these reasons and working to remove the circumstances which lead to refusals.
We encourage assistance dog users to carry the Fair4All Card which clearly establishes them as disabled person with the legal right to be accompanied by their assistance animal. The Card is intended to enable disabled people to discreetly communicate their needs and legal rights to frontline staff, so that there can be no confusion between genuine disabled people and those who might seek to abuse disabled people’s rights. We also work with frontline staff to raise their awareness of the variety and diversity of assistance animals and the legal rights of disabled people, which of course go far beyond the right to be accompanied by a guide dog as such. While understanding the stresses and difficulties of their frontline role, we also reiterate that disabled people deserve to be treated with respect and that a fear of fraud is not, and never can be, an excuse for rudeness or blanket refusal of animals.